Pretty Chef is the one of two restaurants in Sydney that serves Guizhou cuisine from China. This cuisine features spicy and sour flavours with ingredients like pork, particularly smoked like bacon as well as chicken and fish. Find out more about what this regional Chinese food is like and what is a must order at this restaurant in Sydney's Petersham.
How did we find Pretty Chef? We basically drove past it. The distinctive name stuck in my brain and then I looked it up. It is one of two restaurants in Sydney that serves Guizhou Cuisine. This mountainous Chinese province is located just south of Sichuan and Chongqing which means that yes the food is also spicy but unlike the numbing spice of Sichuan, it's a sour spiciness. The sourness is from fermented ingredients which you can smell as soon as you walk into the restaurant. Which brings us to our dining companions this evening who are Queen Viv who is slightly allergic to chilli and Miss America who enjoys spicy food I had not expected Queen Viv to say yes to dinner at Pretty Chef but she says that she can work around the menu.
We walk in at 7 pm and every table is taken, a slight concern because I had made a reservation but it was close to a month ago but the night before I had updated the number of diners from 6 to 4 as 2 friends had gotten sick. The girl is at the front is apologetic and asks us to come back in half an hour so we go across the road to the pub for a drink and then she calls at 7:20 to let us know that a table is free. A tip: you do need to book if you want to come around 7pm-8pm but after 8pm the restaurant really empties out.
The restaurant is very simply decorated and tables are lined with a cartoon Pretty Chef logo tablecloth underneath a glass cover and then plastic on top of this (which will prove handy later). The restaurant mostly comprises of patrons that are Chinese. The menu is in Chinese and English and items are marked with the number of chillies denoting spiciness. There are around half a dozen mild items to choose from. It can be hard to narrow down choices, but we take recommendations from our server and already have some selections based on research.
Drinks are a help yourself affair from the fridge and we start with a water chestnut and sugarcane drink which is light and refreshing and reminds me of barley water. Another drink is the grapefruit jasmine tea which is also really nice and not too sweet.
The first dish to hit the table is the pork and black bean stirfry which is an enormous plate really approaching a platter size. There's plenty of salted black beans as well as garlic chives, slices of twice cooked pork belly and capsicum and chilies. And they're not stingy with the pork belly as there's plenty of meat in this and I love the bold and punchy flavours in this and the caramelised texture of the pork belly slices. This is a very spicy dish which is actually the perfect level of spice for me but it is a touch too spicy for Mr NQN and Miss America. Make sure to have steamed rice handy to tamper the heat.
This is followed by the Guizhou style spicy chicken which is in a soy based broth. The level of chilli in this is more medium than hot and comes from ciba lajiao or a pounded chilli paste. This dish is quite good and the chicken meat tender. However the chicken is on the bone and cut in the Chinese way where it is cut through the bone into bite-size pieces so it can be a little trickier to eat if you're not used to extricating the meat off the chicken pieces. Oh, and the plastic tablecloth? They tell us just to throw the bones on the plastic table cloth. Queen Viv and Miss America are a little horrified by the idea of throwing bones on the table so they ask for a bowl. Mr NQN and I are more of the "when in Rome" type (or "when in Guizhou") so we deposit our bones on the table.
The next dish to arrive is one that I really wanted to try. It's featured in a picture on the menu and it is a bamboo steamer of glutinous rice covered with smoky bacon and sausage. The smoky quality really pervades through the whole dish and we all really enjoy this for the sticky rice and the robustly smoky meats. This is also quite mild so Queen Viv can eat this even though it wasn't marked as a mild dish.
The next dish arrive is a bean hotpot which doesn't look super exciting but it actually ends up being my favourite dish along with the pork and black bean dish right at the beginning. It's so comforting with plenty of kidney beans, garlic chives and pork mince. It's a sort of dish that really comes into its own in winter with a bit of rice. And despite how much I eat of this, I don't feel too full or bloated.
The next two dishes are side dishes. We ordered the first one because Miss America saw it on the menu and was curious to try it. This is a dish that I had first tried in Guilin, China and it is comprised of shredded potatoes with dried chillies. The texture of the potato is a key feature as it isn't cooked until soft like it is in Western dishes. The potatoes have a nice crunchiness although they aren't raw and it's very tasty and just like how I remember it. This is Mr NQN's favourite dish.
The green vegetables are a choice for Queen Viv. It is bok choy cooked with garlic and while it is nice, in comparison to the robust and spicy flavours, it sort of fades into the background.
There's a big pause between this dish and the one before and it is Queen Viv's selection. We actually thought that they forgot about it and because we had so much food we weren't bothered if it didn't arrive. When they set it down Queen Viv says, "Did we order this?" I think that Queen Viv may have thought that it was dumplings as she had seen the words "dim sim". It's actually a sticky millet porridge blanketing pieces of soft pork belly cubes and soft red dates. It's a little bit salty and sweet at the same time and I really love that sort of sticky texture although Queen Viv is less enamoured as she doesn't like sticky mochi.
There's no dessert on the menu that we could see and there's no room in our stomachs considering how much food there was and how generous the portions were. The bill is also a very nice surprise at less than $50 per person!
So tell me Dear Reader, would you enjoy this restaurant? Do you like spicy food? And how do you feel about leaving the bones on the table?
This meal was independently paid for.
Pretty Chef
81 New Canterbury Rd, Petersham NSW 2049
Phone: 0433 179 959
Tuesday to Friday 11:30 am–3 pm, 5–10 pm
Saturday & Sunday 12–10 pm
Monday Closed
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