Malcolm Wood has opened 61 restaurants in his 26-year career. But for the longest time, he and business partners Xuan Mu and Matt Reid were hesitant to start a Chinese restaurant.
“We did all different types of Western cuisine first,” he says. “And historically that’s because we were based in Hong Kong and it was quite scary opening a Chinese restaurant in our backyard and competing with all the others.”
Their fear was unfounded. Mott 32, which the trio opened in the happening neighbourhood of Central 2014, has been a resounding success with locals and visitors alike. Wood puts that down to its unusual menu, which plays the biggest hits from Canton, Sichuan, Shanghai and Beijing, rather than just sticking to a single regional dish or cuisine as Hong Kong’s other Chinese restaurants do. These dishes are also filtered through a contemporary lens, rather than a traditional one.
“You’d never go to a restaurant that’s really good and busy that does all of the classic signatures [from multiple regions],” he says. “That was a big risk for us, sticking them all on one menu, doing it high-end and becoming famous for it.”
The restaurant’s 42-day applewood-smoked Peking duck is justifiably renowned. Likewise the mapo tofu, which swaps the usual pork mince with lightly fried lobster. Mott 32 has also set itself apart just with produce: the menu is padded with Kobe beef; Australian Wagyu; and char siu pork made from Iberico pigs, rather than traditional Chinese breeds.
Then there’s the dark, glamorous Joyce Wang interiors, which are filled with genuine antiques that recall 1940s Hong Kong. The name Mott 32 is a reference to the address of New York’s first Chinese grocery store, an intrepid business that germinated the city’s Chinatown in the late 1800s. The trio thought the reference was well suited to Hong Kong, a former British colony that’s been marked by waves of expatriation and repatriation.
As it turns out, this concept wasn’t just appealing in Hong Kong, but globally. Mott 32 restaurants now operate in Bangkok, Singapore, Seoul, Dubai, Cebu, Vancouver, Toronto, Las Vegas. Now it’s Melbourne’s turn, with a local spinoff to open at Crown Casino towards the end of this year, or possibly early 2027, again designed by Wang. It’s part of a $200 million investment from Crown to bring in 15 new restaurants and bars along the slightly tired Riverwalk.
“There’s only so many places we want a Mott 32. They’ve got to be transient, international, gateway-type cities,” Wood says, although his email signature touts 10 more locations opening soon, including Los Angeles.
“[The brand] does well for several different reasons,” he says. “Chinese cuisine, I always say, is lagging behind the Japanese boom by ten years. Japanese food went everywhere around the world – it went high-end with Nobu and Tetsuya and Zuma. You don’t have many players in the high-end, luxury Chinese space that present their food in this manner.”
Where the team curates the menu at some locations tightly, subtracting or altering dishes they feel won’t suit local palates, Wood says he expects Melbourne will get something very close to the mothership’s sprawling menu of dim sum, barbeque, noodles, rice and more.
“I’ve got Chinese family that live in Australia. I spent quite a lot of my childhood growing up on the Gold Coast,” he says. “I think there’s a very high level of Asian influence, you’re exposed to a very high level of Chinese cuisine across the board … [and] you’ve got an open-minded culture that likes to try different things and we don’t need to sweeten the dishes or remove the spice. I think you’ll accept the product the way it is.”
That said, it’s not remotely as simple as picking up Mott 32’s recipes and handing them to a team in Melbourne. While the menu includes the aforementioned local Wagyu plus South Australian lobsters and scallops, dozens of new suppliers will need to be found. And finding pork and poultry, to pick two examples, that behave the same as their Asian counterparts is so small feat.
“It’s a process,” Wood says. “I think when we went into North America, it took us 60 different duck farms before we found the right farm. But I think it’s really important that you don’t go somewhere, import all your products and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this the same way we did somewhere else’ and expect it to work and expect the community to buy into your brand.”
Mott 32 will open at Crown Casino in late 2026 or early 2027.