Donegal chef Kwanghi Chan: ‘As a Chinese guy leading a young team in a Michelin-starred restaurant, you couldn’t show any weakness’
The Michelin-trained chef, who moved to Ireland at the age of 8, talks about being bullied as a child, reconnecting with his estranged mother and his first trip back to Hong Kong
At noon on a crisp autumn day, Kwanghi Chan is sitting at a corner table in his smart Bites restaurant in Dublin’s Capital Dock, watching the comings and goings. It’s starting to fill up with lunchtime customers but, while he says there are plenty of customers, in common with every other restaurant owner in the country, he’s dealing with the ongoing issues of increased ingredient and energy costs. He is worried about what’s going to happen over the winter, “when the heating really goes on”.
“It’s a constant balancing act, managing bills and cash flow,” says Kwanghi. “There’s only so much we can charge for a plate of food, so right now, it’s survival of the fittest, and those who can hold their heads above water will survive.”
If you’ve ever watched Kwanghi knock out a recipe on The Six O’Clock Show, eaten in one of his restaurants, rooted for him on RTÉ’s Battle of the Food Trucks, or picked up a tub of his ChanChan Spice Bag Seasoning in the supermarket, you’ll know the Hong Kong-born chef with the Donegal accent is a man of many talents.
Now, with the publication of Wok by Blasta Books, Kwanghi can add ‘cookbook author’ to his CV. The first Irish-Chinese cookbook ever published, Wok is a collection of accessible recipes, including some of the most popular from the telly (the lemon chicken is in there) and some he cooks at home with his family, with a few more challenging dishes thrown in for good measure.
Kwanghi Chan with his aunt Katherine and granny as a child
These days, Kwanghi says he’s more a businessman than he is a chef, and the sleek surroundings of Capital Dock could not be further — in every sense — from his uncle Sam’s Wing Tai House Chinese takeaway on the Main Street in Buncrana, Donegal, where Kwanghi first learned to cook. Sam named the restaurant after the apartment building in Hong Kong where his family had lived and Kwanghi spent some of his early years.
An acrimonious divorce saw eight-year-old Kwanghi, who spoke no English, sent to Donegal to live with his father’s brother Sam, his wife Mura, and their two children.
“My mother left and remarried, and my father was supposed to take care of me, but he couldn’t, so he sent me to his brother, Sam, who had emigrated young from Hong Kong and worked as a chef in Chinese restaurants in Belfast, before marrying my auntie Mura, a local woman, and opening his own place in Buncrana.”
In the late 1980s, the Chans were the only Chinese family in the town. “I went to the local school and was bullied,” remembers Kwanghi. “On the first day, I was spat on in the playground during the morning break, surrounded by the hard guys. It was tough but you learn to fight back after a while, and then in secondary school I went to karate classes …
“The bullying never really stopped because I was always the only Chinese — there were no other Asians. That was the reality back then in a farmer town in the middle of Donegal. I didn’t hang around with the cool kids and was quite lonely at times, so I put my head down and worked all the time. I was in the restaurant a lot.”
One of Kwanghi’s jobs was to learn how to peel the tiger prawns, which came in frozen with the heads still on. “We’d use the heads to make soups for our own staff dinners,” he writes in the introduction to Wok. “Those were always the tastiest meals, the ones made with ingredients and offcuts that Irish people wouldn’t eat …”
Sam taught Kwanghi to make the Peking duck so the skin puffed up just so, and to marinate the pork fillets and necks for char siu in ginger and garlic for 24 hours. By the age of 13, Kwanghi was able to cook all the dishes on the menu and oversee the running of the restaurant if his uncle needed to take time off.
Wing Tai House Chinese Restaurant in Buncrana, Co Donegal, in the early 1990s.
There was an expectation that Kwanghi, who says he wasn’t very good at school, would go into the restaurant trade. “My grandad, who has passed away now, always expected me to go into the business because there was nothing else they thought would suit me career-wise. I suppose that’s typical of an immigrant family. I was good at art in school and, for a while, wanted to go to art college in Derry, but then I heard a friend saying he was going to do a chef’s course. I didn’t know until then you could train as a chef. Killybegs was the closest catering college. I applied for that and got in.”
Kwanghi found himself in college with well-known chefs Gary O’Hanlon (of The Restaurant fame) and Gearóid Lynch (of The Olde Post Inn in Cavan), learning classical French recipes and techniques, and getting to grips with the brigade system. He put his Chinese food heritage to one side. A successful placement at Wineport Lodge led to Kwanghi working there for several years after college. There were other fine-dining stints with Derry Clarke at L’Ecrivain and Ross Lewis at Chapter One, as well as at Peacock Alley and The Commons.
“There was a lot of moving around,” he says. “At the time, because I was never adopted properly, I was working through my immigration stuff. I wasn’t an Irish citizen, but because I was over 18, I was considered an adult and on my own. I had to beg employers for the stamps and sort all that stuff out myself. For six or seven years, I had to go to the garda station each time looking for a stamp so I could stay. I was not a free agent; I was basically on my own.”
“Hard work was my exit from reality,” he writes in Wok. “It has been ever since I was a kid. Growing up in a small town where I was the odd one out, I got bullied and called names for being Chinese. Maybe that’s why I liked kitchens. They were somewhere for me to hide and not think, because when you’re in a kitchen, you don’t have time to think about anything. You don’t daydream, you just work.”
It was tough. I was working 16 hours a day and didn’t get to see my wife and toddler daughter very much
Eventually, Kwanghi accumulated enough stamps to apply for naturalisation. “Now they do it in big groups, but back then I had to go to court and swear on the Bible. Once I was free to stay, I was really happy. Until then, I just kept my head down and worked. I never really thought much about how I ended up here, and I didn’t want to think about what I would do if I got kicked out and sent back to Hong Kong, because I didn’t know anybody there.”
While he was working at CityWest Hotel, he met Michelle O’Doineannaigh, now his partner. They moved to Donegal, and it was while working at the Ballyliffin Lodge and Spa in Donegal that he got a call from Martijn Kajuiter, asking him if he’d take on the position of head chef at House, the Michelin-starred restaurant at The Cliff House Hotel in Ardmore.
“I learned a lot there,” he writes in Wok, “and it was a good team, but it was tough. You couldn’t show any weakness or you would get eaten up by the team, especially as a Chinese guy leading a young team in a Michelin-starred restaurant. You just had to put your game face on every day. I was working 16 hours a day and didn’t get to see my wife and toddler daughter very much.”
Meanwhile, Michelle embarked on a mission to reconnect him with his mother. “I don’t speak to my dad any more but Michelle got in touch with him via Facebook and asked him how to find my mother. Once we started having kids, Michelle wanted to know more about our family history, in case of hereditary illnesses. My father said maybe we could find my mother through one of her sisters, who has a restaurant in Belgium, so Michelle contacted a few restaurants in Antwerp asking if they knew anyone with my mother’s name, and one of them came back and said, ‘We know her, why do you want to know?’
“Michelle was in touch with my mother before she told me. She sat me down one night and said, ‘I’ve found your mother. Do you want to be in contact with her?’ I didn’t know what I wanted to do. It stewed in my head for a while. I wasn’t in the right place to do anything about it for a few years.”
In 2016, he visited Hong Kong for the first time since childhood. Surrounded by other Chinese people in the busy Business District, he says he felt normal for the first time in his life — because everyone looked the same, and he didn’t stand out as he did in Ireland.
Kwanghi in Hong Kong after reuniting with his mother's side of the family, including cousins, his auntie and his grandmother.
“It was a very emotional trip,” he recalls, “the start of rebuilding relationships with that side of my family. My mother had remarried and I had a younger half-brother and sister I’d never met before. My mother is from a big family of eight brothers and sisters — there are 43 of them including cousins, and some of them live in Belgium. We had a family reunion and some of my older cousins remembered me from when I was younger. They called me ‘The Lost Child’. It’s a real [Long] Lost Family moment … Have you seen that show? It’s fine now, we’re all getting older and my head is in the right place; if I’d found out when I was younger, I may not have been able to cope, but because I was more mature, I could take it, I could forgive. It took a lot of counselling to get me to that point, to see that side of it.”
In Dublin, the schools Kwanghi’s children attend are “quite mixed” he says, so nine-year-old Lily and three-year-old Alex don’t have to deal with the racism their father experienced in Donegal in the 1980s, and they stay in touch with their Chinese food heritage by going for dim sum as a family at either Good World or Ka Shing at the weekends. The children call Sam and Mura granny and grandad, and the family visit Donegal often.
An ambassadorship with Bord Bia, promoting Irish food, gave Kwanghi an opportunity to return to Hong Kong again and, since then, Kwanghi, Michelle, Lily and Alex have returned several times, and they are planning another trip in January. Alex is excited about going to Disneyland while Kwanghi will be looking forward to eating great food, of which there’s no shortage in Hong Kong.
“I love fine dining, I love the whole experience. That’s my background. I appreciate the finesse. I also love sitting on a plastic chair eating street food: fried crab with garlic crumbs, sucking shells, digging into a bowl of noodles at midnight with the hustle and bustle all around you. In Hong Kong, you can get really good food at the highest level and the lowest level. When I’m there, I am always seeking out new flavour profiles I can bring home to Ireland and replicate in dishes here. It’s a way of reconnecting with my roots. I never really had the opportunity to go back and revisit my culture before because I was never really proud of cooking Chinese food — it wasn’t ‘in’ at the time and people looked at it as cheap food.”
While Kwanghi is enjoying being a hands-on entrepreneur — he has a bookkeeper but handles all the social media for his two restaurants, his food truck and his retail business himself — he says he’s missing cooking.
“If I ever manage to get away from this in a good way financially, and I can support the family and have a bit extra, I’d love to have a little 12-seater restaurant and do a lunch and an evening sitting. I’d bring in just enough to pay the staff and myself, I’d be quite happy with that. I’d go back to the high-end stuff, and use Asian flavours in fine dining. I like the idea of going to the market every day, making up the menu as we go along. It would be very free, very relaxed. I think I’d be happy.”
‘Wok’ by Kwanghi Chan, €15, is published by Blasta Books, blastabooks.com
