Dan Hong has helped change the way this city eats out.
He's the executive chef of Mr Wong's and Ms G's and he's reinvented Asian flavours with his own very special spin.
Now he's putting home cooks of Australia to the test as one of the hosts of the brand new SBS series The Chef's Line.
But before the awards and the TV shows, it all started with a great sandwich, his mum and a big ol' bag of weed.
"Food is my life," says Hong. "I always grew up around food, I grew up around restaurants."
"My mum was one of the first Vietnamese interpreters in Sydney and my dad was an electrical engineer.
Source: Supplied
"Basically my dad just called my mum and went 'look, I bought a restaurant' and my mum was like 'what?'
"Obviously as owners they kept going there, eating there. And my mum was just really not satisfied with the quality, the standard of the food.
"So she actually got into the kitchen herself and changed everything and made Vietnamese food her style."
The key, Hong says, was using better produce and fresher herbs. A lot of her specialities ended up in Hong's school lunches including banh mi's.
His route to ending up in the food industry, like his parents, was an unconventional one and all started when Hong began failing high school.
Source: Supplied
"My mum's like 'look what are you going to do? You've got to get a job, what do you want to do?'
"And I was like I dunno ... and she was like 'why don't you become a chef? You're always cooking at home'.
"I just thought okay, I'll give a go then. I was always getting left to my own devices using whatever was in the fridge and cooking stuff.
"It went from there ... my passion for cooking developed when I started cooking."
Hong's mum got him his initial job as a first year apprentice and now, he's one of the most renowned young chefs in the world having won the Pignolet Best Young Chef Award at the 2008 SMH Good Food Guide Awards.
"Being in a fine dining kitchen is like being in an army," he says.
