Hong Kong Indian restaurant owner on 33 years in the business, surviving Sars and the changing face of Wan Chai
JoJo Mess Club started out in a Wan Chai flat with policeman’s son Kuldip Uppal serving and his mother and brother cooking; he looks back on 18-hour days, the heyday of the US Navy in Wan Chai and JoJo’s changing customer mix
When Kuldip Uppal and his older brother Sukwinder were growing up in Jalandhar, in India’s Punjab state, they knew very little about Hong Kong. Their only window on the then British colony was the presents their father, Tarsem Uppal, brought back for them when he worked for the police force on Stonecutters Island.
The two brothers came to Hong Kong in 1982 and started working in an office by day and part-time in the evenings. Three years later the family opened a restaurant, JoJo Mess Club, in a small flat in Lee Tung Street, Wan Chai. It was a members-only operation initially.
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“My brother and mother cooked in the kitchen and I was the server,” Kuldip recalls. They hardly had any media attention until a magazine called TV Times that had television listings, movie reviews and restaurants, published an article about JoJo Mess Club in 1986, a year after they opened.
“They came in and interviewed my father and brother and we didn’t know when the story was published. Suddenly a flood of people came in and the restaurant was full,” Kuldip recalls.
“That evening my family had a meeting discussing how we were going to prepare enough food for the next day,” he says. “By the third week we hired two more people and every night my brother and I worked until 2am and we were back at the restaurant at 8am.”