“I’ve got a lot of cousins,” says Justin “The Dustbin” Tsang, the 32-year-old chef whose debut book, Long Day? Cook This, became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on publication last summer. “We all meet up, there’s 20 or 30 of us there. My granny always cooks.” We’re talking over Zoom, and Tsang sits at the table in his London flat, dressed in a plain grey hoodie and brown corduroy Carhartt cap. It’s a uniform fans will recognise from his Instagram videos, in which he walks through the door of his flat, hangs up his coat and proceeds to cook fast, enticing dishes with foundations in East and Southeast Asia, but influenced by his passion for Western food: kimchi egg ribbon udon soup, roasted miso cod, carbonara instant noodles. The perfect culinary expression of a “third culture kid” born in north London to Hong Kong immigrants, enamoured with the two cultures he straddles.
