We opened Dumpling King in 1996 when about 80 per cent of other restaurants in the area were selling Cantonese and Shanghainese food. I think people were sick of sweet and sour chicken.

Dumplings are mainly from the northern parts of China. Traditionally, we celebrated Chinese New Year with dumplings at midnight; they were not for everyday eating.

In China, mums and grandparents always made dumplings, but only at festival time, on public holidays, maybe Sundays or special festival occasions. Now China is rich, you can eat them every day and for every meal, and that means dumplings are popular in every part of China. Although in the south part of China they would rather have yum cha.

Our dumpling pastry chefs come from China. We get them a visa, because they have the real skills. We put advertisements in newspapers and find pastry chefs from the northern parts like from the Silk Road region, a province called Gansu. They hold a four-year visa and sometimes get an extension for another four years. We train some local people too.

Who is the best person to do the job? First, they should have training in a hospitality job, second, they have to love eating dumplings and have a special talent for pastry cooking; not everybody can do it. I can wrap ordinary dumplings, but not ones requiring higher levels of skill.

We have more than 100 different kinds of dumplings. We have basic boiled dumplings, mini pork buns, steamed Shanghai dumplings. The base dough is made from wheat flour but we have different doughs; some use yeast, like steamed dumplings, some are pan fried. We also have vegetarian four-seasons dumplings, they are very colourful with each different colour representing the seasons.

We use less oil and more healthy stuff. For example, for our steamed pork dumplings, we have a very good supplier who supplies good quality minced pork. We have secret recipes for stuffing: Chinese cabbage, first [cooked] in water, then we chop it up, add some spice – something like five spice [powder].

We sell about 100,000 dumplings each year at our small factory next door. We have won more than 20 different trophies, and we win every year in the Asian Food Festival.

The interesting thing is 95 per cent of people who eat here are Aussies. Why? Sometimes Chinese people say they can wrap dumplings themselves.