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By Larissa Dubecki
I really think it's time we put away the rivalry and accept that
Sydney and Melbourne are the two magnetic poles of Australian dining,
bouncing chefs and restaurateurs back and forth between their bi-city
business interests. Just the past few months have seen Stokehouse
joining MoVida in Sin City and Paul Wilson doing his thing at Icebergs
while its owner Maurice Terzini plots his Melbourne comeback at Comme.
Exhausting, non? The payoff is that along with clocking up the frequent
flyer points, Australia's answer to those US east coast-west coast
sophisticates are propagating a ''we'll have what they're having''
mentality.
There has been, I confess, a degree of envy watching
Sydney embrace the Asian new school with the likes of Ms G's and Mr
Wong, which in their turn hitched a ride on the pioneering Billy Kwong.
Envy at the slicked-up take on the crash of Honkers and the cool of
the Asian youthquake, but the green-eyed monster was kept at bay by the
certainty it was only a matter of time before we got our own. Our own
arrives thanks to Peter Bartholomew and David Mackintosh of MoVida and
Pei Modern fame. Not so much restaurateurs as the vision guys who spy
deals, put them together and leave others to run the show. They did it
recently with Rosa's Kitchen and they've done it again at Lee Ho Fook,
cutting in former Marque and Mr Wong sous chef Victor Liong to lure him
south, and stumping up more dash than cash for a makeover of the
former Boire.
It's a simple refurb of the tight 45-seater, with a bar
now taking up a slice of the floor action, a panda etched on to the
smoked-glass front window, and a swirly two-tone charcoal and white
paint job that could be a depiction of Beijing smog.