Toi Shan has been serving the Bendigo community for more than 70 years. The owners are retiring and will take their final orders for lemon chicken next week.
“We are getting old,” says Sai Yoke “Sue” Wong, 74, who runs Toi Shan in Bendigo with her husband, Kok Hem “Peter” Chee, 71. “We have been wanting to retire for a long time. We looked for someone to take over, but no one has.”
The couple will permanently close their restaurant in Bendigo’s CBD on July 30. It will later reopen as an Indian restaurant.
Toi Shan has been around since 1948, when Allan Chan took over On Loong cookshop and renamed it after the southern Chinese city he was born in, more commonly transliterated as Taishan. On Loong, however, dates back further, possibly to 1892. Its first iteration was on Bridge Street, in the heart of Bendigo’s Chinatown, and it moved to the current location on Mitchell Street in 1942. The Chan family sold the business to Sue Wong’s family in 2003.
“We’ve been here 20 years,” says Wong. “It’s a hard job with long hours. Staff are hard to find, and you don’t make enough money to pay them anyway, so you work until midnight. One day it’s busy, two days quiet, one day busy. It’s hard for old guys.”
“It’s the most iconic Chinese restaurant in Bendigo, probably in regional Victoria and maybe even in all Australia.”
Doug Lougoon, president of the Bendigo Chinese Association
Wong and Chee are Malaysian-Chinese, but they added Thai food to the classic Aussie-Chinese menu to suit contemporary tastes. “Thai chilli chicken and green curry are popular, but Australians really like lemon chicken, sweet-and-sour pork and black-bean beef,” says Wong.
Australians like a lot of other things these days, too. “Restaurants like Toi Shan are important because they tell a story about Australia that’s unique to their time and place,” says Jennifer Wong, co-author of Chopsticks or Fork?, a book and TV series celebrating regional Chinese restaurants.
“The best person to ask about Toi Shan is someone in their 60s, thinking of their first deep-fried ice-cream. Their palates and sense of nostalgia were formed in a time very different to now.”
When Toi Shan opened, it was the only place Bendigo residents could go for dinner other than the pub. “The idea of being the one restaurant in town is so hard to imagine now,” says Jennifer.
“Our options have expanded, our tastes have changed. These days, people don’t just know the Cantonese-style Australian-Chinese from the 1950s, they also know Shanghainese, Sichuan, Yunnanese and whatever. There’s so much to choose from now.”
However, shutting a restaurant isn’t necessarily sad, she says. “The good news story about a local closing can be the family story – often the parents have worked really hard to give the kids a choice. Maybe they want to take [the restaurant] on, but maybe they don’t.
“That choice is good.”
Wong and Chee’s three sons haven’t considered manning the Toi Shan wok. “They have good jobs in Malaysia, no one wants to do the kitchen,” says Sue.
Jennifer says, “What a town does lose with a closure like this is a historical connection to all the generations that have eaten and worked at those restaurants.”
Some of Toi Shan’s history was preserved in a 1991 ABC documentary, produced by Bernice Daly and featuring Gladys Chan. She waitressed at On Loong from the age of 12, and was working there seven days a week when Allan Chan bought the restaurant in 1948. The pair later married and brought up their children in Toi Shan.
Gladys recalls Allan slaughtering chickens in the backyard and washing them in a trough. Any chickens not killed would be plonked into an old tin drum to await their fate the next day. She would pluck the chooks and get them ready for cooking.
“I could never kill them but I’d do the meat, get the dim sims ready, steam them,” she says in the documentary. “It was a responsibility to the customers, we didn’t like to keep them waiting.”
Doug Lougoon will visit Toi Shan in its last days, partly in his role as president of the Bendigo Chinese Association, but more because he loves the chilli prawns. He has celebrated birthdays at the restaurant as long as he can remember.
“It’s the most iconic Chinese restaurant in Bendigo, probably in regional Victoria and maybe even in all Australia,” he says. “It’s a real shame to see it go.”
He draws a link between this restaurant and the 5000 Chinese who came to try their luck in the Bendigo goldfields in the 1850s, when they were 25 per cent of the population.
In the 1960s and 70s, Lougoon remembers his parents taking pots and pans to the restaurant to collect takeaway. You could also bring an empty bottle and have it filled with soy sauce. ]
“Aunty Sue and Uncle Peter have been mainstays,” he says. “We were leaving there on Sunday night and a bearded guy was waiting for his takeaway. He said, ‘Where am I going to go now?’ It’s a long part of our history coming to a close.
“We are grateful they’ve hung in so long. They’ve certainly earned their retirement, but Toi Shan will be missed.”
Restaurant reviews, news and the hottest openings served to your inbox.
