New beginnings
After running Billy Kwong for close to two decades, Kylie Kwong has an exciting new eatery – and role – planned for 2020.
Kylie Kwong remembers the day she closed Billy Kwong, her Sydney restaurant of
19 years. It was six months ago, on the last Sunday of June. “I was so touched by how emotionally attached the community had become to Billy Kwong,” she says. The lunch service was a blur of food, hugs, hellos and goodbyes. Then she did it again, for the dinnertime rush, to a room full of regulars and former Billy Kwong staff. The chef was winding up a restaurant that she first opened nearly two decades ago as a tiny eatery in Surry Hills that gained an outsized reputation, thanks to the chef’s finesse for merging native Australian ingredients into her Cantonese cuisine.
She inevitably outgrew that location and relocated to Potts Point in 2014 (donating Billy Kwong’s famously uncomfortable stools to Wayside Chapel in the process). The experience was nerve-wracking “because what I was doing was taking this 14-year-old little hole in the wall and moving it to a site that was three times the size in a very different neighbourhood.”
Now, she’s ready for her next move: launching an as-yet-unnamed eatery in late 2020 at South Eveleigh, an inner-city precinct developed by Mirvac. “I immediately fell in love with the place,” she says. Formerly known as Australian Technology Park, the area is the land of the Gadigal and is the location of Indigenous start-up Yerrabingin, run by Christian Hampson and Clarence Slockee, who has known Kwong for a decade. “Clarence made my Indigenous clapping sticks for Billy Kwong in Potts Point,” she says. The chef would strike them when an order was ready at her previous restaurant.
Slockee taught her how to make clapping sticks with lemon-scented gum tree branches from South Eveleigh for her new eatery, which will draw on native ingredients from Yerrabingin’s rooftop garden: from native river mint to the karkalla succulent that grows like a carpet there. The menu will feature the savoury pancakes that she cooked at the nearby Carriageworks Farmers Markets for seven years (she made 189,000 serves of it during her time there). “It’s a really great dish to tell a story via the toppings I use,” she says. That might be sea parsley picked from Yerrabingin, sustainable seafood supplied by Josh Niland or holy basil that Palisa Anderson grows just hours away.
The daytime eatery will only run Monday to Friday, leaving Kwong time for her new role as South Eveleigh ambassador, which will involve organising feasts and other events for the area. “I always go where the energy takes me and, for me, South Eveleigh is overflowing with energy and vitality,” she says. southeveleigh.mirvac.com