When Pearl Garden Restaurant opened in 1975, it was one of a tiny number of Chinese restaurants in Auckland.
Sir Robert Muldoon had just led National to victory, permanent residents who were not New Zealand citizens were able to vote for the first time, Mark Williams was the king of the local pop scene with his number 1 hit Yesterday was just the beginning of my life - and yum cha was something unheard of.
Located on Newmarket’s Teed St, the restaurant famous for its yum cha and Cantonese-style dinner dishes is still being run by the same family who started it nearly 50 years ago.
The late Pauline Kwan Suk Yan’s aim was to introduce higher quality Chinese cuisine after migrating here from Hong Kong with her husband Kan Za Ming.
“Pauline, my late mother-in-law, who many fondly call Mama Kan, felt that the Chinese food that was available in Auckland at the time did not do justice to the cuisine, which is one of the world’s oldest and richest,” said Mabel Kan.
Mabel, 72, said what you’d find on menus at the few Chinese restaurants at the time were mainly chop suey and chow mein, where mostly cabbage and cauliflower were used as ingredients instead of Chinese vegetables.
“There’s also the practice of serving every customer slices of bread with butter, I don’t know how that practice came about, but it’s not Chinese,” she said.
Pauline and Za Ming first came to New Zealand in 1974 to attend their son Peter’s wedding, they fell in love with Auckland and decided to stay.
Being a chef, cookery teacher who had her own television cooking show in Hong Kong, and a cookbook author, Pauline felt she could level up Chinese dining here.
“Mama Kan wanted to bring the authentic Cantonese-style dining experience here and believed she could do it with Pearl Garden,” Mabel said.
“Contacting Chinese market gardeners, we managed to get supplies of bok choy, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots. We introduced dishes like the yam basket and deep fried ice cream.”
One of the new concepts that Pauline introduced with yum cha - literally translated as “drinking tea” in Cantonese - but is truly a brunch style of southern China and Hong Kong of eating small servings of a variety of dishes that are shared.
“It was a challenge to get Kiwis used to this new concept of Chinese dining or even to the idea that the dishes are meant for sharing,” she said.
“Each would order their own plate, they don’t share, and some would ask for tomato sauce to have with their dumplings.”
The yum cha menu back then was limited mainly to dumplings and bao buns, partly because Chinese ingredients were hard to get and Kiwi customers were still very conservative about what they ate.
New Zealand’s strict and discriminatory immigration policy at the time explicitly aimed at excluding people from China.
Immigration rules were relaxed in the late 1980s and 1990s, which saw a spike in newcomers from Asia, and today, more than 320,000 people identify as Chinese in New Zealand.
But with migration, so too came competition - and other new sizeable and upmarket restaurants like Grand Park, Grand Harbour, and Huami appearing on the yum cha scene.
Mabel’s son Chris Kan, 48, who manages the restaurant operations today, said the changing demographics due to immigration meant Pearl Garden had to change the way it does things.
Yum cha used to be offered only on Sundays but the restaurant now offers yum cha every day, except on Tuesdays when they are closed.
The yum cha menu has also expanded from just bao and dumplings to more than 80 varieties, including chicken feet, tripe, sticky rice in lotus leaves and steamed cheong fun rice rolls.
Chris said that once, their main customer base were New Zealand Chinese, but today they make up just 20%.
About 40% were now recent immigrants and the other 40% were non-Chinese New Zealanders and international visitors.
“It’s forced us to up our game, both in quality and authenticity, because our customers today know their stuff and we needed our food offerings to be just as good if not better than what you get in Asia,” he said.
“Competition also means we have to really keep up with the quality, otherwise we know people can just choose to go elsewhere.”
In the Pearl Garden kitchen today are two chefs who specialise in Cantonese dishes and five yum cha chefs, all hailing from the southern China province of Guangzhou.
Eileen Kan, another daughter-in-law to Pauline, who had been involved with Pearl Garden since its opening, said it’s hard to imagine how much had changed in the last 50 years.
Eileen said the restaurant continues to host many visiting and local celebrities, and many politicians and even heads of state.
“Among those we see here from time to time are former Prime Ministers John Key and Dame Jenny Shipley,” she said.
At 82 years of age, Eileen says she is now retired - although she would often still drop by Pearl Garden just to see how things are going.
“After nearly half a century, Pearl Garden has become so much a part of me that I feel a little bit empty without it,” she said.
Eileen remembers Pearl Garden opening with just 30 sets of plates, bowls and cups and 30 sets of chopsticks because “getting Chinese tableware and cutlery wasn’t easy back in the day”.
The original restaurant, located on the ground floor to where the current one is had just eight tables.
Pearl Garden has hosted weddings, birthdays, and christening parties and Eileen said many customers had become lifelong friends.
“We have customers have been coming here since the 70s, and then their children and now their grandchildren are dining here.”
Chris remembers being at work in a restaurant in Australia when he received a phone call from his mother a few years back.
“She said both her and my aunt were getting of age, and asked if I wanted to get involved with running Pearl Garden,” he said.
“I said yes, there was no hesitation on my part, Pearl Garden is so much a part of the Kan family I cannot imagine it being passed on to anyone else.”
Chris described the restaurant as an extension of the family home - where family dinners are eaten and where he grew up playing with his cousins.
One special dish still connects him to his late grandmother Mama Kan: the Chun Chiew Chicken or FJ8 on the Pearl Garden menu.
“This dish is truly my grandmother’s answer to KFC, chicken thigh fillet with a crunchy exterior tossed in her secret recipe spices,” Chris said.
“I remember growing up with this dish, it’s a family staple that is so well loved by so many of my friends too.”
Just like it was 50 years ago when kale was nearly impossible to find in New Zealand, the Chun Chiew Chicken is served on a bed of crispy roasted bok choi leaves.
Pearl Garden Restaurant is at level 1, 1 Teed St, Newmarket.
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