Page 29 - foodservice Magazine July 2019

DINING
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“I wanted to go into the kitchen and change the recipe,” says Khoo, who, until then, had only had a career in banking. “They would say, ‘you’re so young, you’re inexperienced, you shouldn’t butt in’. That’s when I decided, you know what, if we’re so inexperienced, why don’t we go out and do our own thing? That’s how Ho Jiak started.”
Having only ever prepared food for family and friends, Khoo was thrown into a commercial kitchen and was suddenly cooking for paying customers. “It was crazy. Will was like ‘hey, you love cooking? Well go for it. It’s time to learn’. I had no idea what I was doing.”
So Khoo dedicated his time to researching, developing and experimenting. “I am still learning, every day I finish work here, I go back home at about 12 or 12:30 and I’ll do my research until 2:30am. In the morning I drop my kids off and come here to keep researching.”
Their char kway teow is a good example of a dish that’s constantly evolving. He describes how he blends soy sauces from Japan, China and South-East Asia to get the perfect flavour; how he just recently changed the thickness and elasticity of the noodles; and how he’s always trying to get more wok hei (the umami-rich charred flavour you get from using an extremely hot work).
Their Strathfield stall, with its stool seating and no-compromise menu of Malaysian street-food (they’ve never held back on chilli, salt or shrimp paste), brought the brand a lot of success and recognition. More importantly though, it gave them cash. “We always wanted to come back to the city, this was our training ground,” says Xie.
The dream was to give Sydney the same experience Khoo had as
a kid, growing up on the streets of Penang and eating the food his grandparents once made. “My parents were busy working all the time. I was raised by my grandma, without her I wouldn’t be here today. Her cooking meant so much to me, I wanted to share her cooking with everybody else.”
Mid-conversation, Khoo’s voice starts to strain as he battles oncoming tears.