It burns through several woks a week – but such is business when you serve 600 diners a day. Here’s what keeps dedicated locals coming back again and again… and again.
You have reached your maximum number of saved items.
Remove items from your saved list to add more.
Save this article for later
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.
In Brisbane Times’ new Heartland series, food and culture editor Matt Shea seeks out the migrant restaurants, cafes and stores that give the Brisbane food scene its rich texture. First up? A much-loved Sunnybank favourite.
Seven days. That’s the longest a wok survives in Kingsfood’s kitchen.
It sounds wild, but then Robin Yu throws some more numbers at you. That wok can bring two litres of water to the boil in less than 30 seconds, such is the power of the burner on which it sits. And it’s in the service of a 90 to 100-seat restaurant that on an average day will cook for between 500 and 600 people.
“We’ll turn over the entire restaurant three or four times at night,” Yu says. “Then we have maybe two or three turnovers during lunch. So the total daily is around 500 or 600, pretty easily.
“I normally have 10 to 20 woks in storage at any one time. Each chef replaces his wok at least once a week.”
Yu smiles as you take in this info, but perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sunnybank locals (and diners in the know from elsewhere in the city) are in the midst of a 33-year love affair with Kingsfood.
Six days a week they pile in for enormous plates of fried rice, fried green beans, steamed chicken or any one of almost 180 dishes on the restaurant’s menu, all of which typically land on the table in less than five minutes.
Yu has owned Kingsfood for 14 years, but his relationship with the restaurant began, like the rest of us, as a diner. He’d just arrived in Brisbane from Beijing to study a master’s of business at Griffith University. The restaurant was eight years old at the time.
“It was the first Chinese restaurant I ate at [in Australia] and I just remember it being amazing. I still remember what I ordered: black pepper beef with rice,” he says, laughing.
Kingsfood opened in 1990 as a Taiwanese restaurant intended to serve expats attracted to Brisbane by a federal government business incentive program (Brisbane is now home to Australia’s largest Taiwanese community). Its name in script means Taiwan Xiaodiao, which translates to “Taiwanese bistro”.
“The English name is totally different. It’s an interesting contrast,” Yu says. “You can come to Kingsfood and eat like a king, but really it’s just for normal people eating family dishes. We’re not offering fine dining or lobster or anything like that.”
Yu became a regular at the restaurant in the early 2000s, when he was running a realty business in the same Market Square shopping centre. And in 2009 he’d consummate his love for the place by buying it from its original Taiwanese owners. By this time the restaurant was cooking meals inspired by all the regions of China, and Yu continued to push in that direction to end up at its now extensive menu.
The standout dishes? Kingsfood’s most popular order is fried long beans with pork mince and a belacan (shrimp paste) sauce.
Yu flicks through the menu to find some others. There’s the deep-fried prawns in special sauce with pineapple; popcorn chicken; a rich and spicy hot-and-sour soup; crispy shredded beef in sweet chilli sauce; and a classic Mongolian beef.
A word-of-mouth hit among Brisbane chefs is the restaurant’s white chicken in special sauce. Popular in Shanghai and nearby Zhejiang province, the dish brings together tender steamed chicken with a sauce of lemon, chilli, sugar, ginger and spring onion, which leaves a tingling numbness on the palate.
“It relies 90 per cent on the sauce,” Yu says. “It’s a bit of sweet, a bit of sour and a bit of spice. People love it.”
Yu says Kingsfood’s chefs have – perhaps surprisingly – changed regularly. Instead, the restaurant’s famed consistency tends to be driven by the freshness of its produce and speed of service, with the dishes actually having slowly evolved over the years.
“We, of course, have the recipes, but I could honestly say that perhaps only 80 per cent of the dishes [taste] the same as 10 years ago,” Yu says. “We do have the occasional customer who says, ‘It’s different now’, and I say, ‘Unfortunately, I’m no chef. I can’t guarantee it will be the same as 10 years ago’.”
What hasn’t changed is the fitout. Other than a lick of paint, some replacement furniture and a flatscreen television on the wall, the restaurant’s dining room and its enclosed verandahs have remained much the same since the original owners doubled the venue’s capacity in the mid-’90s.
The tightly packed kitchen is the same also, three chefs working five woks and a couple of extra burners along the back wall before handing the meals to a kitchen hand to finish, who then passes them through a window to the front-of-house team.
“The chefs are working with so much heat in the kitchen, it’s like a blacksmith in there,” Yu says. “We have a huge aircon system for the restaurant to keep the kitchen cool.”
The major challenges over the years? Yu ticks off the pandemic, which placed more of a focus on takeaway and eventually kiboshed a CBD Kingsfood that opened shortly before Australia’s first national lockdown. Also, the redevelopment of Market Square, which was finally completed in 2020 after two long years.
“That was even worse than Covid,” Yu says. “Foot traffic dropped a lot. But of course now that it’s finished, there are many more car parks.”
More car parks bring more diners, with new generations now passing through the door.
“The story of this restaurant is generations of families,” Yu says. “You’ll see parents bringing their kids, and then those kids bringing their kids, and then the grandparents bringing their grandkids.
“Last year we did a big birthday to celebrate 32 years, but we’re going to do it again for 33 years. I think we’ve earned the right to celebrate.”
Open Tue-Sun 11.30am-2.30pm, 4.30pm-9pm
Shop 25/341 Mains Road, Sunnybank, 07 3344 4620
kingsfood.com.au
You have reached your maximum number of saved items.
Remove items from your saved list to add more.