Tales of the Subaru - Leura Gardens Festival 2018 - The Epilogue

Writing about the Leura Chinee Restaurant brought back a raft of memories from the Loong Cheong Chinese Restaurant which used to be at the end of a short arcade in Florence Street, Hornsby.  It still exists further along Florence Street, tucked into the side of Westfield to which it is otherwise unconnected.  I describe it as a Chinese restaurant because Jane Turner in her guise as Kath Day-Knight was yet to be born let alone coin the word Chinee as a culinary term when the Loong Cheong first came into being.

Our friend and neighbour Daphne worked at the Loong Cheong during its first incarnation and her name should be a lesson in what not to call your child because poor Daphne spent her entire life known as Daffy which must surely take a toll.  One can only imagine what was going on in the minds of Jack and Ida Face when they named their son Richard.  He went on to become the Member for Charlestown in the NSW Parliament then Minister for Gaming and Racing in the Carr Government until an ICAC inquiry brought poor old Dick Face completely undone.

But I digress!  I want to reflect on the Loong Cheong, not people with unfortunate names like Gordon Fang who was a dentist I once had or the Turkish boy I taught whose name was Kunt.  That apparently means strong or durable in ancient Turkish but gets a bit lost in English.  There was no time to be wasted so after a very sensitive discussion with his parents Kunt became Curt.

Now back to the Loong Cheong which was way ahead of its time with optional chopsticks back in the 60s and exotic names for some of their specialty dishes like Wah Hop Fan which might have been a crumbed chicken cutlet with sweet and sour sauce at any other suburban Chinese.  I was rather partial to this dish, particularly with a side serve of special fried rice, and it remains something of a favourite to this very day provided the sauce is more sour than sweet and not too glow-in-the-dark.

It was a winter evening in 1968 when Daffy brought my Wah Hop Fan and special fried rice to our table then returned to the counter to take people’s BYO pots and casserole dishes through to the kitchen so they could collect their pre-ordered takeaway in the very same thus saving the container surcharge which in hindsight was environmental friendliness decades ahead of its time.

That was the night the Loong Cheong lost a much valued customer. 

In walked Ed Devereaux who played Ranger Matt Hammond in the new and very popular TV series ‘Skippy the Bush Kangaroo’.  He had arrived sans pots and pans to collect the order he’d phoned through earlier as one could do now that it was the 1960s.  He was an actor and therefore presumably wealthy so didn't need to skimp on such things as disposable food containers which was pretty much the mark of affluence at that time.

All would have been fine and Ed would quite possibly have gone on collecting his takeaways from the Loong Cheong for decades more had my mother been seated on the other side of the table but no, she had an unobstructed view of both the door and counter so recognised Ed Devereaux immediately.  Things would have still been OK had my mother possessed the skill of containing herself but no!

She stood up, pointed and yelled “Look, there's Skippy’s daddy!”

The near full restaurant gasped; he glared; I shrank.  Dad had seen and heard it all before but I was 14 and it was just like the morning Mum drove me to school in her nighty and dressing gown and the car broke down in the rain so 20 years before the invention of mobile phones she hightailed it straight into the school office and called the NRMA without batting so much as an eyelid.

Ed Devereaux gathered up his order which had been packed into newfangled plastic bags and according to our good friend and neighbour, Daffy, never again returned to the Loong Cheong Chinese Restaurant.  In fact, he left the country not long after that and moved to London where I can only but hope he enjoyed relative anonymity at his local Chinese restaurant.