Sun Ming, Hurstville

Sun Ming in Hurstville is a casual Hong Kong Cantonese style coffee house diner that serves Hong Kong cafe classics along with a range of Cantonese restaurant seafood dishes like pippies with vermicelli, mud crab with glass noodles and lobster all from the tank. It was the perfect place for a pre-Christmas celebration dinner!

Laura and I both love setting traditions and most of these traditions involve food. A tradition we started a few years ago is to do a Christmas present exchange and Chinese crab dinner a few days before Christmas. It’s one of my favourites as I love crab, giving gifts and Laura and I always look forward to it.

We decided on Sun Ming as I had seen it on chef Sam Young’s Instagram where he featured their crab with noodles and I bookmarked it for months later for the Christmas crab fest. While there is a menu with classic “cha chaan teng” or Hong Kong diner dishes, you can order a range of live seafood too if you’re feeling fancy. I call the day before just to check that they’re open and they tell us that all of their live seafood has to be pre-booked with a deposit (although when we arrive the following night there are a few lobsters in the tank).

It’s busy on this rainy and unseasonably chilly Wednesday evening. They hand us the menu but I had already stalked their Instagram and have a list of must orders. On one side of the restaurant are pictures of their signature dishes labelled in English and Chinese while on the side are Chinese only picture-less signs. There’s a drawing of the owner and murals on each side of the restaurant.

Staff are super sweet and friendly and take our large order without any pause or concern. “I can’t look!” says Laura cowering away from Gerald the mud crab that they’ve brought to show us.

They bring us some unsweetened tea but Cha Chaan Tengs always have interesting drinks. Laura orders the tea and coffee mixed HK style but it isn’t quite her vibe (I am not a fan of it either but it should be tried at least once) so we share my red bean ice drink with a generous layer of sweetened red beans with shaved ice and milk.

The food comes out quickly. The salt and pepper chicken wings come out piping hot and covered in a delicious crispy garlic and fresh, chopped chilli. I love salt and pepper anything so enjoy these immensely. They’re even better once they cool off for 5 minutes or so.

Normally they have a minimum order of a kilo for pippies but since we order the crab they let us have a half kilo of pippies. The vermicelli is crispy and coated in XO sauce and cut into squares for easy eating. There are a generous amount of pippies on top and I suck on the shells for the meat and to extract all of the sauce.

Since when is tofu a signature dish? I’m willing to bet that this sizzling silken tofu will change any tofu haters minds. As promised, it comes out sizzling on a black cast iron hot plate with minced pork with a bottom layer of egg omelette. The tofu is cut into round pucks and is so silky and wobbly inside it reminds me of panna cotta. It is definitely one of my favourite dishes and unique to them.

The sticky rice is said to be another signature. It’s nice with cubes of lup cheong and peanuts and it is perfect to soak up the sauce from the tofu. On its own, it’s a nice change from regular fried rice.

Then comes the main event: the mud crab with XO sauce and vermicelli. It comes out in a large pot and the crab pieces are all hidden underneath a large mound of glass noodles. The claws are enormous and the crab is so meaty with sweet meat that we barely make a dent in the dish (we also had so much food). Interestingly, there’s also some pork mince mixed in with the noodles which we haven’t seen before so Laura doesn’t really enjoy the noodles as she doesn’t really like meat but I love the added element of flavour from it.

There’s no dessert or fruit plate but that’s totally fine because we can’t fit another thing in. We take what we can’t eat home where we do a present exchange. Laura has delicious leftovers for a few days while Mr NQN has dinner while I go out the next few nights!

So tell me Dear Reader, do you like starting food traditions? Do you have a Christmas tradition with a friend?

This meal was independently paid for.

Sun Ming

173A Forest Rd, Hurstville NSW 2220

Monday to Friday 10am-10pm

Saturday and Sunday 9am-10pm

Phone: (02) 9585 2772