Tartine de saint-jacques aux crevettes sounds pretty fancy, but I’ll let you into a secret: it’s just prawn toast. You remember prawn toast? Everyone’s favourite oily triangles of sesame-seed-encrusted sandwich bread? Well, it’s changed.
For this Frenchified version, chef Brendan Fong combines scallop with a fluffy prawn mousse, piles it on pressed white bread, deep-fries the whole thing until golden, then slices it into fingers of fabulousness at the candle-lit Restaurant Hubert in Sydney. It’s another sign of the increasing hipness of this old Aussie-Chinese staple.
In Melbourne’s CBD, Victor Liong of Lee Ho Fook makes prawn toast with ama-ebi (sweet, raw, Japanese shrimp), green garlic and (hold the phone!) salted egg yolk butter.
In South Yarra, Alex Yu of Yugen Dining reinvents a classic by piping the prawn mousse along the top of long fingers of youtiao (Chinese doughnuts), coating them in sesame seeds and serving them, crisp and golden, with a sweet and sour amazu chilli vinaigrette.
The idea of prawn toast sprang last century from the clever chefs of Hong Kong, who wanted to fuse Cantonese prawn mousse, a popular dumpling filling, with western toast. The Cantonese name of ha tosi is a hybrid of ha, or har, for prawn, and tosi for toast.
Like many of us, I grew up ordering prawn toast and spring rolls in suburban Chinese restaurants, followed by special fried rice and lemon chicken or beef in black bean sauce.
Then Yin Toe opened The Wandering Wok in Melbourne’s Albert Park in the 1980s. His prawn toast was ethereally light, mounded high on a round disc of crisp, un-oily bread, elevating the Women’s Weekly Chinese Cooking Class favourite to Vogue status.
By 2011, Sydney chef Dan Hong was serving prawn toast with yuzu mayo and a salad of Asian herbs at Ms.G’s. He followed up with foie gras prawn toast at Mr Wong, thereby introducing a trend for combining luxury with nostalgia that endures to this day.
Now there’s a backlash as chefs de-gentrify our Aussie-Chinese staples to celebrate them for what they were.
Hence, the triangles of prawn toast speckled with sesame seeds at the Lucky Prawn Chinese bistro situated within the charmingly named Bob Hawke Beer and Leisure Centre in Sydney’s Marrickville.
You’ll never guess what chef Nic Wong has done to it. Nothing. It’s just prawn toast.
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Terry Durack is the chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and Good Food.
