T’s Chinese Restaurant
Sheffield, Tasmania
Alex Zhao was working the woks one night when his neighbour rang to say that one of Alex’s cows had escaped and was heading down the road. When you’re both the paddock and the plate in T’s Paddock to Plate Chinese restaurant, sometimes mid-stir-fry you just have to jump on your motorcycle and go retrieve a cow.
T’s is the only Chinese restaurant in Sheffield, a town of around 1600 people in the north of Tasmania, which is a popular destination for people on their way to Cradle Mountain. It sits on the main street near a bakehouse and a pizzeria, with a view of Mount Roland, a majestic rocky range which stands 1233 metres above sea level.
Alex and Sammi, T's Chinese Restaurant. Credit: Image credit: Chopsticks or Fork? by Jennifer Wong and Lin Jie Kong (Hardie Grant).
The restaurant, which is also the only paddock-to-plate Chinese restaurant in Australia, is named after Tamara, Alex’s grandmother on his mother’s side. Alex’s parents are from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang in northwest China. His dad Victor is Chinese, and his mum Sonya is half Chinese and half Russian. They left Urumqi as refugees in 1985, stopping for two months in Hong Kong where Alex was born, before arriving in Sydney.
They stayed there for eleven years – it’s where Alex’s two younger sisters were born – and looked for a farm where they could settle. Growing up in the city of Urumqi, it was Victor’s dream to be a farmer. Eventually, in 2000, they settled in Sheffield because it was affordable. ‘We were the first Chinese family to move to the district,’ says Alex, ‘and we felt very welcome.’
The family farm, which Alex runs, is an 80-hectare property with 200 Dorper sheep, 40 Berkshire pigs, and 40 Angus lowline cows. Alex also runs T’s with his wife Sammi – she’s front of house, Alex is in the kitchen with Victor, Sonya helps out when it gets very busy, and an Italian-named robot, Bella, brings out the dishes. ‘It’s very multicultural,’ quips Sammi.
Credit: This image is from Chopsticks or Fork? by Jennifer Wong and Lin Jie Kong (Hardie Grant).
Northern Chinese cuisine features proudly on the T’s menu, where cumin-spiced lamb from Dorper sheep is used for hand-pulled noodles, and pork from Berkshire pigs is stuffed in pan-fried potstickers. Angus beef is served as beef and black bean in a nod to traditional Australian Chinese cooking, and the black bean sauce is made from scratch. Even the chilli crisp oil is homemade using Xinjiang chillies grown and dried on the family farm. If the weather’s been kind that season, the Chinese broccoli, carrots, and zucchini in stir-fries are homegrown too.
Even the chilli crisp oil is homemade using Xinjiang chillies grown and dried on the family farm. Credit: Image credit: Chopsticks or Fork? by Jennifer Wong and Lin Jie Kong (Hardie Grant).
In 2013, T’s was listed in the annual Phaidon book, Where Chefs Eat, where Anthony Lui (executive chef and co-owner of Flower Drum, the esteemed Melbourne Chinese restaurant), praised their lamb and dumplings and described T’s as a ‘humble restaurant doing spectacular food’. But there was a time before T’s became destination dining.
Credit: Image credit: Chopsticks or Fork? by Jennifer Wong and Lin Jie Kong (Hardie Grant).
When the family arrived in Sheffield in 2000, they had no farming experience. They began with cattle, and it did not go well. ‘Whenever a cow got sick, we didn’t know what was going on,’ says Alex. ‘So we’d run over to the neighbours and they’d help us out.’ Their dream of being self-sufficient on the farm did not work out, and several years later they were in debt. Then an opportunity came up to buy the oldest building in town, which came with a homemade ice cream business. Alex and his sisters Katrisha and Karina ran the shop after school. The first time they made $100, they were so excited that they closed the shop and ran home to tell their parents.
The shop did quite well until the global financial crisis in 2008 and tourists stopped coming. So the Zhaos decided to turn the shop into a Chinese restaurant, despite having no restaurant experience. ‘Every Chinese family knows how to cook in a way. It’s just trying to cater to the Australian palate,’ says Alex. As research, the Zhaos went to Launceston to eat at a Chinese restaurant – just a few weeks before opening.
On opening night, there were many dockets of orders, but the food wasn’t quite right. ‘We thought we could figure it out, but my dad made a beef and black bean and it tasted nothing like it,’ says Alex, who then googled a recipe for beef and black bean. ‘The family knew nothing about farming and nothing about running a restaurant, but they kept going because it was about survival,’ says Sammi. ‘Both Alex and his dad are perfectionists, so that drive to get things perfect really pushed them.’
Credit: Image credit: Chopsticks or Fork? by Jennifer Wong and Lin Jie Kong (Hardie Grant).
One night a customer complained that their lamb wasn’t good. Alex suggested to his parents that they use their own lamb from the farm. The restaurant began serving paddock to plate long before they told customers that’s what they were doing. When the Dorper sheep that Alex raised started to win awards, ABC Rural did a radio story on him, where he told listeners about T’s. ‘I said that if they wanted to try the lamb, they should come to our restaurant.’ The farming community got behind Alex and T’s, and things turned around. ‘I feel a real sense of pride growing my own organic product and then putting it into the restaurant,’ says Alex. ‘How many people get to do that?’
Business is good these days, and Alex and Sammi have never been so busy, with a restaurant and a farm to run, and a family of seven children to care for. It’s not a lifestyle that they want for their kids, though. ‘No, they’re going to be lawyers,’ laughs Alex. ‘We won’t stop them taking on the restaurant, but we won’t encourage it,’ says Sammi. ‘It suits our lifestyle, but it’s full on. It’s a lot of work. I hope they go and enjoy the world.’
Make their recipe
T's pan-fried potstickers
