Amy and Anthony run Amy’s Street Food from a food truck based at their house in Amaroo. Photo: Tenele Conway.
Ni hao and xie xie – the sing-song call of the Mandarin words for hello and thank you – are repeated with the coming and going of each customer at Amy’s Street Food in Amaroo.
Serving traditional Chinese food to a largely Chinese following, Amy’s Street Food operates from a food truck parked at the house of owners Amy and Anthony.
Discovering that Canberra has a permit system to allow food businesses to operate in this way was an ah-ha moment for me.
Canberra food trucks face many challenges, including high costs to secure trading sites at events, unreliable weather and difficulty securing public land. Being able to operate from their own home alleviates much of the pressure associated with these ongoing challenges. It is one that Amy’s Street Food has embraced as its primary mode of operation.
Talking with Amy, she reflects a similar story.
When first starting out, they attended the National Folk Festival, where they cooked BBQ from a marquee, but it was a steep learning curve, which saw them make a loss when they didn’t manage the food and site costs correctly.
This was followed up with an unwanted lesson from the skies when attending an event in Goulburn where it was so hot and humid during the day no one was eating, and when the sun went down, the rain and wind came, and they didn’t sell anything.
Amy livestreams from inside the food truck to Chinese social media. Photo: Tenele Conway.
Looking for a better way, Amy came across the process of getting approved to trade from a food truck on their own private land, and a permanent location in their driveway was secured for the business.
Open on weekdays from 5 pm until 9 pm to service the after-work dinner trade, I popped along on a Tuesday to see what Amy and Anthony have been cooking up. The enthusiastic ground-up, bootstrapping style of Amy’s is so exciting to see happening in Canberra, where I previously thought regulations would never allow businesses like this to operate in the suburbs.
Amy’s van has minimal branding on it; a sign on the street greets you to tell you they are open, and you slip into the open gate to order at the truck window, sandwiched between their house and the van.
Upon arrival, we were met with a steaming pile of slow-cooked pork shoulder that Amy tells us isn’t on the menu, which is the case for many of the dishes being served, with Amy and Anthony always playing with new dishes to meet the demand of their regular clientele.
It’s a no-brainer that when presented with a huge pile of tender, juicy pork with the skin-on, I’m going to order it and it turns out we’re in good company with Amy posting a story to socials to thank her regular customer who had ordered this dish 41 times in a row.
To navigate the rest of the menu, Amy more than happily helped us to understand what some of the dishes were to help us order.
The stewed pork isn’t on the menu at Amy’s Street Food, but grab it whenever it pops up. Photo: Martin Conway.
The Lu Rou Fan, for example, is a dish that I’m not familiar with, and man, am I glad I asked about it. Anthony takes pork belly and slow-cooks it in an aromatic broth with soy and five spice until it’s so tender it melts in your mouth. The broth and pork juices then soak down into the rice that it sits atop, creating a wonderful flavoursome rice to accompany the meat.
The deep-fried, soft boned chicken is a yes, yes, yes from me with its heavily spiced and incredibly tender and juicy meat. The bits of cartilage are always an acquired texture, but that’s totally on me and something I’m working on. It’s never too late for personal development, you know.
The crispy chicken on rice is served on the bone and is similar to a BBQ chook; throw on top some of Anthony’s homemade chilli bean sauce and you’ve got a cracker dinner.
Anthony then treated us to a new dish he had been working on, a Hong Kong-style noodle dish, which is not a dish you commonly see in Canberra, with its thin rolled noodles, topped with a sweet hoisin sauce. This is a nice side or stand-alone dish.
And lastly, the cold Sichuan noodles were delightful the next day for lunch on the run.
The Lu Rou Fan is one of the most popular dishes on the menu. Photo: Martin Conway.
Amy says she is conscious of what dishes she puts on Instagram and saves the most Chinese dishes, like those containing liver and other more confronting ingredients, for Chinese social media in an attempt not to scare off a broader clientele.
Amy doesn’t realise it, but the loyal Chinese following for her traditional food that she has built up speaks for itself and is exactly why you should go here.
“We know all of our customers, and they are mainly Chinese, but we are expanding our dishes to appeal to more people. We would love to see other people coming to eat with us,” Amy explains.
Amy caters to her audience in more ways than just food, with a tablet set up facing into the food truck to livestream all of the action of the food prep directly to Chinese social media. A performance that you can have in person when you come along to grab dinner.
Amy’s Street Food – does it get more ‘street food’ than this? Photo: Amy’s Street Food Facebook.
To order from Amy’s Street Food head to Facebook or Instagram, where you can view the menu and order via phone, text, one of the many food ordering apps Amy is on like DoorDash, or wander over to 4 Inkerman Street, Amaroo, and let Amy talk you through the dishes of the day.
