On the show, Liaw and Poh try all sorts of both traditional and contemporary Aussie fare like meat pies, spaghetti Bolognese and even sandwiches. — GREAT AUSTRALIAN BITES
On a muggy Monday morning, Adam Liaw’s appearance at the Mandarin Oriental in Kuala Lumpur doesn’t attract too much attention. A couple of stragglers do a double-take, some curious bystanders stare for a couple of minutes but beyond that, few people seem to realise that they are in the presence of one of Australia’s biggest culinary stars.
In Australia, this scenario would probably have played out differently because over there, Liaw is a megastar in his own right and for good reason: the Malaysian-born Australian lawyer competed in and won the second season of MasterChef Australia in 2010 in a finale that is still the most-watched non-sporting television event in Australian history.
Since then, Liaw has gone from strength to strength, churning out a series of successful cookbooks and helming numerous television shows, including The Cook Up with Adam Liaw, which is the most commissioned show on Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services (SBS), with an initial commission of 200 episodes!
Poh is a passionate advocate of Malaysian food and says being Malaysian is part of who he is, which is why he loves telling people about the joys of Malaysian cuisine. — ABIRAMI DURAI/The Star
In 2021, Liaw paired with fellow Malaysian-born Australian Poh Ling Yeow on a series (commissioned by the Australian High Commission Malaysia) called Adam & Poh’s Malaysia in Australia. The show captured the unique Australianised Malaysian food available Down Under and was the highest-rated debut show on SBS.
This year – Liaw’s latest show called Adam & Poh’s Great Australian Bites will air on the Asian Food Network in Malaysia in October (it is already airing on SBS in Australia) and involves the quest to find Australia’s national dish.
In many ways, Liaw is in an elusive category of celebrity chefs: one whose appeal continues to grow with time. And what is even more interesting is that part of his success and allure is rooted in his appreciation and openness about his Malaysian culinary heritage.
Formative years
Liaw was born in Penang but moved to Adelaide, Australia when he was just three years old. His parents are both doctors and growing up, it was his formidable paternal grandmother (who moved with the family to Australia) who helped look after Liaw and his two siblings and ultimately had a huge influence on how he viewed food.
Liaw grew up eating classic Malaysian dishes like Hainanese chicken rice as his paternal grandmother lived with the family in Adelaide and cooked every day for Liaw and his siblings. — Filepic
“My grandmother was a single mother from the age of 28 or 29 after my grandfather passed away. So she was responsible for looking after her three kids and she had a little café in Segamat, Johor, so she basically ran the café and looked after her children and put them all through school and university – she was very smart and capable,” says Liaw.
It was also his grandmother who introduced him to the Hainanese food and Malaysian dishes of his roots, so that even though he was transplanted to a different country, he wasn’t immune to the culinary charms of his homeland.
“My grandmother was a very good cook and she made us three meals a day, so it was really her food that I grew up with. So food was very much used as a way to remember life back in Malaysia but also to learn more about how to be in Australia, so things like spaghetti Bologne. My grandmother didn’t eat beef but she would make spaghetti Bolognese and steaks and things that Australian kids were eating, so we could assimilate more with Australian foods.
“But the foods I loved growing up were Hainanese chicken rice which was probably my favourite and kaya toast which is still my favourite and nasi lemak, of course,” says Liaw.
Throughout their new show Great Australian Bites, Liaw and co-host Poh travel through Australia in search of Australia’s national dish. — GREAT AUSTRALIAN BITES
When he grew up, Liaw become a lawyer, although that happened inadvertently rather than by intent.
“I think when you are a migrant to a new country, your parents want stability and stability through education for you primarily. So my parents were both doctors and my brother and sister are both doctors and to be honest, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.
“It just so happened I was having lunch with a friend who was applying to law school. He said ‘I can’t have lunch with you, I am applying to law school’. So I said, ‘I’ll come with you, we’ll both apply!’ and we both just applied for law school and ended up getting in,” he says matter-of-factly.
And that is how Liaw ended up practising law. Although he enjoyed it tremendously, food continued to play a huge role in his life and he often cooked up a storm on his own. It is why while working as a media lawyer for the Walt Disney company in Japan, his friend encouraged him to audition for MasterChef Australia.
Coincidentally, Liaw was thinking about moving back to Australia, after having worked in Japan for five years so the timing was fortuitous. In the end, he auditioned for the show, enjoyed the process tremendously and the rest as they say, is history.
Although many MasterChef winners have gone on to have varying degrees of success, Liaw has been a media darling from the start. Ever-curious with a natural humility and charm, his genuine interest in food and people at large, has won over Australians time and time again.
On screen, his storytelling skills are interwoven with his innate ability to allow others to also tell their stories, resulting in a give-and-take element which is rare in celebrity chefs, who often have (or would prefer to have) the spotlight on them all the time.
Liaw says that it is fortunate that he and Poh get along very well as Australia is a huge country and they often had to sit through eight-hour drives to get to their destinations on the show. — GREAT AUSTRALIAN BITES
Liaw says he has enjoyed his post-MasterChef career, as it has allowed him to explore eclectic options that meld with his own inability to sit still.
“Nobody gives you a career after being on reality TV. I have been very lucky to be making shows with SBS, one of our public broadcasters in Australia and I have been doing that now for nearly 13 years.
“When you have a career in the public eye, it is really hard to know whether you will be successful or not, it is not like another career where you can work really hard and you can be whatever you want to be.
“With this, it’s kind of up to the public – if people want to keep watching you, they’ll keep letting you make TV shows. But it’s a career that really suits me because I can do so many things. I’m a little bit scatter-brained in that I don’t like doing the same thing again and again and again so I like my career now.
“Also TV shows are very different now when people watch them on demand rather than having to tune in at the same time every week. The way you tell the story is different, the way you engage the audience is different and I like the puzzle of working that out,” he says.
The Malaysian connection
Although Liaw didn’t actually grow up in Malaysia, his Malaysian roots have never been far from his mind. If you’ve watched MasterChef Australia and the season that Liaw featured in, you’ll see how often Malaysia and Malaysian food features in his culinary oeuvre.
Very surprisingly, laksa was a contender for the position of Australia’s national dish! — GREAT AUSTRALIAN BITES
Part of this has to do with his grandmother and part of this has to do with the Malaysian expat community that Liaw grew up surrounded by.
“I would say that the expat Malaysian community in Australia is so large that it is an identity of itself, it is not Malaysia-Malaysia, but it is a very large community that has a very Australianised version of Malaysian culture. We celebrate certain things and have get-togethers – a lot of it is food-related, so I think a lot of the Malaysian-Australian community still feels a strong connection to Malaysia – we all have family here and visit regularly.
“Like my mother came back and stayed in Penang for a few years after she retired and my sister wasn’t even born in Malaysia but she lived here for about five years and left at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, so we still very much maintain our connections to Malaysia,” says Liaw.
Malaysian food has also exploded in popularity in Australia and Liaw says he is frequently inundated with requests for recipes like rendang and chicken curry!
So when the opportunity to be on Adam & Poh’s Malaysia in Australia came about in 2020, Liaw says it felt completely natural to do a show that was so intrinsically tied to his own heritage. Co-host Poh (also a popular star in Australia) was also someone Liaw knew and got along with, so the pairing was spot-on from the start.
“Poh and I are actually Malaysian-Australians who grew up in Adelaide, so we have a lot of common friends. Our parents have met each other and I think our dads have played golf together without knowing that we knew each other,” says Liaw.
Liaw says creating Adam & Poh’s Malaysia in Australia and Great Australian Bites with Poh was fun because she is extremely easy to work with. And given the long hours involved filming and travelling throughout Australia for both shows, it would have been very difficult if they didn’t get along.
“There were a lot of challenges with filming Adam & Poh’s Malaysia in Australia because of the pandemic. We weren’t able to film in Malaysia because of border restrictions, so we made the series in Australia, which is a little bit strange.
“Generally people don’t make shows about the cuisine of a country in a different country but I guess in a pandemic, you do things that are not normal. But actually we had no trouble finding content for that show because we have so many Malaysian communities in Australia.
“Like there is a small town in western Australia where the population is 30% Malay, and the food reflects that,” he says.
Great Australian Bites
Liaw’s latest show with Poh is called Adam & Poh’s Great Australian Bites and once again involves him and Poh travelling through Australia, this time on a journey to discover Australia’s national dish. Episodes uncover traditional Aussie fare like finger buns, curried pies and even indigenous food.
Liaw says there were some strange discoveries made during the course of the show, like the fact that one of the contenders for Australia’s national dish is none other than the ubiquitous Malaysian laksa.
Although Liaw was certain spaghetti Bolognese would eventually win the title of Australia's national dish, surprisingly even laksa beat out this classic dish in the final vote. — KLAUS NIELSEN/Pexels
“One of the most popular foods in Australia is curry laksa. It’s kind of an Australianised version of laksa and is well-known particularly in the northern part of Australia but laksa is so popular in Australia that it is pretty much considered Australian food.
“I can’t think of another country outside of Malaysia where laksa would be as popular as in Australia,” he says.
The show has yet to premiere in Malaysia and the finale episode hasn’t even aired in Australia yet, so Liaw doesn’t want to reveal too much about the ending, but what he does say is that the final episode involves a vote to see which dish ultimately serves as Australia’s national dish. The reveal will be done by the Australian Prime Minister, so it’s a pretty big deal.
Liaw does say though that he is pretty surprised by the final outcome as it is not quite what he expected.
“It was quite surprising to me. I had my own ideas – to be honest I thought Australia’s national dish was spaghetti Bolognese because when the pandemic hit, everyone went to the supermarket and bought the ingredients for spaghetti Bolognese and that is all everybody made!
“But I was definitely in the minority on that, I would have thought it was very clear that was the national dish. But people had different opinions, there were more votes for laksa than spaghetti Bolognese, to be honest!” he says.
But can an entire country’s culinary predilections boil down to a single national dish? It’s a tough question because food is so subjective and in multi-cultural countries like Australia and Malaysia, it is even harder to determine what foods are representative of an entire nation made up of so many diverse communities.
“To be honest, you probably can’t equate a country with a single dish, but it’s an interesting exercise. Because when you vote on the national dish, sometimes people are aspirational about it, sometimes people wish that their cuisine was something other than it is but it is very interesting to think about what the national dish is because it makes you think about what the country is and what the people in it are,” says Liaw.
The futureGiven how busy he is, it isn’t any surprise to learn that Liaw has a million different projects up his sleeves. He recently finished a documentary on Chinese-Australian history and his new cookbook Seven Days a Week will be out next month.
Liaw will also soon start filming a cooking show designed to tackle the rising cost of living and consequently how to cook cheaply. But despite wearing different hats and doing so many different things, he says that Malaysia and Malaysian food will always be something he advocates and is passionate about.
“Being Malaysian is part of who I am and for someone who is in the public eye, the more people understand you and where you come from, the better. And for me, I am a food guy so I want people to know that Malaysian food is delicious,” he says.
Adam & Poh’s Great Australian Bites airs on the Asian Food Network (Astro Channel 709) in October 2023 (date TBC).
