Jimmy Shu

For Jimmy Shu, there are no borders to his cooking. His South Melbourne restaurant,Near East , has a menu combining at least five cuisines, and "links different continents", but sits in a European restaurant setting. Whereas at Hanuman, his Darwin restaurant in the far Northern Territory, "you don't even feel as if you are in Australia."

Certainly when you visit some of the growers who Hanuman buys from in outer Darwin you enter another world. Extraordinarily beautiful flowers grown from seeds brought in from Borneo mountains; varieties of fruits and ginger not seen elsewhere; plots of land tilled by 'butterflies', which is the name given to some of the Thai women who have found their way across the Timor Sea.

How does Jimmy manage restaurants at the top and bottom of the country; such a far flung empire? He gives credit to his Chinese-born father who owned a restaurant for 38 years in Sri Lanka, where Jimmy was born. His father taught him about the running of a business, how to buy at the markets, as well as about cooking. "His food was Chinese, but we had a local influence with lots and lots of chilli and curry powders. My tongue is fairly corrupted from eating all of those hot spicy foods." It is typical of Jimmy to put himself down in this way, he is a most humble man, giving credit for his success to his mentors.

Soon after arriving in Melbourne in 1974 he had three jobs: processing vegetables; selling doughnuts at weekends and finally work in a restaurant. "I started by doing dishes, but was always watching over the cooks' shoulders and learning. I then progressed to cold larder. In the early '80s I worked at Shakahari and The Chinese Noodle Shop. At Shakahari I was with partners Beh Kim Un and Ma Kim Poay, then at Monsoons in '85 with the same partners, and next at Isthmus of Kra in 1989".

Jimmy was still involved in the Isthmus of Kra when he went to Darwin in 1992 to investigate ways of getting fish for the restaurant. "I did get some fish, it was the best barramundi that you could get in Australia. Whilst I was doing the fish rounds in Darwin, I came in through the back door of a restaurant called Christo's (now Crustaceans on the Wharf), and met this famous Greek restaurateur. I decided to have a meal there, enjoyed it and before I knew it, was offered a restaurant. I love a challenge but said , 'I need 24 hours'. The next day I went to three restaurants just to see what was on offer. After that I felt very comfortable to compete there, so I stretched out and shook his hand and have never looked back since."

In fact Jimmy is about to expand Hanuman's dining area and kitchen. In the New Year, 2000, he will close the restaurant for a month to do the work. There will be a new look, extra seats, and he is also introducing a tandoori oven (it will be the first in Darwin). Although Hanuman is still regarded as Darwin's top restaurant, he feels it is time for a change to its style.

In Melbourne, the food has always been more complex at Near East, where he aims for a "very positive flavour" so that people leave remembering the taste of the food, with actual taste memories, not just saying they enjoyed it. He does this by using a mixture of skilled chefs: David Duong, Erica Halim; Joey Lim, Paul Mulholland and Cuc Tran. The head chef is Tony Tan, who has worked with Jimmy for many years, and Jimmy's wife, Selina, does all the desserts and Nonya dishes. There is great expertise and experience from these staff. They come respectively from Penang, Thailand, Tibet, Timor, and Vietnam. As Jimmy says, "each one of us has at least two cuisines up our belt, so we can do a lot of different things". Jimmy says that his chefs have to be prepared to learn, even those who have been cooking elsewhere for many years. "If they don't have a learning attitude, it won't work".

He does not believe in copying others' recipes. "You have to have a palate memory to make dishes work, a recipe might tell you to use four teaspoons of coriander but it depends on the harvest - it could be an intense coriander or it could be one that got caught in a shower of rain while it was in the drying process. So you have to taste and check." When Jimmy is at the restaurant he does this, or it is Tony, the head chef, or Selina who, he says "has an excellent palate."

His ideas come from "heaps and heaps of Asian cookbooks and a fair bit of travelling. I love my Thai food, I love my Vietnamese food. Because I was born in Sri Lanka I am very familiar with the Singhalese food and Indian food, but southern rather than northern, where there is less yoghurt and cheese used, but lots of coconut milk." And in his travels he keeps on going to markets, finding ingredients and implements.

There are a number of ingredients that he is not allowed to bring in from Asia but still, some of these things can be found in Darwin. How they came across the seas is anyone's guess. "There are something like four types of ginger that we use here, one is called 'chi', it is long and slender, almost like a pencil. It is used in Thai fish cakes and in green curry. It can't be bought in Melbourne but I can get it in Darwin. We also bring in the gold band snapper which is a beautiful fish, better than coral trout. Turmeric leaves and lime leaves we also bring in, and curry leaves". Jimmy personally supervises the ordering and collection of all this produce, getting much of it directly from the growers in Humpty do and their farms. Keeping track of all this means that he is on a plane just about every four weeks.

And yet he shows no sign of slowing down or of being content with any one style. There are always ideas to be developed, new ways of looking at serving and presenting food; exciting plans for other Melbourne businesses, maybe another in Malaysia. With his businesses as with his cooking, Jimmy keeps more than one iron on the fire and lots of pots on the stove. Some are on simmer, some bubbling, but his energy and enthusiasm never seems to go off the boil.

A 1997 interview with Jimmy Shu

Jimmy Shu's Recipes

Oriental pork spare ribs
Chilli baked reef fish
Coconut panacotto with gula melaka syrup