Swee and I went for dimsum this afternoon. Despite asking her to not order too much because we were both still slightly hung over from last night, she did the exact opposite. She ordered a lot. My mistake for asking her to go grab a table first while I parked the car.

She couldn’t resist it. The place is good. Come to think of it there are plenty of other good dimsum places in Perth as well – a city of a mere 1.4 million people. Here’s a little trivia: Perth has more restaurants per capita than any other cities in Australia. Yup, we beat even Sydney and Melbourne which are also reknown for their food. The increased competition forces restaurants to *be* good.

So back to dimsum. How did a small city like Perth get so many good dimsum restaurants? And for that matter, good Hawker (Singaporean & Malaysian), Chinese, Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese restaurants? The main reason lies in the fact that Perth is an attractive place to settle down for migrants. Perth is closer to SE Asia than Sydney or Melbourne. Flights home are cheaper and therefore new migrants feel less intimidated by the distance.

The food scene in Perth wasn’t always this varied. It all started to flourish in the late 80s to the mid-90s when there was an influx of SE Asian migrants (which led to a lot of right-wing hysteria here but that’s a discussion for another time). I still remember when I first got here in 1989 and there was one (yes, *one*) Hawker restaurant. It got business not because it was good but because it was the only one. People go there because they missed the food back home too much. Now every suburb (towns within the city) with a high concentration of Singaporeans or Malaysians have one or two restaurants catering to their taste – items such as Penang fried kuay teow, chai tau kway, laksa (Assam & Curry) are now easily within reach.

pho-tai

Then there are the Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants which are equally great. The dimsum, sayur lodeh, tomyum, pad-thai and pho-tai (raw-beef noodle soup) are good by any standards, no matter where you are. There are a few truly authentic things that we can’t get here for sure but what we do have is more than good enough. Besides, flights home are cheap enough that we can fly back if we really must have Penang or-chien (oyster omelette).

Penang or-chien

How dull a place Perth and for that matter Australia would be without all this variety in food. The alternative is just too bland to even think about. If there’s only one thing that migrants are good for (and that is not true), it is the cuisine that we bring to our new home – just like the Italians and Greeks did before the Asians.