Northern exposure
Chef and restaurateur Jimmy Shu brings viewers on a culinary tour of his home town of Darwin, and beyond, in the new series Jimmy Shu’s Taste of the Territory. He tells Danielle McGrane why this is a cookery show with a difference.
Jimmy Shu knows a thing or two about food.
The Darwin chef, and all- round legend, has opened a total of 13 restaurants in his life and currently operates two called Hanuman in Darwin and Alice Springs.
Food is his DNA.
“I was born in Sri Lanka to Chinese parents and Dad had a restaurant for 38 years so it was fried rice, fried noodles, sweet and sour pork all wafting throughout our place for all of my life,” Shu said.
His childhood, his experience running restaurants and his passion for food all led him to Darwin, where he’s lived now for nearly 30 years.
It’s a place that perfectly mixes native food with influences from the culture of people who migrated there. He credits the migrants for bringing Asian vegetables there, one of the first things to make him really feel at home.
“They have brought in their part of the culture and I don’t know how some of the seeds would have got in, but they started to grow all these vegetables that you would find in any part of Asia – that’s Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand you name it. That whole region,” he said. “Everything’s here at our doorstep. The beauty for me is that it reminds me of my childhood.”
For him, Darwin, and its surrounds, are a mecca for food and now he gets to show that all off in his eight- part series, Jimmy Shu’s Taste of the Territory.
“The good thing about this show is we’re able to highlight some incredible people who were just doing their own thing and just in their own world, but this show will highlight them and will encourage people to use these people as mentors,” he said.
The show didn’t just introduce him to new people and new culinary experiences, but also to new places in the Northern Territory that he loved exploring.
“I didn’t know the Aboriginal people I met on the show. And then once I travelled to their part of the world I realised what an incredible landscape they live on, that’s what I really call heaven,” he said.