Meet the viral cooking star who's coming to the Edinburgh International Book Festival
It’ll be his first time in the city
For cook, author and influencer, Justin Tsang, 32, his appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival will mark his first ever visit to the Scottish capital.
“I've been to Glasgow a few times though. That's the birthplace of the chicken tikka masala, if I'm correct, so I was basically eating a lot of Indian food. Everyone tells me to go to Edinburgh, but I just have never really felt like it was the right time,” says Tsang, who regularly appears on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen and has an incredible one million followers on Instagram and 36.5k on TikTok.
Thankfully, the right time has nearly arrived, and he’ll be part of the festival’s popular Table Talk food series, at Elliott’s Studio on Wednesday August 26 from 7pm until 8.30pm.
It’ll be a chance for him to showcase some of the recipes from his book Long Day? Cook This, which features unpretentious and punchy East Asian recipes, such as firecracker rice, peanut butter bacon French toast, tangy instant noodle salad and kimchi egg ribbon noodle soup.
At the event, he’ll also be talking about kitchen shortcuts, flavour pairings and his childhood in his Hong Kong immigrant parents’ Chinese buffet restaurant in North London.
His mum and dad are very proud of his current job.
“They love it, to be honest. I think it was a shock, as they didn’t want me to follow in their footsteps. I guess I haven’t, in that it's a different industry, but I think they love that I'm just keeping the story alive, and their recipes,” says Tsang, who is nicknamed Justin the Dustbin on social media. “Chinese was my first language, but when I went to primary school, I decided I didn't want to speak it anymore, and my mum was struggling to kind of keep that heritage in the family. Now I think she's really proud, because I crave Chinese food, and I get to teach people how to cook it properly and do it justice”.
The elder Tsangs ran their restaurant from 1993, until they retired and the property was let out to another business last year.
As he grew up there and was their chef between the ages of 18 and 30, that was a wrench. “I keep thinking I can walk back in, but nobody would know who I was,” he says.
The social media and television jobs didn’t really kick off until 2024.
It’s now nearly a year since the book was launched, so he’s had time to take stock of the feedback from the public.
“Everyone is asking for book two, so it's just a great feeling. I get loads of emails from strangers who love the premise, which is East Asian food with a twist, but also how accessible everything is,” he says. “Nowadays your average high street supermarket will have so many of these speciality ingredients. I think people love the fact that all the recipes are complete meals, you can cook them after a long day, and they really give you that satisfaction”.
There are plenty of hero ingredients in the book, like noodles and gochujang, but garlic is also a star, with recipes including twenty-clove garlic noodles.
Tsang has had the most positive feedback from readers about the triple garlic crispy chicken with green rice and sauce recipe. It’s in the book’s Keeping it Light? Fresh and Healthy-ish chapter, and contains broccoli, jasmine rice and a sauce made with mint and coriander, among other things.
“People love it. I think it epitomizes the East meets West idea. So we use Western techniques to debone and cook the chicken, crispy skin side down, no oil. But then we use Cantonese techniques, where we make the sauce by scorching hot oil onto the aromatics, and that brings it together,” he says.
There are also plenty of fans of the gochujang udon, which is “almost a nod to carbonara”.
The one omission in the book is sugary stuff. There are absolutely no puddings. I wonder if that might be the plan for book two, but Tsang soon puts me right.
“I’m really weird when it comes to going out to eat. I go for two starters. I'm a savoury kind of person. I love sweets, like Skittles and Haribo,, but I try to avoid patisserie and desserts, because I'm not really trained in that field. It's just not my thing,” he says.
It’s great that Tsang doesn’t feel he has to expand his repertoire for the sake of it. The pressure of having one million followers, some of whom might like sugar, doesn’t phase him.
“I think it does the opposite. It allows quite a lot of freedom for me, because it feels like everything I'm doing, people are resonating,” he says. “Earlier on in my career, I had the pressure of trying to try to do things for the audience. Now that I have followers, it's justified doing crazy wild stuff and not getting cancelled for it. I feel like East Asian food is very strict on tradition, and I think I've broken every traditional rule there is, and the reception has been great”.
The ever expanding amount of followers opens a lot of doors. For example, he got to meet Gordon Ramsay recently, and they filmed themselves cooking fried chicken in one of the Scottish chef’s Bread Street Kitchen outlets.
Tsang sometimes feels imposter syndrome, when meeting those who have a more traditional career trajectory, but Ramsay was very welcoming.
“He's nicer than his TV persona, he’s just a lovely person,” Tsang says. “A lot of traditional chefs and restaurants don't like the new wave of social media, but Gordon was talking to me about social media influence and saying that food influencers were the new critics of the food scene, and they can make or break a restaurant. He just said, you really need to steer into it, and that's what he's done”.
Long Day? Cook This: A Table Talk with Justin Tsang 7pm-8.30pm, Elliott’s Studio, tickets £35.00 (£32.00/£25.00), www.edbookfest.co.uk
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