I love food. I’ve always loved food. I grew up in a farmhouse with four older brothers and two younger sisters and there never seemed to be enough food. At a meal, I learned to eat as much and as fast as I could, and sadly this trait stays with me up until today (it makes for dinner party conversation, anyway). I grew up to the constant strains of ‘Are you gonna eat that?’

Anyhow, as an introduction, that was lamentable. As a cooking show with heart, this one has it all down. Shows like this come and go on Australian television and some are just rehashed and repackaged crap (Surfing the Menu) while others are much less pretentious and keep modern with a flair of their own.

Ms. Kwong’s show is just that.

A chef in a busy Melbourne restaurant (of course, there couldn’t be restaurants in any other state could there?), Ms. Kwong brings a delicious (haha) joy to her work. While she seems a little unsure of herself in the opening episodes, she soon finds her feet and starts working the camera perfectly, cooking with high energy and excitement.

She merges the cultures of China with her own fifth generation Australian upbringing, tripping through the markets (as do all good chefs) and attempting to converse in Chinese but failing miserably (she’ll admit that herself). To her cooking is as important as breathing and this shows in her passion for the work and her creativity in the blending of cultures and tastes to create exquisite masterworks. Well, mostly. Don’t think you’ll get me anywhere near the tripe dish she cooks up in Episode Five. She also keeps the show moving, focusing more on the cooking and preparation rather than the eating with hired friends at the finish, or endless shots of her peering into store windows that so many other hip young chef shows seem to fill empty time with. Averaging five dishes per 26-minute episode, Ms. Kwong works hard and fast and brings such enthusiasm into the cooking that it is easy to become excited yourself about it.

She also touches upon her own ‘multicultural upbringing’ in Australia, though this more provides fuel for her menu each episode rather than a sobering epithet about life or Asian relations. It’s an energetic and enjoyable series that provides a followable methodology of cooking as well as an entertaining delivery from a fresh new face in the cooking genre. With the confidence she has built throughout these eight episodes, I look forward to seeing how she tackles a second season, should one be in the offing.

Made for TV, this is designed for widescreen people with a 1.78:1 enhanced delivery. It looks great and there are no real worries with picture quality. Colours may border on over-saturated occasionally, but this is tolerable, considering the show is so vibrantly colourful so much of the time. Flesh tones are all natural and mostly all Asian, while there is no real use of shadow to gauge detail about and blacks are true.

Sound is via a pretty stock standard Dolby Digital stereo delivery, which does the shot nicely. Ms. Kwong’s narration gets a little wooden on occasion, but this may be attributed to her limited experience reading in a studio. On screen she speaks clearly and warmly, yet these narrations do sound quite ‘read aloud’ for a lot of the time. This too should improve with experience. Music is fairly predictable in its jazzy-café-cool/sultry-sax-coffee-after-hours feel, but it suits the show’s style well enough. This would appear to be all track work with no real scorer, but again this suits the modern stylings.

There are unfortunately no extras on this two-disc set, and it is presented as two DVD 5s rather than one single DVD 9. Is this supposed to fool us into thinking there’s more to pay for or what? If you can fit eight episodes this sweetly onto two 5s, you can put them on one 9 just as sweetly.

Also, surprisingly, there aren’t any Chinese subtitles! What a wasted opportunity.

Ms. Kwong manages to make for herself an interesting cooking show that makes some brave use of what may be otherwise treated as no-nos by more refined cooking shows. Chicken feet, organs and that ever barf-inducing tripe all make appearances, as do numerous other disgusting things, but they certainly look tasty, there’s no doubt about that. Good for her in bringing something new to the table though (haha) and not just rehashing the boring-arse fish and chips they do elsewhere (Ed: Oi! Fish and chips are manna!). This is a quality production for anyone interested in Asian cooking, though there’s enough Aussie influence to keep most of it all familiar.

I don’t know how to say bon appetit in Chinese, so I’ll use the French stalwart of bon appetit!.

Bon appetit!