What a viewIn Kwoklyn’s Chinese Takeaway Kitchen, the chef shows how to make takeout-style dishes at home
- Chef Kwoklyn Wan spent his youth working in his family’s Chinese restaurant in Leicester
- The popularity of his YouTube ‘cook-alongs’ has secured him a show on Amazon Prime
DIY television: one of lockdown’s finest boredom-busters. Practical, too, in times of restricted restaurant opening hours, particularly in the hands of affable British-born Chinese chef Kwoklyn Wan, a big-hearted big bloke and wok-wielder to the weary and isolated.
Cooking from his suburban Leicester home – in his kitchen, overlooked by neighbours’ houses, or his makeshift garage studio – Wan is on a mission to recreate, for Chinese takeaway aficionados, exactly what it says on the tin, or in this case, the styrofoam container.
Hailing from the New Territories border village of Tam Shui Hang, the Wan family moved to Britain in the 1950s, grandfather Wan opening Leicester’s first Chinese restaurant in 1962. Other establishments followed, with Kwoklyn spending much of his youth in their kitchens.
Today his calling is to show TV viewers how to make not just authentic Chinese dishes, but Chinese takeaway standards – king prawn chow mein, tofu and black bean sauce, even the simplest fried-rice fare – as prepared on the high street. Or as they would be, if restaurants around the world were operating normally.
Now, Wan’s nostalgia for what we took for granted, which has suddenly become unobtainable, has elevated him and his “cook-alongs” from a YouTube word-of-mouth hit to a bona fide Amazon Prime series: Kwoklyn’s Chinese Takeaway Kitchen.
Naturally, a couple of recipe books accompany the production; and if that constitutes a cash-in, then more power to Wan’s spatula.