2 days Ago By Terry Durack
14.5 / 20 How we score Cantonese $$ $$ “You can’t help but trust a restaurant filled with Cantonese-speaking patrons,” says Dim Joy House on social media, right under an image of big round tables crowded with people and topped with dumpling steamers. The pride in both their food and culture is palpable.
With so many Cantonese restaurants opening in the past 12 months – Chinatown’s Royal Palace, Double Bay’s Song Bird, Darlinghurst’s Wan’s Cantonese and now, Chatswood’s Dim Joy House – there’s a sense of old traditions being celebrated and handed down. The 160-seater opened inside Chatswood RSL in June this year. Owners Dennis Chair and Carmen Cai were behind Lynn Shanghai Cuisine at the Castlereagh Street RSL until it closed in 2021, and also run Green Sprouts Vegetarian in Neutral Bay.
There are the usual RSL formalities to go through – register your ID at the front counter or sign in, find out who won the Mega Meat Raffle, follow a circuitous route upstairs between fantasy lands of pokies – before you get to sit down in the attractive dining room. Pony Design Co. has fitted out the place with soft, muted tones, bentwood chairs, round tables, draped private rooms, timber panelling and display shelves full of elegant Chinese artefacts.
But the real reason we’re all here is inside the kitchen. The chefs are old-school, and hail from Chinatown’s greats – East Ocean, Emperor’s Garden, Golden Century, Zilver and Marigold. Head chef Ming Biu Tam has 50 years’ experience in those kitchens, and is a master roaster.
There’s a big menu, a short daily specials list of live seafood, and a current Monday to Friday special of live lobster for $138 a kilo. There’s whole roast pigeon, hor fun noodles with beef, hand-made silken tofu with salted egg yolk, and wagyu shank in satay sauce. As ever, the best order is a simple, “I’ll have what they’re having”.
Here, that overwhelmingly means lobster or crab from the tank, and slow-poached, free-range chicken. Happy days. The classic white-cut chicken ($31.
80 half) is exceptional. You can see – and taste – the layer of jelly between the golden-tinged skin and the soft, giving flesh. Chef Biu Tam’s technique is painstaking – the massaging, the slow-cooking, the ice bath, and the steeping – and the chicken, from Aurum Poultry, tastes the way chickens used to taste, a long time ago.
The traditional accompaniment of minced ginger and spring onion is chunky and robust. At $118 a kilo, mud crab is the cheaper of the three crabs, with snow crab and king crab double the price per kilo. Steamed with ginger and spring onion on a giant serve of fine egg noodles ($15), it’s remarkably sweet and juicy, and the shells have been cracked exactly where they should be, and no more – the mark of an expert.
Enormous to start with, the dish seems to keep growing as I eat, instead of shrinking. Wok-fried Asian greens ($24.80) are a must – tonight, silky, garlicky choy sum – and enough for six.
The drinks list is predictably safe, with prices from a bygone age. A schooner of Reschs is $6.70, a glass of Markview Shiraz is $5, and Pocketwatch Sauvignon Blanc from Robert Oatley, $6.
90. All perfectly acceptable, and 10 per cent less for RSL club members. The meal ends with wedges of fresh orange and crisp, fried fingers of sugared pastry, compliments of the house.
By day, there are trolleys and more crowds – always a good sign, because it means the kitchen can offer more variety. Not only are there plump har gau prawn dumplings ($13.80) and gnarly pork and prawn siu mai ($11.
80), there is ngow jarp ($16.80), a savoury braise of beef organs including honeycomb tripe, bible tripe, lung and spleen, with soft rounds of lo bak radish for light relief. And the best thing? When I order too much, plastic takeaway containers land on the table for me to fill.
Sometimes, we all speak the same language. The low-down Vibe: Proudly Cantonese dining hall in an RSL Go-to dish: Slow-poached free range chicken, $31.80/$58.
80 Drinks: Well-known big brands from Fosters to Angoves, McWilliams and Penfolds, via the RSL bar Cost: About $150 for two, plus drinks.
