Josiah Li doesn't like to get too attached to things.
He's a seasoned restaurateur who changed the face of Canberra's fine dining scene in the 1980s, and has one of Canberra's longest-running restaurants.
But he's opened and closed many other places, and moves house every four years.
"I love designing, all my restaurants' designs, and my house designs, are mine, and I only move to a house where they allow me to redesign the whole thing," he says.
In fact, he tells us, sitting in his bright new space at East Traders Hall, he moved house again this very week - to a place right around the corner.
We're at a sunny table in the screened-in "outdoor" section of WORLD, the newest addition to Canberra's constantly evolving food scene. Just a few blocks away from another of Li's restaurants, Lanterne Rooms, this new one's name - in all caps - speaks for itself.
The small, intriguing menu includes oatmilk ramen, buckwheat galette, Reuben and Caesar banh mi, Tom Yum pasta, curry Tsukemen and Galbi steak and frites.
"It includes everything in many senses," Li says.
"The cuisine itself, you can see from the menu. We have Spanish garlic prawns, we have carbonara, and we have ramen, and then we have Thai, and we have banh mi and then Italian salad."
Just don't call it fusion, he says. He prefers to call it "deconstruction".
"We don't add Western things - we deconstruct the Chinese way of cooking, and then we employ different techniques, whether it's Spanish or French," he says.
To run the restaurant, he has brought together managers from the various restaurants he still owns in Canberra - Chairman and Yip in Barton, Lanterne Rooms in Campbell, cocktail bar Cicada Room and Japanese restaurant Mu Omakase, both in Civic.
It's a way of passing on the baton, and reminds him, he says, of his early days in Canberra as a student, finding ingredients and cooking meals with a group of friends, and scraping together enough money to open their own restaurant.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, he had seen little of the world when he made the decision to come to Canberra to study in 1981, as an 18 year old. He already had a place at the London School of Economics, and his older brother was studying in Cambridge. But he opted to set out on his own, and when he looked at the printed prospectus for Australian National University, he saw avenues of autumn leaves photographed from the top of Mount Ainslie.
He says moving overseas to study was a given for people of his class in Hong Kong, but it was never going to be easy. University was still free back then in Australia, but his mother gave him just $500, and he knew he would need to find work the day after he arrived.
His first job - after trying the almost inedible food in the uni halls - was at the Safari Room in Civic, a Greek milk bar that sold cheese and tomato toasted fingers, and milkshakes in tall aluminium cups.
He remembers the owner regularly giving milkshakes to a homeless man, something he'd never seen done in Hong Kong.
"Canberra gave me a lot - it opened my eyes," he says.
"I'm a Hong Konger - busy city, but very close. It's a small place, so we have a small-place syndrome, and we always think we are the best."
But when he came to Canberra, the ultimate small town with small-town syndrome, he discovered new levels of greatness, from the crisp air to the athletic country kids sharing the same student accommodation.
He remembers seeing "a guy from Orange" racing barefoot down the corridor of John XXIII College, easily breaking the 100-metre-sprint record he thought was held by a Hong Konger.
"Right away, the world was bigger than I thought," he says.
Today, aged 63, with Oreo, one of his three French bulldogs, at his feet, he can see his own legacy spread out before him - more than a dozen eateries, five still open.
He opened his first restaurant, Window on the Orient in Belconnen's Swanson Plaza, with his good friend Danny Yip, while he was still studying at ANU. It was the start of an odyssey that's still going.
Over the next 30 years they opened, among others, China Tea Club in North Lyneham in 1987, Madam Yip in Dickson in 1990, Cape Cod in Deakin in 2004, Phat Duck Takeaway in the Petrie Plaza in Civic in 2005, Malamy in 2012 and Lilotang in 2014, both in Barton.
And these are the ones that have been and gone, and he has no regrets about any of them.
"I'm old enough not to get attached," he says, although he admits it can be hard for local restaurants to stay afloat while large Sydney conglomerates circle the scene, testing the waters.
"I welcome them - that means there are people with funding coming in, and I think it's healthy for the industry," he says, even though some have left in a hurry.
"I think maybe they don't understand Canberra people. Canberra people are very smart diners.
"My partner, Yip, said doing a restaurant in Canberra, if you are successful, you can do a restaurant anywhere in the world."
And while he knows all too well how hard it is to run a restaurant, he says the key is never to sit still.
A "dish pig" at heart, he often finds himself washing dishes when staff are sick, and insists that cleaning a shopping centre would be a dream job. Maybe when he retires.
Around us, the lunchtime crowd is filling up the new and beautiful space, and Li presses a Mont Blanc iced coffee into my hands - a chilled espresso topped with citrus-infused cream.
It's delicious, and the last thing I expected from the purveyor of some of Canberra's most expensive Chinese banquets.
But that's the thing about Josiah Li - he's a stayer who never stops moving.
