28/10/2025
You think you’re cooking dinner until dinner starts cooking your history…
At in Covent Garden, eight of us stood in aprons, laughter already hinting at a camaraderie not yet earned.
Two teams emerged: Wok This Way and Chop It Like It’s Hot. What followed was less competition than communion, an edible theatre set to the rhythm of sizzling oil and shared wonder.
Chef Ian, patient as a poet and mischievous as a magician, guided us through a menu that read like a love letter to the Straits:
Jiaozi dumplings, folded with reverence.
Rojak salad, where pineapple flirted with cucumber under a tamarind sun.
Kapitan chicken curry, a velvet-gold sonata of coconut milk, galangal, and grace.
Between the perfume of sesame oil and the percussion of pestle and mortar, time blurred and suddenly I was no longer in London, I was in another kitchen, decades before my birth.
My great-grandfather was a businessman in Malaysia, a man whose ambition smelt faintly of clove and enterprise. Their home in Kuantan was not of tin roofs, but of teak, jasmine, and measured grace, a house that believed civility was its own inheritance.
My great-grandfather and grandparents returned to Jaffna, carrying that same quiet refinement, the discipline of trade, the poetry of hospitality.
As the curry thickened, I thought about how food survives exile. How recipes travel when people cannot. How an aroma can outlive empire, ocean, and loss.
Because cuisine is not just culture, it’s continuity. Every dish is a family tree disguised as flavour.
By the time we sat to eat, rivalry had melted into kinship. There was laughter, pride, and that rare intimacy between friends and strangers who had cooked something sacred together.
So here’s to Team Wok This Way for their finesse, to Team Chop It Like It’s Hot for their fire,and to the gentle truth that every recipe, when told honestly, is autobiography.
Some nights nourish hunger. This one nourished history, simmered in nostalgia, garnished with belonging, and served with the grace of remembering.
