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Spring rolls have a . The dish's origin story is hinted at in its name, but it's easy to completely miss this – Chinese restaurants serve this staple all year round, so you might not realise it's actually connected to a season of harvests.
, a famous poet from the Tang dynasty (618-907), associated this snack with the early days of spring, and link it to a ritual of preparing vegetables in advance and serving them in a portable roll shape. It's also popular , an event that unfolds during China's springtime. The dish symbolises good fortune because the deep-fried appetisers resemble bars of gold.
While I don't know of any Australian poets who've written about spring rolls (but I'd welcome rhymes and stanzas about its crunchy shell and shredded filling!), the Chinese dish has inspired the creativity of the hospitality industry: just look at how it has reshaped the spring roll in such multicultural ways.
At in Sydney's west, co-owner Jeremy Agha offers a version that resonates with the shawarma wraps, hummus and tabbouleh that are on the menu at this Lebanese house in Guildford.
It's three cultures in one spring roll.
His spring roll is stuffed with melted haloumi, which he imports from Greece. Instead of a traditional Chinese wrapper, he turns to the Middle East: "it's Turkish baklava pastry that we deep-fry, so it's three cultures in one spring roll." He adds, "we do sprinkle za'atar on top, I guess that's the Lebanese component to it."
While this tangy mix of sumac, oregano, sumac and thyme isn't traditional, it's symbolically important to Agha.
"It's something that's brought us to where we are today. If there wasn't oregano and za'atar in the first place, there'd be no manoush shop, there'd be no Yum Yum Bakery," he says.
The stretchy, cheese strings that swing between the crunchy halves of its haloumi spring roll are bound to capture appetites (and Instagram snapshots) at Yum Yum Bakery's next outpost. "We're opening a venue in Parramatta in 2023," Agha says.
At in Sydney's Pott Point, you'll find lamb spring rolls that are described as "". I wonder if it's inspired by a particular experience with the Aussie classic, which can be found literally anywhere – kids parties, petrol stations, bakeries, stadiums – and it isn't properly ready until dolloped with tomato sauce.
"Our lamb spring rolls actually came from my uncle ," says , who runs Fei Jai with . "He served them for many years at and then . When we first opened up Fei Jai in 2010, he generously passed on the recipe to us and it's been on our menu ever since.
"I remember he affectionately used to call them 'Chinese meat pies' and we've just continued on with the tradition," he adds.
Mention this lamb spring roll to and he immediately recognises it and its Flower Drum origins. "It's braised lamb inside a spring roll," he says. "That's delicious."
The chef is well aware of how spring roll wrappers can be reconfigured in innovative ways. While Hong has never claimed to invent cheeseburger spring rolls, he's known for making them popular in Sydney. currently serves around 10,000 of these snacks each week at its Allianz Stadium stands alone. His cheeseburger spring roll was when Hong hosted Instagram cooking lessons early in the pandemic and it also had a star turn on of his latest show, . (Don't worry: you needn't pester the chef online if you're wondering how to make it, we've got a recipe , with a scaled-up version if you need to maximise your stash of spring roll wrappers.)
So how did the story of Hong's cheeseburger spring rolls begin?
He timestamps it to 2014-2015 when he was working at Merivale's restaurant in Sydney's Potts Point. He'd long wanted to put a cheeseburger spring roll on the menu, and had experimented with it at home.
"It was pretty simple," he says of the recipe. Essentially, it was a McDonald's burger zapped into spring roll form: think beef, American cheese, onions, pickles and squiggles of tomato sauce and mustard, all stuffed into a deep-fried wrapper, instead of slick paper packaging with a serve of fries.
Since then, this burger-flavoured snack has travelled well beyond Ms G's outlets.
Source: Andrew Dorn
And when I mention the with fermented chilli aïoli that Sydney's launched in August, Hong recalls its head chef once worked for Merivale.
"He helped out at Ms G's a bit…that's where he was first exposed to the cheeseburger spring roll," says Hong. Could it have inspired the lasagne version, even in a small way?
Whenever you're searching for multicultural reinterpretations of this Chinese snack, you needn't look very far. Hong points out, just days before our interview, 's created a Turkish spring roll at a brewery in Sydney's Marrickville.
"There's a dish called , which is made from lamb sweetbreads wrapped in intestines and cooked over charcoal," he says. "She put that into a spring roll over the weekend."
Does the Merivale chef have a theory as to why the spring roll is inspiring such diverse, border-crossing versions?
"That spring roll wrapper is a vessel for anything. It's like the jaffle movement or a sandwich. You can literally put anything into a spring roll, so why not?" he says. "The spring roll is the perfect snack size."
He thinks there's also the nostalgia factor: the appetiser has long been a fixture on Chinese restaurant menus. And it also appeals to all demographics.
"My kids, when they go out, they love spring rolls. Everyone loves spring rolls!" he says.
"If you don't like spring rolls, you're a psychopath!" Hong jokes.
In all their glory. Source: Camellia Ling Aebischer
Two years later, the made its debut at the Wagga Wagga Agriculture Show in NSW. Invented by Bendigo boilermaker Frank McEncroe, this iconic Aussie snack was inspired by , hence the name, even if the Chiko roll featured zero chicken (boned mutton, instead, was stuffed inside the deep-fried parcel, along with cabbage, celery and carrot). It went on to become a mainstay in takeaway shops and supermarket freezers, with 40 million piping-hot Chiko rolls consumed yearly when the fast food hit peak popularity in the 1970s (its cultural impact still lives on: there were news headlines when that, no, they represented the true home of the Chiko roll, actually).
Given its seven-decade reign, the Chiko roll might be the earliest 'multicultural remix' of the spring roll in Australia – but Hong isn't exactly a fan of it.
"It's like glue! It's not even food in my opinion," he says. "Chiko rolls are disgusting."
"It's the same size as a Chiko roll. You could get both at the local corner shop. I was in the school of the Marathon spring roll. I think it was more delicious than a Chiko roll," he says.
The Marathon spring roll was . His aunt, Fotini Proka, had done a short stint at a Chinese food business, and together with a family friend and Dardalis’s sister, they hand-folded spring rolls in a Melbourne garage in the company's early days in 1961. Dardalis tapped into his contacts and the spring rolls were sold at fish and chip shops owned by his Greek community. Keeping up with the momentum required for deliveries was like running a marathon – hence the name of the business.
Today, Marathon sells meat and "" vegan versions of its spring rolls and, given the founder's Greek origins, I wonder if one day we'd see an interpretation that reflects this (spanakopita spring rolls, perhaps)? If haloumi spring rolls can work, this could be a joyfully cheesy and crunchy success, too.
Although Hong wouldn't recommend, say, putting a Caesar salad into a spring roll (it'd end up pretty soggy, for instance), he thinks the format allows for a lot of flexibility.
Source: Randy Larcombe Photography
"I mean, the sweet ones are delicious, too," he says. "We've done Nutella and banana and stuff like that."
You could even put ice-cream in a spring roll – it just needs to be frozen hard enough to offset the deep-frying temperatures.
"It would be delicious," he says. "To be honest, I couldn't think of anything that shouldn't be in a spring roll."
