restaurant

Originally published by Two Thousand in 2014

It was a well planned day. Inspired by my recent week’s worth of meals over the course of one afternoon in Cabramatta, former Two Thousand editor Alex Vitlin got in touch and asked if I wanted to do the same thing in Ashfield with him, making our way through the best of the many incredible Chinese restaurants on Liverpool St. We enlisted the help of wives, sons and best mates and agreed to meet at Eaton Chinese Restaurant, Ashfield’s cheaper version of Golden Century, only to find it closed when we got there. Instead of moving to the next restaurant on our list – most likely a dumpling joint, we threw our plans to the wind and randomly selected our lunch spot from the long line of potentially life changing Chinese restaurants that take up most of Liverpool St, each one calling to your soul with faded photos of noodles and dumplings taken decades ago.

One of the ‘risks’ with travelling out to the suburbs for a meal is that the one spot you were mad keen for might be closed. Sometimes great food in the ‘burbs goes hand in hand with being unable to answer a phone or stick to your opening hours. If this happens in Ashfield, you’ll find the closed restaurant sandwiched between two open restaurants, both of which look appealing. There’s extremely little risk of eating something shit. We took a chance with (and a few longnecks into) Sky Mountain Hand Made Noodle Restaurant.

Sky Mountain is a good representation of most of the restaurants on this strip. The menu is huge, the service is fine, the chairs are plastic and the food is awesome. Our table fills with huge servings of food about one shared longneck after ordering. Small pieces of chicken, still on the bone, fried and hidden under a mountain of sichuan pepper and chilli. A pool of sour soup with pickled cabbage and non-descript ‘fish’ (only there for texture). A tofu dish flecked with the first pieces of meat that our photographer has had in about five years. Whoops.

The highlight of the meal is a giant plate of multi-textured plants, meats and miscellany (delicious miscellany), carefully arranged around a bowl of ‘family sauce’. The dish had a great name, but all I can remember about it is the family sauce, a vaguely vinegary satay-like liquid that was poured over the other parts of the dish. It was then poured over every other dish we ordered with a joy only known by foreigners in a Chinese restaurant who don’t know any better.

We leave Sky Mountain happy, even though we’ve thrown our ‘let’s do a guide to Ashfield’ plans to the wind. Instead our plan reverts to ‘let’s drink a bunch of beers and be grateful that Ashfield exists’. Eventually we got takeaway from a restaurant down the road that looked almost identical to Sky Mountain.