![]() Sydney Food Boy steadily built a following through the pandemic, working around the challenges of scattered trading hours and curfews in a part of the city subjected to the strictest and longest lockdowns in the state.Īs for what comes next, there is an ever-growing list of more than 200 restaurants to tick off. The first place La reviewed on his return home was an Afghani restaurant in Merrylands. “I’d love to see visitors take a day or two to venture out to different suburbs and try food out here as well.” Kevin La, aka wanted to come home and do the exact same thing here – I wanted the exact same feeling of exploring and travelling and eating cool food that I haven’t tried before.” “You can really see the influence of all the people that have been in and around Singapore over 200-odd years, and the food culture there stands out so much. “I would go out every day, and say, ‘I’m gonna visit this hawker centre today, or I’m gonna visit this restaurant today’, and just explore and eat,” he says. ![]() He had visited the city on layovers a handful of times before, but this was the first time he had a chance to explore the city for himself. The idea for Sydney Food Boy was born on a 10-day stay with family in Singapore on the return leg home. After finishing his optometry degree at UNSW, he put his skills to immediate use, travelling to Nepal as a volunteer in 2019 to provide eye treatment in remote communities. He visited family in Vietnam, France, Canada and Singapore. “It was the thing I wanted to do most because I never got to do it as a child.” When he left high school, he wanted to see it all. He envied the kids at school who travelled. La’s father worked seven days a week at a fruit and vegetable shop when Kevin was growing up, and he often only saw his parents in the evenings. “You never saw Mum or Dad with a recipe book, it was just things that they grew up eating themselves, things that they remembered seeing their parents cook, and then going off to taste.” “Every night on the dinner table, it was something different,” he says. He has fond memories of being led around Cabramatta produce markets and served food influenced by cuisine from all over Asia (both his parents were born in Cambodia, and his father also spent time in Vietnam before emigrating to Australia). La and his three younger brothers were raised a five-minute walk from here by Cambodian parents of Chinese descent. Kevin La explains how to make crispy fried rice: “It’s textural galore, man.” Credit: Rhett Wyman ![]() “As a child, this was my understanding of what Lao food and Thai food was. “It felt like you were walking into someone’s house,” he recalls. Lao Village has since moved to bigger digs around the corner, but when La was growing up, the two restaurants sat side by side with identical flyscreen doors and lace curtains. “Every family in this community would have grown up in one restaurant or the other,” La says, but his family went to both. La suggests meeting early Lao Village and the nearby Song Fang Khong are both known for serving the best Lao food in the area. It’s not easy getting a table here on the weekend as it is. They have recognised La as Sydney Food Boy, and the father, who is Lao, playfully asks him not to share the restaurant with the masses: “I’d like to get a seat every now and again!” He asks what they’ve been up to this morning (they’ve been to the zoo), and whether they come here often (all the time). As our food arrives at our table (barely 15 minutes after ordering), La strikes up a conversation with the family seated next to us. Not everyone is so eager to give up their secrets. The spread: paw paw salad, sticky rice, Lao sausage, ox tongue and crispy fried rice.
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