Where do you go for a succulent Chinese meal?
Gone are the days when your standard Chinese menu comprised of lemon chicken, beef and black bean, or sweet and sour pork.
A walk down city streets will now yield a wealth of options.
Xinjiang's sizzling lamb skewers, Yunan's wild mushroom soup, spicy Sichuan hotpot, steaming Shanghai soup dumplings, Guanxi's snail noodle soup, and Taiwanese shaved ice and jelly desserts abound.
Lu Gan said when she and her family migrated to Melbourne in 2008 for better education and lifestyle, there was "barely any authentic Chinese food".
"But now if we look at the city, even just hotpot, just southern hotpot, there's different flavours of hotpot."
Ms Gan represents a new generation of migrants who are transforming the Chinese food scene in Australia.
It was her university peers who inspired her to start serving up piping hot bowls of beef noodles from her hometown in north-western China, Lanzhou.
"I had a lot of international student friends, and they were always asking, 'Where [can you find] the good Asian food?', 'Where is the good hometown food?'" Ms Gan said.
She realised these students were her core demographic and she knew them well, so she opened up her first Lanzhou noodle branch near a university campus.
Ms Gan said she did not have any hospitality experience, so she hired two "shifus" — or master chefs — from Lanzhou, who were experienced in hand-pulling the famous noodles.
Meanwhile, she waitressed at the restaurant every day after class.
The in-land province of Gansu, and its capital Lanzhou, is semi-arid and the soils are not productive enough to grow rice or green leafy vegetables.
"Leek and coriander grow very well in cold weather and brings out the flavour of the broth," Ms Gan said.
Once a gateway city on the Silk Road and being home to a large Muslim community, most local dishes are made with lamb and beef rather than pork, as well as a unique mix of spices.
Wheat noodles are also popular — all seven kinds — which Ms Gan likens to different types of pasta.
"So even with the same broth, eating a different type of noodle will [give you] a different experience," she said.
Ms Gan's favourite type of noodle is the thinnest, which softens after soaking up the broth.
"But for men in Lanzhou, they like the thickest," she said.
"They like the chewiness of the noodle and they don't like the noodle to be too soft or tender."
Cantonese roots of Chinese food
While Chinese food can refer to a range of cuisines today, up until the 1980s the term was ubiquitous with Cantonese cuisine.
It began in the Victorian goldfields in the 19th century when migrants from the Canton region, now known as Guangdong in south-east China, arrived to strike it rich.
Food educator Elizabeth Chong said some of the first immigrants would have brought sacks of rice and seeds with them to grow their own vegetables.
"There's not too many Chinese who can exist too long without their own food," she said.
"If they had their bowl of rice and they have their vegetables, I'm pretty sure they could have easily complemented that with what [they] could find in the bush."
Fish or eels from the river, rabbits, possums and even snakes were fair game.
Ms Chong said although Australian miners were initially unimpressed with the vegetables the Chinese cooks were using, after tasting what came out of the wok the Chinese were soon conscripted as cooks in the mining camps.
Historian Sophie Loy-Wilson said the appreciation for Cantonese food and an abundance of stir-fried vegetables and smoked fish went beyond culinary pleasure.
"It wasn't just the pleasure of food consumption but the necessity of Cantonese food consumption in a nutrition-depleted European diet which was mutton and damper," she said.
"Being a miner is bloody hard, so you're more likely to survive if you get better nutrition."
As a result of the White Australia policy, there was little migration during the first half of the 20th century.
While Australia was closed off, generations of Cantonese migrants continued to establish themselves by opening restaurants and starting import and export businesses.
It was during this period that Cantonese food really cemented itself in Australia's consciousness because it was made to suit Western tastebuds.
Lemon chicken, sweet and sour pork, and honey prawns were some dishes that were easy to quickly prepare en masse for large dining groups and also travelled well for takeaway.
"A lot of the food culture in Australia had done a dance between preserving traditional Cantonese food styles and also catering to Western customers," Dr Loy-Wilson said.
China opens up to the West
Dr Loy-Wilson said the end of World War II saw Chinese migrants arrive from other parts of South-East Asia and the Pacific, and these migrants tended to speak better English and were able to educate European Australians about Chinese food.
Students from mainland China began arriving from the 1980s with a large humanitarian influx after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
Dr Loy-Wilson said this demographic of migrants were from northern and eastern China including Beijing and Shanghai.
It was not that they did not want to eat Cantonese yum cha or Western food, it was because they could not afford it, she said.
"This meant that a food culture that's more democratic needed to open up that could cater to these migrants."
She said people often forgot how difficult the transition was for those who migrated to Australia.
"Food is home, especially in a country that doesn't follow the Chinese calendar in terms of Lunar New Year or mid-autumn festival," she said.
Besides the comfort of home cuisine, food was a way for international students to keep connected to their families in China.
China's economic boom saw more international students from mainland China arrive throughout the 2000s and 2010s, and they brought with them more disposable income and pride in their own regional cuisine.
Australia's palette welcomes the east
Osber Zhao opened Spice World, a hotpot restaurant in Melbourne's Chinatown, after he saw a gap in the market for a different kind of Chinese cuisine.
He remembers a time when he and his university friends struggled to find a Sichuan hotpot restaurant that satisfied their cravings for their hometown food.
"Ten years ago, there were only two or three hotpot restaurants here," he said.
"I tried all of them with my classmates but it's not that good. That's why we thought it was a perfect opportunity for us to open a real Sichuan hotpot restaurant here."
The former teacher from Hangzhou and his family ran Sichuan hotpot restaurants back in China, so he knew the south-western cuisine well.
"At the beginning a lot of [Australian] customers were confused," Mr Zhao said.
They asked, "'Why do we have to pay to cook our own hotpot in the restaurant?'"
They also found the hotpot broth too spicy, but Mr Zhao introduced them to customisable dipping sauces, another cornerstone of Sichuan hotpot.
"Some dipping sauces will make the spicy much [milder] … and some sauces will make the non-spicy pot more flavoured."
Mr Zhao has posted dipping sauce recipes on the walls of his restaurant and taught his staff to be patient and share hotpot culture with Australian locals.
When he first opened, most of his diners were Chinese migrants, students and tourists, but nowadays more than 50 per cent of his customers are Caucasian, particularly younger ones.
Dr Loy-Wilson said although the Australian palette had evolved with the help of increased travel and food posts on social media, there was a large enough Chinese population in Australia to sustain demand for its many cuisines.
She said there was also an entire "ecosystem" of education agents and university recruiters who wined and dined everyone who came to Australia for a visit.
"International student networks formed in the 80s and that led to the migration of their families, which absolutely changed the food scene in a huge way," she added.
