Jian Wang, 54, restaurant owner
Before I fell in love with food, I played the violin. I grew up in the northeast of China, in Changchun, Jilin province, and graduated from university after four years of studying music, then went on to teach violin but I always wanted to work with food.
My parents worked for the government, my sister is a doctor and my two brothers have their own businesses, I’m the youngest. I was only about 12 when I started cooking for my family – it’s in the blood: my mother was a good cook, and my grandmother. I was always asking them how they made different dishes.
I was 37 when I came to the UK in 1997. I made some money in China with an advertising company and wanted to put it to good use: to invest in my 12-year-old son Yin’s education. I remember I was asked to choose what city I wanted to go to in the UK and because Edinburgh University was famous for penicillin I recognised the name and said I wanted to go to Edinburgh.
When I arrived and went to a Chinese supermarket I couldn’t find any dumplings. That’s when I got the idea to make and sell my own, it was the beginning of a long, hard journey for the next six years. I cried every day – it was difficult setting up a business when nobody knew me, my English wasn’t good and I was really homesick. By the time my money ran out it was a real struggle but I had to go on. It isn’t in my character to give up.
I started making dumplings at first in my kitchen at home. I made a connection with Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce and got a contact with a community of Chinese women in Glasgow. I filled two big ice buckets with dumplings and brought them to Glasgow and sold them to the women’s group. After that I started coming regularly, they loved the dumplings and that encouraged me.
In time I moved to a small industrial unit, and now have a factory in Edinburgh. It was very difficult at the start but I didn’t think about it, I just got on with it. At the back of my mind I always wanted to open my own restaurant, and when restaurants asked me to sell them dumplings I always refused. Over the years I built up the business and supplied more than 50 Chinese supermarkets across the country.
I wanted to promote myself, so nine years ago I opened the first Chop Chop restaurant in Edinburgh and it grew very quickly. Chop Chop made it to the final a few years ago in Gordon Ramsay's search for the UK's best local restaurant in television’s The F-Word.
I always remember when people came in at first they asked for chicken curry and chips. I felt quite nervous, I didn’t know what a curry was, and then I realised every Chinese restaurant here sold curry.
I would say to people, ‘What you want to order we don’t have, so eat whatever you want, if you don’t like it you don’t need to pay.’ Even now, I still do that. It people don’t like the food I don’t charge.
The Glasgow restaurant opened earlier this year and I don’t do so much of the cooking now but I am always in the kitchen, checking the food. If something is not right I notice it straight away. Even if the cooking smell is not right, I can tell something is wrong.
I met my husband Roy King in 2000, he was a business consultant and someone recommended him to me to get advice. We have an 11-year-old daughter Sophia and my son Yin is now 30 and has two daughters of his own. He is the general manager.
We are looking all over the UK for new restaurants to open. There are many chains of restaurants across the country but none of them are Chinese.
Visit www.chop-chop.co.uk
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