It's Canberra's first Chinese restaurant, but how did Happy's Chinese Restaurant get its start?
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00:00Tell me a little bit about how Happies came to be.
00:05My grandfather was a vegetable farmer when they first, when he first migrated to
00:09Australia actually and he hated it and I think at the end he decided to move to
00:14Canberra of all places, he just didn't like Sydney either and just started a Chinese
00:19restaurant, used a lot of recipes that my grandmother gave him and then obviously
00:22with the lack of available fresh ingredients just made do of what
00:28Australia had at the time and yeah we've just kept going I suppose.
00:34And Canberra was such a different place back then. Totally different, I remember when I was a kid
00:38he was telling me that he was pretty much the only Asian guy let alone Chinese
00:44guy and then I think slowly they started, obviously we needed staff as well so
00:48they started trickling down to Canberra as a bit of a different place, get away
00:52from Sydney and a lot of the guys that sort of learned their trade with my
00:58grandfather at this restaurant lived with him as well because they did you
01:01know obviously find a combination all that so a lot of them stayed together
01:04they entertained each other because you know they didn't speak English very well
01:08and they did their stuff like mahjong and gambling and smoking and drinking so yeah.