The food is what I grew up on.

I'm Muriel. I was fed this food before I could hold chopsticks. My mother, Jade, cooked it at home in Taiwan and then in Sydney, and twenty years on it is still what comes out of this kitchen, made the way she made it.

Here below is the long version of why.

From Grain to Blue Eye Dragon.

Our first place was called Grain: Tea, Rice and Noodles. Small room, plain fit-out, my mother's recipes on the menu because they were the only ones that mattered.

People found it and kept coming back, and when we outgrew the room we opened Blue Eye Dragon here at 37 Pyrmont Street in 2005.

The dishes came with us. So did most of the regulars. The name comes from the dragon on the gate, and the gate is the first thing most people remember.

Behind it there's a dining room lit mostly by candles, a stage room with a curtain that has heard a lot of speeches, and a courtyard under the sky.

Pyrmont has changed around us. The food hasn't. Years ago I put my beef noodle soup on the cover of a local paper with nothing but the line "the best kept secret in Pyrmont".

No name, no address.

People found it anyway. It's still on the menu, and I still like that line.

Three generations of Taiwanese cooks, one kitchen.

Native Taiwanese traditions, provincial Chinese technique and Japanese clarity: flavour, balance and freshness, dishes cooked for the table rather than the trend.

The dumplings are folded by hand every day, the way my mother taught me, and they are still the thing people write about twenty years in.

The beef noodle soup is hers. The sanbei three cup chicken, the slow-cooked pork belly, the chilli wontons, the XO sauce people ask to take home: all hers first, mine now.

Nothing on the menu is there simply because it photographs well. It's there because a family has been eating it for three generations and I like to think it's really good.

What we cook and why it tastes like this

People who cook for a living come here to eat, and sometimes to learn.

We’ve hosted and taught fellow chefs, such as Justine Schofield from MasterChef, and Kate Bracks, in years past.

We’re proud to have a regular diners, such as Stefano Manfredi found us back in the Grain days, followed us to Pyrmont and has been bringing his family in for twenty years.

I teach small cooking classes at the Miele Experience Centre in Bondi Junction, four people at a time, dumplings and the dishes people ask about most. For teams and private groups I can bring a dumpling class to you. Dates are on What's On.

I’ve published 3 cook books: Blue Eye Dragon: Taiwanese Cooking (2008), Wu-Gu (2015) and more recently, The Taiwanese Table (2026). Published by New Holland available at all good book shops and at our restaurant’s counter.