Scottish chef ‘steps back’ from restaurant amid first cookbook success and London move

This love of cooking and fusion of Scottish and Malaysian food led to her opening a food stall in Glasgow in 2016 with classic Malaysian dishes like Nasi Goreng and dishes with a twist: sesame prawn toast using a local delicacy – Scottish, thick-cut Mother’s Pride Bread. Lin called this “ making little lunch boxes for people. It was almost like the hawker style stalls that you get in Malaysia,” she explained, on the latest episode of our podcast Scran. “I really loved street food, so I started cooking at lots of festivals and things like that, lots of great music festivals in Glasgow. And then we ended up opening our first little restaurant.”

The little restaurant was Julie’s Kopitium, located on Pollokshaws Road in Glasgow’s southside. Lin called it “like a hole in the wall". I loved it”. The cosy restaurant, and the food being cooked in the postage stamp kitchen went hand in hand - and enveloped diners in a warm embrace of spicy flavours and unexpected combinations all eaten in what felt like your friends dining room. Picking up takeaways from there was something that helped me get through lockdown, such was the comfort of the soft coconut curries and jars of hot and spiced chilli oils.

Julie’s Kopitiam inevitably led on to bigger things, this time with the opening of Gaga in the city’s west end in 2021. Lin, in partnership with the team that, at that time, managed the nearby Thornwood bar. But now, she is starting a new chapter, quite literally, with the launch of her first cookbook, Sama Sama (which means same same or you’re welcome) and a move to London. This means taking a step back from Gaga, as Lin said: “ I am no longer a restaurateur and now becoming an author. It feels really good to be at this stage of having gone through lots of different styles of hospitality and food and learning about food to now have a little book that’s just been released.”

Lin said she’ll always have a toe in restaurants but with the book coming out, and more TV work on the horizon (you may recognise her from Saturday Kitchen on Somebody Feed Phil), she wants to take a step towards teaching, home cooking and presenting.

Lin added: “ I've grown up in Glasgow and I love it. I feel like a Glasgow girl through and through. As much as I don't live here anywhere. I live in London now, I still love Glasgow with all my heart, but it's been really nice to see my food journey happen through Glasgow.”

In Sama Sama, Lin showcases how food is central to culture and how it has, for her mum, broken down barriers, something she hopes we can take to heart in these more turbulent times. She said: “If I was to bump into you, I would say ‘hi, how are you? What have you been doing?’ But in Malaysia you would say, hi, have you eaten yet? Because you just start every conversation with food. So it seems to be that food is ingrained in every single part of our lives, even from the very beginning of you speaking to someone. And that's no different from how my mum taught me about foods and how we eat growing up, it was always very much a celebration of what we had in the house. My mum used it as a kind of social way of making friends when English wasn't her first language. I feel like food would've done a lot of that communicating for her.”

Lin added: “With everything that's going on in the world right now, there's so many amazing parts about living in the UK and food is so diverse here. You get so many different countries selling food and that is such a privilege. We've had people that moved here to create lives. Food doesn't resolve everything, but it certainly helps us speak about all of the things that are happening in the world because it's essentially political in itself. For me, I think we need to celebrate within Scotland and the UK all of the amazing kind of food that we've got.”

This fusion of cultures in food is what you might call modern fusion, but forget any kind of perception you have of fusion dishes from the past. Lin said: “I think that fusion food got a really bad rep in the nineties and noughties, and I think primarily from fancy chefs who didn't quite know what to do with all of these ingredients from all over the world. Actually fusion is such a lovely way of cooking and what it represents. I would even argue that Malaysian food in itself is a fusion because it's so mixed. You've had so many years of colonisation and movement. There’s Malay Indian influences, a British and Portuguese influence in the food.”

After a whirlwind book tour, you’ll see Lin back on TV as she’s presenting Discovering the World’s Table on BBC World Service, where she’s visited Istanbul, an experience that she relished. “ You look back and think ‘wow’. I feel so lucky to be at this point and very privileged to have had all of these opportunities including doing quite a lot more TV presenting.” But when it comes to the book, of which she’s already planning a second, she said “ A special shout out to Scotland because writing the book really was a nice exploration of celebrating being Scottish, but also celebrating, being mixed.”

Sama Sama: Comfort food from my Malaysian-Scottish kitchen is out now, priced at £28 and to listen to this full episode, search Scran wherever you get your podcasts.