Canberra has mosquitoes to thank for its first Chinese restaurant

Mosquitoes. They’re annoying. And you’ll have learnt the factoid about how they’re the deadliest creature in the world, responsible for the most human deaths per year.

But they’re not all bad: they’re the reason Canberra scored its first Chinese restaurant.

Gavin Chan, owner of Happy’s Chinese Restaurant in Civic, told audiences at the Canberra Theatre Centre over the weekend that his grandfather left Queensland vegetable farms for one simple reason.

“Mosquitoes. He hated mosquitoes,” he said.

After trying Sydney, his grandfather came to Canberra in the late 1950s for a fresh start – making him one of the city’s earliest Chinese residents. In 1959, the family opened a restaurant in Queanbeyan, followed by one on Lonsdale Street.

But it was the current Happy’s, opened in 1962, that became the capital’s first Chinese restaurant and has endured for well over 60 years.

“This particular Happy’s restaurant has been here since 1962, as the first Chinese restaurant in Canberra,” Mr Chan told Region.

Chan was one of the stars of FEAST on Saturday, 28 February, a comedy show hosted by longtime family friend Jennifer Wong.

This Sydney-based comedian and writer published the book Chopsticks or Fork a few years ago, inspired by one of her visits to Happy’s when she was offered “Chopsticks or fork” by the waiter.

“She goes, ‘How ironic was that? Like, I’m the Asian one here, and you’re asking me if I want to use chopsticks or a fork,” Chan says.

“Jennifer and our family sort of go back a long way.”

A part of the show recalled how Happy’s got its name.

“My grandfather, he couldn’t speak English very fluently, and a lot of the time when he just didn’t understand things, he would just smile at people and laugh. And in the old Aussie way, people would say, ‘Hey, happy. You’re always happy, mate’. And that’s how the name came about.”

‘Happy’ retired in the early 1980s to focus on charity work with the Lions Club and died in 2005. Mr Chan took over in 2007.

“When you’re young, you don’t really get a chance – or have the intelligence – to go and speak to your grandparents,” he says.

“But when you think about all the stuff that he accomplished back in the 60s in a completely sort of different, alienated society, it’s quite remarkable.”

Perhaps the biggest challenge in those days, however, was sourcing Chinese ingredients.

“It was very hard to get ingredients at first. That was one of my grandfather’s biggest challenges,” Chan says.

Happiness spread quickly, though, because his grandfather also trained other Chinese cooks who later branched out and opened their own restaurants in Canberra and beyond, like in Cowra.

Much of the history was preserved in decades’ worth of photos, newspaper clippings and other memorabilia, including old ads from The Canberra Times. In the 1960s, for instance, Happy’s urged diners to “Try Happy’s … And Be Happy”, promising “first-class Chinese and Australian meals”, from spring rolls to fish and chips.

But much of this was lost in a house fire just days before Christmas in 2010.

“We had an electrical fire in the family home in Stirling on 21 December,” Mr Chan says.

“Lucky the smoke alarm saved us, but we lost everything in the living room, and the house was completely gone. We lost all our photos and all our little childhood things and a lot of the memorabilia from Happy’s.”

The family put out a call for customers to share their own pictures and memories, but many of their longtime diners weren’t active online.

“So we’re calling out again now to see what we can get,’ Mr Chan says.

He hopes people who celebrated birthdays, weddings and anniversaries at Happy’s will dig through old albums and upload images via the restaurant’s website.

Mr Chan, now coming up on 20 years at Happy’s – and busily training his daughter Jennifer Chan to take his place – says these moments are his favourites.

“Just the people I’ve watched grow up,” he says.

“You’ve got the sad part where you end up losing a lot of customers as well, and you find out they’ve passed … But no, it’s the customers who have supported us through thick and thin.”

In recent years, he’s also noticed a return to “old retro sort of Australian Chinese”.

“A lot of people have come back for that nostalgic feeling – the whole memory of going to your local Chinese as a child for your birthday. They’re bringing their kids down going, ‘Look, this is what we used to eat’.

“So we’ve been going back to the basics. You get to that age where you just think back to the old days, and I’ve got a lot of those customers at the moment.”

To upload your photos – or learn more about this iconic Canberra restaurant – visit Happy’s.

Original Article published by James Coleman on Region Canberra.