Author profile: Cheong Liew

Cheong Liew is widely regarded as the Father of East-West Fusion Food. He’s been named one of the ‘ten hottest chefs alive’ by American Food & Wine Magazine and, in 1999, was the first Australian chef to be recognized with a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his role in “developing and influencing the style of contemporary Australian cuisine”.  We are delighted to add to ckbk both his classic cookbook My Food (1995) and its 2025 followup Cheong Liew: Inside My Food, a memoir with recipes. In this feature, Cheong’s friend and fellow cookbook author Roberta Muir speaks to the chef about his recipes, food philosophy and the diverse influences on his cooking.

By Roberta Muir

As well as being one of Australia’s most influential chefs, Cheong Liew has been my dear friend for over 25 years. I’ve had the honour of eating his food many times in restaurants and at home as well as cooking with him. As David Sly, co-author of Inside My Food, says: “Nobody thinks about food like Cheong Liew. Nobody’s face lights up like Cheong’s when food is exciting.”

For 50 years Cheong has crafted great Australian produce into uniquely delicious dishes inspired by his Straits Chinese heritage and the melting pot of cuisines he discovered on arrival in Australia. “Malaysia is one of the most multicultural societies in the world”, Cheong explains. ”We’re used to learning about other people’s cultures, so I felt right at home when I arrived in Australia which was just starting to embrace its multicultural heritage in the 1970s.”

Over centuries, Malaysia has absorbed the influence of Chinese, Indian, Thai, Indonesian, Dutch, Portuguese, British and Persian settlers, creating at least three distinct ‘fusion cuisines’: Nonya (through the intermarriage of Chinese and Malay), Indian-influenced Mamak, and the lesser-known Portuguese/Dutch-influenced Kristang. Cheong draws on these classic fusion cuisines for his versions of dishes like Mamak mud crab and Nonya-style korma chicken curry.

He also riffs on these traditions to create his own unique fusions such as his popular black rice and palm sugar pudding based on watalappan, a Sri Lankan coconut custard sweetened with palm sugar. Cheong’s late wife Mary Ziukelis, who was his dessert chef in the early days and sounding board throughout his career, decided to add black rice to watalappan. Cheong then took inspiration from Nonya layered custard cakes to sandwich the rice between two layers of custard, plus French crème caramel for the final presentation.

In 1971 when Cheong moved from Melbourne, where he’d been studying electrical engineering, to Adelaide to be closer to family, he needed a job – and kitchen work appealed as he’d been fascinated by food since his earliest memories. So he worked his way through several kitchens – including a pub, Chinese, Indian, Spanish, Greek, and a French steakhouse where he started reading Elizabeth David to learn how to deal with previously unseen vegetables. Each kitchen sparked Cheong’s imagination and contributed to his repertoire, from his take on sweet and sour pork (vibrant with salted plums and Hawthorn fruit and a world apart from anything on a suburban Chinese restaurant menu), through Spanish-influenced Sherry-braised whole chicken with mushrooms, to olive fried octopus (recipe in My Food) and grilled red mullet with lemon, chilli & marjoram, both inspired by his time at Greek restaurant The Iliad.

Cheong is a lifelong student, learning from everyone and everything around him. “I don’t care what I’m learning”, he says, “as long as I’m learning. I had no classical training or culinary schooling; my real training came from my Grandma's kitchen. The rest came from the books I started collecting, first cookbooks for all the different cuisines I was discovering, then the great chefs of France followed by technical cookery books and eventually Chinese cookbooks. I didn’t know anything about Chinese food beyond the Cantonese I grew up with until I came to Australia. It was a steep learning curve.”

Cheong’s travels and exploration of regional Chinese cuisine have led to dishes such as Nanjing salad, Chaozhou steamed abalone with red date and wolfberry, Hangzhou-inspired tea shrimp, Teochew spiced pork belly with whole roasted smoked garlic, and Fujian Buddha jumped over the wall. While his huge cookbook collection inspired recipes like pot-roasted pigeon with garlic and grilled figs and farmhouse Muscovy duck in spiced fortified wine. Fried Milk Slice—a Saturday night dessert special at The Grange served with fruit compote, spiced chocolate sauce, durian cream, bergamot ice cream and coconut sorbet—is an Australian-Malaysian-Spanish combination inspired by Cheong’s collection of Spanish cookbooks.

No culture is as food-obsessed as the Malaysians (except possibly the neighbouring Singaporeans) and Cheong’s food education began at birth. Many of his dishes are inspired by childhood memories, such as the family favourite  steamed eggplant with tomato chilli sauce, fried rice—the first dish his mother taught him to cook—and the black bean and chilli rice vermicelli that he cooked for staff meals as a teenager in his father’s restaurant. Then there’s the biryani he watched being prepared by a master Indian chef for an uncle’s birthday on his family’s farm and the Indian rojak he used to get from the travelling street hawker who sold his father sweets as an afternoon snack.

In 1975, with friend Barry Ross, Cheong opened his first restaurant, Neddy’s on Hutt Street in Adelaide. “Barry and I had been dishing up curry together in an Asian restaurant when the Neddy’s site became available. He could carry plates, I could cook, and my late wife Mary made desserts—we figured that was enough to get us started,” Cheong recalls. It was here that Cheong’s ‘fusion cuisine’ was born with dishes like shark lips and sea cucumber braised in carrot oil, which later morphed into the tamer (but just as delicious) braised sea cucumber with spring onion oil.

“I feel like in the 1970s Adelaide really was the birthplace of great Australian food”. Cheong explains. “Don Dunstan was in power and he gave ethnic groups an opportunity to shine as well as nurturing a great arts scene. Phillip Searle came across from Sydney, Barry went to work with him at Possums, as did Christine Manfield later.”

“Neddy’s menu was a mixture of all the food I’d cooked in Australia so far: Steak Diane from the pub, Greek, Spanish, plus popular Malaysian dishes from my Grandma and that I learned from Charmaine Solomon’s cookbook. 

Warm bug salad (full recipe in My Food) was one of Cheong’s first fusion dishes. Merging Malay technique with French flavours, he fried the bug meat quickly in garlic and ginger-scented oil and combined it with a French-dressed salad – to which he couldn’t resist adding Asian bean sprouts and toasted salted fish. “The fusion was never by design, but through exploring”, Cheong explains. “I found a French recipe for duck in one of my cookbooks and loved the flavours, but knew the Malaysian way is the best way to cook duck so I blended Malaysian technique with French flavours because that would create the most delicious dish.” Cheong’s love of duck runs deep, and the saltwater duck he learned to prepare in Nanjing formed the basis of the menu with which won the ‘Olympics of cooking’, the Bocuse d'Or competition in New York in 1992. 

Growing up on a poultry farm on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, chicken is another of Cheong’s favourite ingredients, often appearing in humble home-style dishes. A simple drunken chicken hotpot is perhaps his favourite dish – and steeped chicken his family’s benchmark of perfection. Cheong uses the stock from steeping chicken to make an accompaniment of Hainan chicken rice served with his own cumquat chilli sambal, a deliciously achievable menu that will have family and friends begging for the recipes.

In 1988 Cheong went to teach at one of Australia’s leading culinary schools, Regency Park College. He was dealing with students with limited international experience but good technical skills and determined to get them to focus on freshness, clean flavours and understanding produce and seasonality. While these are concepts taken for granted today, in mid-80s Australia they were ground-breaking. 

Then, in 1995, the invitation to become consultant chef at the Adelaide Hilton’s The Grange Restaurant was “too good to refuse”, Cheong says. Especially as he was given an almost unlimited budget to buy the best produce. He championed fresh South Australian seafood and brought the Asian ethos of working with the freshest quality produce into the western kitchen where chefs had often believed they could turn average produce into great dishes through sheer culinary skill. Here Cheong developed his most acclaimed dish: Four Dances of the Sea. This dish, which would go on to become his signature, involves four seafood recipes with 50 separate elements and 25 techniques between them. “The Four Dances recipes started out as training dishes for my young chefs”, Cheong explains, “to teach them about freshness, multicultural sauces and presentation.”

As the years went by and the pressure of running one of the country’s most acclaimed fine-dining restaurants began to take its toll on his health, Cheong refocused on food-as-medicine as he’d learnt to think of it growing up. His flavours became cleaner and his food lighter. He officially retired in 2009 when he left The Grange, but has never stopped cooking, learning and teaching. Today he spends much of his time cooking for family and friends and his focus has returned to the home cooking dishes he grew up with. This is especially reflected in the Soups chapter of Inside My Food, notably clean out the fridge soup, which every cook should have in their repertoire. “Soup is succour for the soul,” Cheong explains. ”My mother prescribed soup as the remedy for ailments and weakness … [she] prepared a hydrating and nutritious soup for every evening meal – some designed to cleanse our lungs of pollution … others for good eyesight or improved digestion.” His Mum’s octopus and lotus root soup is a great example of soup as sustenance, comfort and medicine.

While many have tried to imitate Cheong’s ‘fusion’ style, more created con-fusion than succeeded. Cheong’s mantra has always been that you have to know the rules before you can start to bend or break them. “For me, living and cooking in Australia, I have total freedom … but freedom doesn’t mean anarchy and chaos. Freedom has to come from respect and knowledge,” Cheong states.

From classic Malaysian comfort food like roti babi – through western dishes like pickled herring and wood-smoked salmon – to the refinement of his legendary Four Dances Of The Sea, we can be thankful that a Malaysian electrical engineering student with a lifelong passion for food and an unquenchable thirst for learning, found his way into Adelaide kitchens as Modern Australian cuisine was being born. And even more thankful that this evolution has been recorded in two iconic books: My Food and Inside My Food.

You will find 188 recipes from My Food and Inside My Food on ckbk. Roberta advises that in some cases Inside My Food offers a summary, while the more complete recipe is given in My Food. Roberta also notes that “Cheong has never cooked a dish the same way twice”, so take this into account and use the recipes to inspire your own creations and adaptations.

Cheong Liew’s most popular recipes on ckbk

About the author

Roberta Muir is a cookbook author and gourmet tour leader. She loves making it easy for others to explore new cuisines, ingredients, wines and places through her small-group food and wine tours, online cooking classes, and fun food events in and around Sydney. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Gastronomy and is a certified Sherry educator and cheese judge. For almost 25 years she ran Australia’s largest recreational cooking school, Sydney Seafood School at Sydney Fish Market.

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