Taste testing Jennifer Wong’s Sweet & Sour Hour Of Power

Comedian and food enthusiast Jennifer Wong is bringing her new show The Sweet & Sour Hour of Power to Perth Comedy Festival this year, hitting The Rechabite on Friday, May 10, with tickets on sale now. Following TV appearances on Chopsticks or Fork? (ABC), The Cook Up (SBS), and Celebrity Letters and Numbers (SBS), Wong road-tests the latest fitness and wellbeing trends so that you don’t have to. BRAYDEN EDWARDS caught up with Jennifer Wong to get a taste for the show.

It’s great to have you coming to Perth Comedy Festival with your show, The Sweet and Sour Hour of Power. Just to whet our appetite a little, what’s something sweet about the show and something sour?

Something sweet about the show is that in the live punning section, I ask the audience to name something sweet so that I can make puns with it. One night someone said tiramisu, a dessert I don’t know much about because I have an egg allergy. So the audience began calling out all the ingredients in a tiramisu. It quickly changed from being a comedy show to a cooking lesson.

When I think of a sour moment from the show, the first thing that comes to mind is that in Melbourne, when I asked the audience to call out a health or wellbeing trend for me to make puns with, after a long pause someone said, “Lemon water!” She said it with such ZEST!

Some of us will recognise you from the ABC series Chopsticks or Fork? where you travelled all over Australia, visiting Chinese restaurants. What were some of the main differences you noticed when travelling between the states? And was there anywhere you particularly enjoyed?

When it comes to Chinese restaurants, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how one in Queensland might be different from one in Victoria, but you can definitely see some differences when it comes to the ingredients they use, like seafood.

Like at Oriental Palace in Hervey Bay (QLD), they give you so many prawns in their laksas because seafood is easy for them to access. And at Raymond’s at Malua Bay (NSW), if you rock up with a fresh lobster that you’ve bought at nearby Narooma, Raymond will cook it up for you with ginger, garlic and spring onions.

After we finished the series, we visited a few more restaurants to feature in Chopsticks or Fork? The Book (published by Hardie Grant on September 3, 2024), and one of those restaurants was Dunsborough Chinese in WA. Such a unique restaurant: it’s attached to a Shell service station, and is minutes away from some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. They do an excellent salt and pepper pork, Singapore fried noodles, and satay vegetables, if you’re ever in the area!

This show sheds light on fitness and wellbeing trends, which constantly seem to be coming and going. In your research for this show, what were some of the most bizarre, or amusing, fitness or wellbeing trends that you’ve come across?

I don’t talk about this in the show, but I recently learned that there is a group class called Aqua Sculpt, where you do yoga and pilates-type exercises, but instead of doing them on land, where we belong, you do them on a floating mat in the middle of a community swimming pool. As someone who doesn’t swim or do yoga very well, this whole idea makes me very anxious. Also, from a business perspective, it makes me wonder: Is it hard to stay…afloat?

And is there anything you’re looking forward to doing in WA that may one day become the subject of your show? 

One day, I would love to go to Broome to see the staircase to the moon. I saw a photo of this 20-something years ago, and I’ve never forgotten the image of the full moon and the moonlight reflecting on the water. If it was going to be the subject of a show, maybe I would call it “Reflections on the Moon-ing of Life”…we’ll see!

Jennifer Wong’s The Sweet & Sour Hour of Power hits The Rechabite on Friday, May 10 for Perth Comedy Festival 2024. Get special discounted tickets for $25 if you book via this link.