Kylie Kwong
Encyclopedia
Chef
A chef is a person who cooks professionally for other people. Although over time the term has come to describe any person who cooks for a living, traditionally it refers to a highly skilled professional who is proficient in all aspects of food preparation.-Etymology:The word "chef" is borrowed ...
, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, television presenter and restaurateur
Restaurateur
A restaurateur is a person who opens and runs restaurants professionally. Although over time the term has come to describe any person who owns a restaurant, traditionally it refers to a highly skilled professional who is proficient in all aspects of the restaurant business.-Etymology:The word...
.
Early life and education
Kwong attended Epping North Public School and Cheltenham Girls High School. As a fifth generation Chinese AustralianChinese Australian
Chinese Australian is an Australian of Chinese heritage. In the 2006 Australian Census, 669,890 Australian residents identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry, either alone or with another ancestry....
, she learned the fundamentals of Cantonese
Cantonese cuisine
Cantonese cuisine comes from Guangdong Province in southern China and is one of 8 superdivisions of Chinese cuisine. Its prominence outside China is due to the great numbers of early emigrants from Guangdong. Cantonese chefs are highly sought after throughout the country...
cooking by her mother's side. She undertook much of her apprenticeship
Apprenticeship
Apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a skill. Apprentices or protégés build their careers from apprenticeships...
at Neil Perry
Neil Perry
Neil Arthur Perry is a prominent Australian chef, restaurateur, author and television presenter. He also is the co-ordinator for Qantas Flight Catering under his company Rockpool Consulting and has a food brand sold under his name, available at Woolworths Supermarkets.Perry co-owns and is...
's Rockpool and Wokpool, and later at Restaurant Manfredi.
Career
In 2000, Kwong opened her first restaurant, Billy Kwong, in the Sydney suburb of Surry HillsSurry Hills, New South Wales
Surry Hills is an inner-city suburb of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Surry Hills is located immediately south-east of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of the City of Sydney...
. 'Billy' in the restaurant's name derives, not from the name of a family member, but from the partnership with Sydney celebrity chef Bill Granger
Bill Granger
Bill Granger is a self-taught cook, restaurateur and food writer, based in his native Australia, but also working internationally.-Career:In the late 1980s, Granger relocated from Melbourne to Sydney to study art. He found inspiration in the city's lifestyle, light and harbour views. He worked...
under which the restaurant was founded. Kwong has since become the sole owner of the restaurant, which retains its original name.
The restaurant made a commitment to use organic
Organic food
Organic foods are foods that are produced using methods that do not involve modern synthetic inputs such as synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers, do not contain genetically modified organisms, and are not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or chemical food additives.For the...
and biodynamic
Biodynamic agriculture
Biodynamic agriculture is a method of organic farming that emphasizes the holistic development and interrelationships of the soil, plants and animals as a self-sustaining system. Biodynamic farming has much in common with other organic approaches, such as emphasizing the use of manures and composts...
food: "We now use only organic and biodynamic fruit and vegetables, poultry, meat and noodles. All the soy sauces, sugar, vinegar and oils we flavour our food with are organic, and we serve Fair Trade tea, coffee and chocolate." The restaurant made this transition in 2005.
Kwong is quoted as saying "I wanted my work and social life to reflect my Buddhism
Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha . The Buddha lived and taught in the northeastern Indian subcontinent some time between the 6th and 4th...
. Offering my customers healthy, life-giving, precious food is the best way for me to help them. Whether it's my books, restaurant or TV show, I'll always ask, Is this sustainable? Is this about uplifting and elevating the energy rather than depleting?".
Billy Kwong received the inaugural Sustainability Award in 2009 from the Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, in recognition of Kwong's environmental initiatives, including the option for diners to donate to a renewable energy credits program, purchased from a wind farm in the Chinese province of Hebei. The restaurant serves only filtered Sydney tap water, offering no bottled water.
At a public lecture by the Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...
on December 3, 2009 at the Sydney Entertainment Centre
Sydney Entertainment Centre
The Sydney Entertainment Centre is a multi-purpose venue, located in Haymarket, Sydney, Australia. It opened in May 1983, to replace Sydney Stadium, which had been demolished to make way for a new railway. The centre is currently owned by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, which administers...
, Kwong acted as master of ceremonies.
On 1 October 2011, Kwong's first ever tableware range went on sale in Oxfam shops around Australia. The range, which includes a soup bowl and rice bowl with matching plates, soup spoon, teapot, teacup and coffee cup, is a joint project with Oxfam Australia and is hand-crafted by one of Oxfam's fair trade producer partners in Vietnam, Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts.
Television and books
In 2003, Kylie Kwong: Cooking with Heart and Soul was published by Penguin Viking/ABC Books in October 2003 to coincide with her first TV series which was screened on the ABCAustralian Broadcasting Corporation
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...
at the same time. Her first cookbook Kylie Kwong: Recipes and Stories was published by Penguin in April 2003. The television series was screened both on the Australian ABC, but also on Foxtel
Foxtel
Foxtel is an Australian pay television company, operating cable, direct broadcast satellite television and IPTV services. It was formed in 1995 through a joint venture established between Telstra and News Corporation....
, on the LifeStyle Channel, and on Discovery Home
Discovery Home
Planet Green is a Television Network on satellite TV and digital cable TV in the U.S. run by Discovery Communications. Originally launched on June 1, 1998 as the main competitor to HGTV, the channel offered programming ranging from do-it-yourself to cooking to interior design/landscaping to party...
in the U.S..
In late 2001, the LifeStyle Channel released a statement revealing that a second Kylie Kwong series would be released. The 6 part television series would be named Kylie Kwong: Simply Magic. This series was then televised in January 2006 on the LifeStyle Channel and later in 2006 on Discovery Home
Discovery Home
Planet Green is a Television Network on satellite TV and digital cable TV in the U.S. run by Discovery Communications. Originally launched on June 1, 1998 as the main competitor to HGTV, the channel offered programming ranging from do-it-yourself to cooking to interior design/landscaping to party...
. A new Kylie Kwong book was released in 2006 under the name of Simple Chinese Cooking. The book aims to make Chinese cooking as easy as possible, with every recipe accompanied by a full-page colour photograph.
A third series to accompany her new book My China: Stories and Recipes from My Homeland will be shown on UKTV Food in Summer 2008.
Summary of Publications
To date Kylie has released 5 books, all of which share her love of cooking and explore many different facets of Chinese culture and cuisine. In order of release, these include:- Kylie Kwong: Recipes And Stories - 2003 - 184 pages. ISBN 978-0670911189
- Heart and Soul - 2003 - 204 pages. ISBN 978-0670041541
- Simple Chinese Cooking - 2007 - 313 pages. ISBN 978-0670038480
- My China: A Feast for All the Senses - 2007 - 482 pages. ISBN 978-0670018796
- My China: Stories and Recipes from My Homeland - 2008 - 496 pages. ISBN 978-0007271047
- Story in Growing up Asian in AustraliaGrowing up Asian in AustraliaGrowing up Asian in Australia is an anthology of personal accounts, essays, short stories and poetry edited by Alice Pung. The discourse of "Asians" in Australia is similar to that in America and usually includes people of East Asian "oriental" background such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese or...
- 2008