British-Chinese son-and-mother duo Chin and Choo Taylor turn viral videos into best-selling cookbook

Chin and Choo Taylor never set out to become social media stars.

When they began posting cooking videos online in 2017, the British-Chinese mother-and-son chef duo simply wanted to drum up business for their Chinese restaurant and takeaway in Somerset, England, which was called Ziang’s, after Choo’s maiden name.

So they uploaded a single video to YouTube, then promptly forgot about it. Nine months later, they discovered they had 4,500 subscribers.

Today, they have one of Britain’s most popular Chinese cookery channels, Ziang’s Food Workshop, and their spontaneous, irreverent kitchen tutorials have attracted a combined following of more than 3.2 million across social media.

And their new cookbook, The Ultimate Chinese Takeaway Bible – available at Kinokuniya Singapore – topped British bestseller lists when it debuted in late September.

The recipes nod to their roots in East and South-east Asia, where the Ziang side of the family began cooking in hawker stalls more than 150 years ago, and still has relatives living in Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia today.

But it is mostly a celebration of British-Chinese takeaway cuisine – including favourites such as lemon chicken and crispy shredded chilli beef, which were designed for a Western palate.

The book is equally unapologetic about the Taylors’ use of monosodium glutamate (MSG) and cross-cultural dishes such as Singapore chow mein – the curried rice noodle dish that originates from Hong Kong rather than Singapore.

In a video chat from their home in Somerset, Chin, 40, and mum Choo, 66, have the same warm, bantering energy they do in their cooking videos, where they deliver unscripted and humorous tutorials.

Chin says they never rehearse or plan these out.

“When we started taking it seriously, we thought, ‘Okay, we’re going to plan and do it this way.’ And literally, we never do the recipe we planned.

“So we decided we’re going to wing it. And I feel it’s more natural and not so contrived,” says the chef, who is married with no children, and has lived with his parents for most of his adult life.

“Because we work so closely, it makes sense that we all live together,” explains Chin, whose younger sister, 37, is not involved in the family business.

Choo grew up in Seria, an oil and gas town in Brunei, and worked at her Hakka and Cantonese parents’ hawker stall preparing everything from rojak to laksa.

She met Doug Taylor, an English seismic surveyor working for oil companies in Brunei, and in the 1980s, moved with him to Britain and got married.

She then got a job at a Chinese takeaway in the coastal town of Watchet, Somerset, and it was here she and her son learnt to make the staples of British Chinese food.

Chin says: “I grew up in that takeaway and started cooking there, off the books, when I was nine. Then I kind of fell in love with it as an adult and carried on doing it.”

And while British-Chinese takeaway meals may not look exactly like those eaten elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora, it is “a misconception they aren’t authentic Chinese food”, he adds.

“It’s cooked very similarly, but uses slightly different ingredients out of necessity, and with recipes invented because wholesalers didn’t stock authentic Chinese ingredients at the time.”

In their content, the Taylors add disclaimers such as “this is not traditional, it’s Westernised Chinese takeout”.

But although most comments are positive, they still get snarky remarks about their food not being “authentic”.

“And it’s almost never from people from Singapore or Hong Kong or China – it’s normally Westerners wanting to show that they’re more cultured than other Westerners,” says Chin.

British-Chinese takeout menus have evolved over time, but Singapore noodles have been a fixture since the 1980s and are now sold as ready-to-eat meals in many British supermarkets.

The dish was brought over by Cantonese chefs, who are thought to have invented it in Hong Kong in the 1950s or 1960s – using curry powder from Britain’s other colonies, and naming the noodles after Singapore to make them sound more exotic.

The classic version is a stir-fry of thin rice vermicelli, curry powder, char siu, prawns, scrambled eggs and vegetables.

The dish is also eaten in Canada and Australia, and celebrity chefs such as Jamie Oliver have published their own takes.

Chin remembers eating Singapore noodles for the first time at age eight, when the takeaway Choo worked at decided to put it on the menu.

“Mum called a chef friend up north to get the recipe, and I remember her making it for the first time – the taste was like nothing I’d had before,” he recalls.

Like every recipe in the book, the Taylors’ Singapore chow mein uses a smidge of MSG to enhance the umami flavours.

And Chin, who studied MSG as part of his biology degree at university, has made it his mission to debunk what he believes are the myths around it.

“I went into it thinking it was bad and I wanted to know why, because we use it in our takeaways.

“And I found that it all goes back to poor science and the rhetoric that followed,” he says, arguing that shoddy experiments in the 1960s led to MSG being unfairly demonised, which was then used to “marginalise the Chinese community”.

When the Taylors began posting online, “we were the only channel using MSG and we used to get death threats in the comments, which YouTube has since deleted”, he says.

“And even now, people still think MSG is bad.”

But he and his mum use it liberally in their cooking and Chin has done multiple videos explaining why he believes it is perfectly safe.

The Taylors have owned and operated several restaurants and takeaways together since 2010 and continued cooking professionally even as they became famous online. Chin’s father, now 68, pitched in to help after he retired as a surveyor seven years ago.

Six weeks ago, however, they shuttered their last restaurant, Ziang’s 35a, in Minehead, Somerset.

“Our lease was coming up for renewal and we thought it was a good time to bow out, while we’re successful,” says Chin, adding that they had been worried about rising costs.

The restaurant business is notoriously tough and operating in small towns, as the Taylors did, meant sometimes driving three hours just to pick up ingredients.

“It was logistically a nightmare. And the number of physically demanding hours you have to put in,” says Chin.

Choo adds: “It’s mental as well – you have to stay on top of what you need to order.”

But with their cookbook a hit, the Taylors are going to focus on further growing their brand and perhaps developing their own product line or cooking series in the future.

“We’d love to do a TV show, launch our own supermarket brand and things like that,” says Chin.

“We’d quite like to take over the world in terms of what markets we could be in that we could fit into.”