Have you noticed what happens when people talk about Southeast Asian restaurants they like? Often, but not always, any combination of the following happens. Maybe first they act like they have discovered the restaurant themselves: an explorer of old, stomping down the highstreet as if the past hundred years haven’t happened. Colonial shadows come to the fore and they stake their metaphorical flag right in the middle of the dining room. They might then tell you to excuse the decor - it is awfully grubby in there, but don’t worry because the food is great. I bet you at some point they make a joke about the grumpy, sour faced staff - but don’t worry, because the food is great. I’m certain they will tell you how cheap it is; commoditising the food and seeing value in it only because it is inexpensive. Looking at the differences in results of a Google search of the best places to eat in Wellington, and then the cheap eats in Wellington, one is predominantly European and the other Southeast Asian. Now this simply can’t be the case.
KC Cafe was opened in 1998 by Michael Chan and has been feeding every kind of Wellingtonian ever since. I arrived in Wellington this year and have averaged a meal there every other week, but in reality this is now fast becoming once a week. It welcomed me like an old friend and it feels like potentially the most real restaurant I have ever been in, whatever that means.
It's sad that in 2022 people casually joke about the interiors of Southeast Asian restaurants, as if there is a collective amnesty on bigotry when talking about them. Go to any cafe and you’ll see boxes in the back stored near the toilets; it just seems people are more ready to notice them and comment on them when they are in a place that serves noodles. When talking to people about KC Cafe it comes up all the time. But take a moment when you next walk in and actually look. It’s beautiful. The deep, third room height wood panelling runs the length and breadth of the space. The wood carries onwards and around, mapping the underside of the serving hatch window through which you can see the hanging meats; its repeated pattern jutting neatly out into the room like the keen hull of a well-loved sailboat. The hanging meats, lacquered, proud and glamorously uplit like the star of the show. Look around and see that the hardwood floors and precise strip lighting are the stuff of a boutique fashion brand's dream - across Berlin and East London people are ripping out interiors to fit their new joints just like this, desperately searching antique fairs to find this quality of mismatched formica tables. And on the wall that menu, an iconic design that should be reproduced as posters, fridge magnets and mouse mats to be sold in their thousands.
That monolith of a menu. Looming over everyone like a benevolent god; organised into five broad categories: soups, claypot, stir fried, steamboat and finally noodle and rice dishes. I have seen people stand in front of its immense energy for upwards of fifteen minutes, rendered immobile with indecision and panic at the idea of narrowing down everything they want into a single, realistic order. But this is not the only menu. Three much smaller menus are hidden around the room. The first behind the tall floor plant by the golden meats, the second behind the open door that I missed on my first three or four first visits that holds a wealth of other hidden surprises, and the last one right next to the till that adds a final layer of last second jeopardy and doubt when finalising an order. If you take only one thing away from this piece let it be this: you know those four pieces of paper sellotaped to the perspex in front of the cash register; the ones written in Mandarin in permanent marker? Those are four pages of additional menu with things that aren’t written in English anywhere else in the room. I won’t spoil the surprise, but use your phone to work out what they say.
There are nearly two hundred dishes when all menus are taken into account, impossible to cover in any great meaning in a single piece of writing. And anyway, the herculean effort of working through all of these is being documented in phenomenal fashion over at KC Review on Instagram: 92 dishes in and still going strong. What I can tell you is that the roasted crispy pork on rice is exactly what it needs to be, salty and fatty and crisp and in all the right places, served with a generosity that should cripple most restaurants trying to work a profit in an age of post-Covid razor thin margins. The cooking juices that drip from the roasted meats hanging on display are poured back over as a sauce and served with a pile of sweet, steamed pak choi. The curry laksa, a Malaysian variety popular in Kuala Lumpur, has the traditional creamy base that has been built up with a deep, rich chicken broth and loaded with seafood. Thick, dark hunks of roasted chicken carcass tell you that this stock has developed over many hours and is absolutely the real deal - laksa leaves bobbing around chewy hokkien noodles in the terracotta broth. Elsewhere in the bowl there are shrimp and squid and all the other deliciously processed things that come in a bowl like this - all oddly somehow reminiscent of a western childhood filled with processed meat sandwiches and seafood paste rolls in my lunchbox at school.
Chicken wings are served individually, so you know they must be good. Each one comes with all three parts present and correct: the drumette, flat and tip. They are pretty simple: no added rubs, spices or sauces - just poached, seasoned then deep fried to create a wing that is all sticky goodness. The kind of sticky that shreds a single ply napkin on contact and leaves finger tips frosted in tissue.
I could go on: the gelatinous beef tendons in a gently numbing broth, the piles and piles of deep fried, tender octopus or the second best mapo tofu in town. But writing about the food at KC Cafe is a stupid idea. It’s like trying to glean the meaning of a novel from reading individual pages, or deconstructing a film from a single frame. This is much more important than just the food anyway - it is an icon in the centre of town that is a testament to the immigrants of New Zealand. I am not going to even bother addressing the notion of bad service in KC Cafe: it is patently untrue. I am always greeted with genuine warmth and have witnessed people getting free dishes when unhappy, being gently advised to order less as they wouldn’t be able to finish, and even staff helping to decant meals into takeaway pots as the elderly customers weren’t confident enough in moving broths.
KC Cafe shouldn’t find itself on lists of the best cheap eats or anything else so insulting. It is among the best restaurants in Wellington and for the people it serves day in day out, it is beautiful, welcoming and immensely valuable.
So where the best mapo tofu in town?