The School of Wok founder tells Victoria Stewart why he loves frankfurters with fried rice, and why Cantonese cooking is so much more than comfort food.

It was school lunch boxes that convinced Jeremy Pang that food could be fun.

Aged 10, when the family moved to Singapore, Pang admits he found eating “a bit of a chore because I wanted to go and play football with my mates.” But there, “where there were so many cultures – I think we had about 52 different races in our school – it felt exciting. Everyone ate all these different things.”

Each morning before school, Pang’s mother would cook fried rice or noodles and put them in what he calls thermos tiffin-style carriers, so that the food would still be warm at lunchtime:

“At the time I had a lot of friends who were Korean or Japanese or from Hong Kong or China, and all their parents would be doing the same thing for their children’s lunchboxes. So instead of swapping sandwiches and packs of crisps, we’d do swapsies of fried rice for bulgogi, and things like that. And that’s how I grew up from there really.”

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To read the article, which appeared in full in the Evening Standard in October 2017, click here.