{"id":69,"date":"2007-07-05T02:46:16","date_gmt":"2007-07-05T07:46:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/2007\/07\/05\/there-are-no-pennies-in-australia-and-other-notes-from-the-chinese-restaurant-frontier\/"},"modified":"2007-07-10T21:52:37","modified_gmt":"2007-07-11T02:52:37","slug":"there-are-no-pennies-in-australia-and-other-notes-from-the-chinese-restaurant-frontier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/05\/there-are-no-pennies-in-australia-and-other-notes-from-the-chinese-restaurant-frontier\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia is (literally) a penniless society and other notes from the Chinese restaurant frontier"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Australians eliminated their penny in 1991 &#8212; without too much of a fuss, so all cash transactions are rounded to the nearest five cents. Some Australians feel that Americans <a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2006\/06\/01\/news\/newsmakers\/penny\/index.htm\" title=\"CNN article on eliminating the penny\">shouldn&#8217;t give  up the penny without a fight<\/a> (and indeed Americans for Common Cents seems to be holding the torch there). Other thoughts. Southern hemisphere, so seasons are flipped. It&#8217;s July but nights are long, days are cold, and there are no holiday festivities in sight.  It feels like <a href=\"http:\/\/books.narnia.com\/\" title=\"Narnia world\">Narnia<\/a>: winter without Christmas.<\/p>\n<p>Why journey to Australia? Because it turns out that three of the most notable Chinese restaurants in the world are in Australia:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/gnt\/profiles\/Transcripts\/s1242188.htm\" title=\"Billy Kwong\">Billy Kwong <\/a>in Sydney, Kylie Kwong&#8217;s Chinese restaurant of modest size but large reputation. It&#8217;s the only Chinese restaurant to make it R.W. Apple&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/10\/05\/travel\/05applepics.html?ex=1317700800&amp;en=fbda4d2c568be2cf&amp;ei=5090&amp;partner=rssuserland&amp;emc=rss\" title=\"R.W. Apple's global gourmet list of 10 restaurants around the world worth getting on a plane for\">posthumously published list of 10 restaurants around the world<\/a> worth getting on a plane for.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.yourrestaurants.com.au\/guide\/?action=venue&amp;venue_url=flower_drum\" title=\"Flower Drum\">Flower Drum<\/a> in Melbourne, which has made it to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.restaurantmagazine.co.uk\/\" title=\"Restarant Magazine\">Restaurant Magazine&#8217;s<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theworlds50best.com\/\" title=\"World's 50 Best Restaurants\">world&#8217;s 50 top restaurants<\/a> four times since the list was first published in 2002 (2002-2005). R. W. Apple did a <a href=\"http:\/\/query.nytimes.com\/gst\/fullpage.html?sec=travel&amp;res=9900E7DD1E3FF937A15751C1A9659C8B63\" title=\"R.W. Apple's write-up of Flower Drum in The New York Times, 2003\">write-up<\/a> in The New York Times in 2003.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lilis.net.au\/\" title=\"Lili's Chinese Restaurant\">Lilis<\/a>  in Melbourne. Lilis, located in a semi-industrial street full of garages,  is the least glamorous of the three, but comes has an imperial pedigree. Lili&#8217;s great-grandfather was a minister of household affairs for the Empress Dowager. After her death he retired, but he kept the recipes that were later passed down through the generations of his family. Lili&#8217;s is one of three restaurants around the world (the other two are in Beijing and Tokyo) which are owned and operated by members of their family.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Australians eliminated their penny in 1991 &#8212; without too much of a fuss, so all cash transactions are rounded to the nearest five cents. Some Australians feel that Americans shouldn&#8217;t give up the penny without a fight (and indeed Americans for Common Cents seems to be holding the torch there). Other thoughts. Southern hemisphere, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,29,8,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-chinese","category-chinese-food","category-chinese-restaurants"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2pydS-17","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}