Joshua Hinton’s A Place in Sultan’s Kitchen is, quite literally, dinner and a show. But it also taps into the rich migrant stories behind much of the food we eat.
Food has a remarkable capacity to tell stories. Particularly migrant food.
When we visit our favourite dumpling spot or noodle joint or banh mi shop, we tend to understand that what we eat didn’t begin in the kitchen out back. Not quite. It began elsewhere, sometimes long ago.
What lands in front of us, with all its twists and iterations, carries the narratives of the people who made it, both now and in the past. Their journeys, their setbacks and achievements. How they’ve changed, how they’ve stayed the same.
Joshua Hinton understands this better than most. Hinton is a theatre-maker and singer-songwriter who has turned his reflections on his grandparents’ restaurant into a one-man play, A Place in Sultan’s Kitchen (or How to Make the Perfect One-Pot Chicken Curry).
Yes, that Sultan’s Kitchen. The one that’s been there since 1983 on Given Terrace just down from the Paddo Tavern. You might’ve dined there for a birthday or before a game at Suncorp Stadium.
Hinton has fond memories of Sultan’s Kitchen and he doesn’t even live in Brisbane. That’s because it was originally owned by his grandparents, Mehrangiz Fassy and Abdul Careem Mohammad Fassy (it’s now operated by his uncle, Afnan Fassy).
“I was born in Sydney, and then I lived in Brisbane for maybe the first four-ish years of my life, and then my family moved to Wollongong and been there since,” Hinton says. “But we would go up to Brisbane once or twice a year growing up, and there was always at least one visit to the restaurant.
“We would drive up and arrive at, say, 11pm, and we’d stay with my Mehmeh [Mehrangiz], and they’d always have food from the restaurant ready when we arrived.”
When he was older, Hinton would travel north to help the family run Sultan’s as a food stall at music festivals and the like.
Mehrangiz was born in India of Iranian descent, but as Hinton visited and worked with the Fassys, he came to understand the different undulations of his wider family’s migrant story, which touched upon countries such as Sri Lanka, Iran and South Africa.
“In the back of my head I was always thinking, ‘We need to do something with these stories,’” Hinton says. “And most my life I’ve grown up around the theatre – my dad works at Merrigong Theatre Company in Wollongong, my grandfather was an actor. So I had that performing arts background, and listening to these stories it started to come together in my head as something we could put on stage.”
This was at the end of 2022, and he spent 2023 writing the script, with the debut performance of the show in August last year.
“This was the first full play I’d written,” he says. “So I was in the deep end a little. But it was also my world, so I took some time with it.”
A big part of the writing process for Hinton involved sitting down with Mehrangiz and interviewing her to flesh out her stories.
“In the back of my head I was always thinking, ‘We need to do something with these stories.’”
Joshua Hinton
“The first few months of developing the show was just sitting and pouring through all the audio and picking out the stories that I thought were particularly poignant or would work in the context of the show.
“We’d clean up that audio and make it into certain files that we went on to use in the performance.
“My mindset in making the whole show was, ‘If it doesn’t turn into anything, at least I had this priceless opportunity to sit down with Mehmeh and have all these recordings of her talking about her memories of her family, of her parents. If nothing else comes of it, at least I have that.’”
But it did turn into something – a 70-minute play that takes in the sweep of Hinton’s family history, all while he cooks a one-pot chicken curry to his grandmother’s recipe – as much as there is one, he says – before serving it to the audience.
![“It’s crazy telling these stories,” Hinton says. “I’m jumping in front of the kitchen bench and then having to [go back to] quickly stir the curry and make sure the spices are all doing their little dance.”](https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_0.36923076923076925%2C$multiply_1.9683%2C$ratio_1.5%2C$width_756%2C$x_0%2C$y_0/t_crop_custom/q_62%2Cf_auto/265de231d7d43ad990af4e636728f25bfe77b5a0853697565342b494dce664af)
“She watched the closing night last year and we had some technical difficulties,” Hinton says. “I was just talking to the audience while we got the projections working again, and she stood up and started heckling me that I wasn’t adding enough spices at a certain part, or that I needed to fry the onions a bit more.
“It was scary for me as a performer, but I thought it added something really lovely to it.”
The final result is perhaps half show, half dinner party.
“It’s crazy telling these stories,” he says. “I’m jumping in front of the kitchen bench and then having to [go back to] quickly stir the curry and make sure the spices are all doing their little dance.
“But it’s that simple: inviting the audience in to listen to my stories while I make them dinner.”
A Place in the Sultan’s Kitchen (or How to Make the Perfect One-Pot Chicken Curry) will play at QPAC’s Cremorne Theatre September 16-20 as part of this year’s Brisbane Festival.
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
