It might give the appearance of being perfectly changeless, but for this landmark of Australian fine dining, evolution is constant and quiet innovation keeps it on top.

 
To the casual observer, Flower Drum is about as classical as it gets. The carpet is red, the tablecloths are white, the dining rooms divided by lacquered screens. Some of the waiters give the impression they might’ve been working the floor for all of the restaurant’s nearly 50 years in business.

Just ask Jason Lui, the GM. He hasn’t been around quite since the very beginning in 1975, not being quite yet born then, but he almost literally grew up in the restaurant. His father, Anthony Lui, moved to Australia from Hong Kong to join the kitchen, and bought it from founder Gilbert Lau in 2000, having never worked a day in another restaurant in this country. Jason has worked right across the business, as a busboy, at the bar, as a cashier, absorbing the lessons of a master maître d’ and restaurateur at Lau’s side, and his vision for Flower Drum is perfectly clear.
 
 

“We’re a traditional Cantonese restaurant working with the best Aussie produce we can find,” he says. “Our menu is quite broad; after 47 years you pick up a lot of things along the way, and we’ve still got regulars from 30 or even 40 years ago who still order the same thing, even if it’s not on the menu anymore. We still keep skewers in the kitchen in case someone comes in asking for satay.”

 
 
Glance at the written menu today and there’s everything you’d expect at the highest of high-end restaurants in Hong Kong: delicate dumplings in translucent gossamer wrappings, noodles dancing with the breath of the wok, soups of exceptional depth and clarity. You can have your rock lobster stir-fried with XO sauce and dried scallop, or whipped with egg whites and cream into an airy omelette. The Peking duck is one of Australia’s finest examples, served tableside on featherlight pancakes, and fried rice, crisp-skinned chicken and barbecue pork are all present and correct.

But there’s also a double-boiled soup made with wallaby tail and red dates – not something you see every day in Kowloon or Wanchai – and preserved egg wrapped in deeply savoury minced quail, like a Cantonese Scotch egg. The meat of the pearl oyster – not the usual eating family Ostreidae, but the Pinctada maxima used to culture pearls off the coast of Broome – is served on its shimmering shell, its dense, almost abalone-like flesh dressed with ginger and spring onion.
 
Zoom in on the red-meat situation and that quiet edge of innovation becomes even more apparent. While beef is prized as a special treat, Cantonese diners – southern Chinese diners in general, in fact – are traditionally not big eaters of lamb or mutton. Or, as Irene Kuo puts it rather more bluntly in her 1977 landmark The Key to Chinese Cooking, “beef is scarce in China and lamb is disliked by most Chinese because of its strong odor”.
 
At Flower Drum circa 2023, though, it’s a different story. Cantonese cooking is, after all, about bringing out the best qualities of the best ingredients to hand, and in Australia, that means fine lamb and beef. “It’d be silly not to use it,” says Jason. In the lamb department, Anthony Lui favours saltbush lamb, and works with Bultarra, the certified organic producer that runs White Dorpers in northern South Australia, grazing them on the saltbush and native grasses of the Flinders Ranges.
 

And then Jason throws another curve-ball. Flower Drum is famed for the breadth of its off-menu offering – most of the real regulars verbal their whole order without ever cracking the pages of the carte. But even so, learning that the Drum does a steak still comes as something of a shock. Will it be Black Angus eye fillet or Robbins Island wagyu porterhouse? “We do those with black pepper sauce or our Sichuan sauce,” Jason says. It’s more usual for these cuts to be sliced into strips before they’re cooked here, of course, as you would in any restaurant where chopsticks are the weapons of choice at the table, but the Drum also has guests who prefer it as a steak, and, this being a can-do sort of place, they’re always happy to serve them. “We’ve got seeded mustard here if you want it.”
 
So how does it work, this business of being both a timeless institution but at the same time constantly evolving?
 
 

“The techniques we use are still very traditional, they work for a reason,” Jason says, “but we have a bit of fun playing around with things and doing things differently with certain dishes. Even our spring onion cake we do with puff pastry rather than the usual pancake – you can’t just do the same thing all the time.”

 
 
Flower Drum is famed for the personal quality of its service. Jason Lui speaks fondly of Gilbert Lau’s total commitment to the job and his fastidious way of working, talking about him running his fingers under the chairs to check that they were clean all over, or drilling staff not just on the menu and the wine list but on the varieties of flowers arranged around the dining room.
 
“Above all it was him teaching us how to look after people, how to make them want to come back. Even if they’ve got to save for a year before they can come back, you overwhelm them with service and attention to detail, and the food is so wow – you make it so that they can’t not come back.”

As we enter the Year of the Rabbit, as the restaurant eases closer to its own 50th year, what does Jason want the wider world to know the Flower Drum is all about?
 
“I’d say don’t be afraid to have a chat with us,” he says. “The menu can be daunting for some people but it’s just a snapshot of what we can do for you. Tell us what you like, tell us what you don’t like, and let us do something for you. That’s when most of my guests have the most fun. Do something different. You’ve made the booking and waited two months to come in – let’s go all in.”