The wonton noodle soup at this BYO Chinese takeaway has been recognised by the UN

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Soup is soup, but such is food’s power that a single dish can bridge generations, build community and take you back to a specific moment in time, the memory so close you can almost touch it.

At Canton Noodle House, the food lives and breathes. Look at the shrine of clippings and pictures on the wall, which features a framed certificate from the UN-backed Asia-Pacific Council for International Intangible Cultural Heritage, recognising owner and chef Annie So for her wonton dumpling and flank beef noodle-making technique.

Roll it back. Think about how the taste of a fruit tart can bring up your first visit to the local bakery as a four-year-old, or how the scent of a granita biscuit can drop you in your grandparents’ kitchen. These are personal, but the certification acknowledges this experience moving from the individual to something more universal; So’s noodle soup doesn’t just taste like home to you: it tastes that way to many.

What’s powerful about food, though, is that even though its meaning may be intangible, its form is not: just go to Riverwood and order it. Minutes later, it will land on the table. Egg noodles nestle in the bottom, steam rises. You pick out a dumpling and the slipperiness of the wrapper gives way to the sweetness of hand-cut pork mince and the crunch of fresh prawn. You sip the sweet, clear stock, then move to the brisket, which collapses at first bite, all heft and juice and satisfying chew.

For you, maybe it’s just a great soup. Or maybe you first ate it in Hurstville, in 1994, at the original Canton Noodle House restaurant (still the same menu, just different owners), when you were new in town and it brought you comfort. Maybe, years later, you brought your kids, and maybe they’re here in Riverwood now, grown up, lost in time and memories.

For So, the story of the dish is in the faded photographs on the wall. In how her father, Chio Kuan Sun, moved his family from Macau in the 1980s, opened a stall in Dixon House Food Court, then backed So and her husband, Chin Pang So, to launch their first restaurant. Burwood followed Hurstville, before Riverwood opened in 2015.

Do not for a second think that everyone here is having a transcendental soup experience. This isn’t a temple: chairs are scuffed and stacked by the entranceway, tables are chipped. A screen in the corner incessantly beams out daytime TV. But it’s lived-in and efficient, waiters rushing you through the menu, families and groups of wizened uncles occupying the larger tables, drinking tea and spinning live lobster and salt-and pepper pork ribs on the lazy Susan.

The menu is proper 𝄒90s suburban, which means it offers almost everything, alongside even more specials hidden around the room, like they took inspiration from Mr Bean disappearing a steak tartare – here’s one behind a sightscreen, there’s another under your teapot.

The sheer volume means there are misses: “pipis” in a watery XO sauce that turn out to be clams; mango pudding that tastes artificial. But then fan favourites have merits, such as salt-and-pepper calamari that’s gorgeously pale and dry.

On my next visit, I swap them for whitebait, having found Hurstville’s version impossibly crisp and addictively seasoned, but Riverwood’s falls short. Stick to calamari, try the pork version, or try it again another day, then add the Shandong chicken, partly boned out, golden-skinned and juicy, the flesh soaking up a sweet-sour vinegar dressing fragrant with garlic. Eat it over steamed rice, presented in a retro-chic plastic tub to dole out among the table.

First Canton Noodle experience? Hurstville has the vibe right, but then Riverwood has Annie So. You might find yourself here one quiet night. Order her prawn dumplings, a bowl of soup, the dry noodles with flank beef, and in just a few bites, feel the abstract and the real – the intangible and the tangible, the past and the present – collide in full colour.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.

This review was originally published in Good Weekend magazine