Dubai: When Kelvin Cheung told his father that he wanted to become a chef, his father did not try to make the profession sound better than it was.
Cheung was 22 years old. His father asked him to look first at the two of them.
“We virtually did not have a relationship because when I woke up to go to school, he was already at work, and then by the time I went to bed, he was still at work,” Cheung remembers. “We would only see each other occasionally, or when I was working at the restaurant. That’s when we would actually start to begin our bond.”
Then his father pointed to his marriage.
“He’s like, also look at my relationship with your mother,” Cheung says. “It’ll be extremely difficult, and only if you’re extremely lucky will you find a partner who can understand the life of a restaurateur, the life of a chef.”
Even with such a person, his father warned him, family life would not necessarily be conventional. A restaurant runs to somebody else’s calendar.
“Every major holiday, every major day, whether it be a birthday, Christmas, New Year’s, whatever, your friends will be out partying and celebrating and having fun, and you’ll be out working.
“But I knew that because that’s how we grew up, I understood all of that.”
The restaurant had been there almost from the beginning. Cheung was born in Toronto into a Chinese restaurant family. His father expanded the business across Canada and later moved to Chicago to open in China Town, what Cheung describes as his largest project at the time.
The children worked too.
“When we were kids, we didn’t have a babysitter,” Cheung says. “So when I was four, I was already making almond cookies in the bakery.”
There were dumpling skins to make, spring rolls to roll. As he got older, he moved through the restaurant: busboy, dishwasher, waiter, captain, manager, bartender. By 12, he says, he was working full-time.
Eventually he arrived in the kitchen itself.
“I started from washing vegetables and doing the fryer, and then steamer, dim sum, and finally the wok.”
But growing up in a restaurant and being expected to become a chef were two quite different things in his family.
“It’s always the immigrant dream, right? I was supposed to be the doctor. My sister was supposed to be the lawyer. My brother was supposed to be an engineer. And yeah, I mean, that was the plan.”
“School was never a challenge for me. But I, in my heart of hearts, I always knew that the kitchen was where I belonged.”
His parents were disappointed. The irony was that his father understood exactly what his son was choosing. He had started his own career as a chef; Cheung’s grandmother had been a chef in his grandparents’ restaurants in Hong Kong.
His father agreed, eventually, but with a final test. Cheung had grown up working for his parents. Now he had to find out whether he could survive without them.
“The rule was that I had to work outside of the restaurant to prove that it was truly something that I loved.”
For a year, he moved around Chicago, working in different kitchens and hotels.
“I would stage [an unpaid internship] every day at different restaurants,” he says. “One day would be with Bill Kim in Chicago doing his Korean food. One day was at a French restaurant. One day was at Sofitel.
“I would just roam around to show them I could do it, and I was capable and strong enough to be able to work in any kitchen.”
Eventually, his father was satisfied.
“Finally, when I proved it to him, then he gave me his blessing.”
Cheung went to Kendall College in Chicago. He worked full-time at the restaurant while studying and was also a teaching assistant at the college.
“It was my choice, I didn’t want to ask my family for money. I had to figure out how I could pay that off.”
Some days meant school in the morning and work at night; others, the reverse.
“It was just a constant thing of working nonstop.”
After culinary school came Belgium, time in France, Toronto and Vancouver. His professional training was largely classical French and European, far removed from the food he had grown up with.
That distance began to matter.
In Chinese kitchens, Cheung says, there was a term for someone like him: Jook Sing, a Canadian-born Chinese person regarded as not quite Chinese enough.
“You’re not true Chinese, right? I would have to always out-hustle everyone in the kitchen to prove a point.”
Western kitchens produced another version of the same problem.
“I was always the weird Asian kid who was not either French enough in the French kitchen or Italian enough in Italian kitchens,” he says. “But I could always out-hustle and outwork everyone.”
Work was simply what his family had taught him.
“For us, work is work. There’s no complaining. There’s no extra work, right? If there’s work to be done, you do it. If it’s washing dishes, it’s washing dishes. If it’s cleaning the floor, it’s cleaning the floor.”
In his early 30s, he was preparing to open a restaurant in Toronto when a dispute with the landlord ended the project.
“I had nothing to do. I was unemployed, no plans because we were ready to open the restaurant.”
Then a former student called from Mumbai, India.
Ellipsis, a restaurant in Colaba, had been built with considerable ambition and expense. It was failing.
Cheung's first reaction was not enthusiastic.
“I had zero interest in going to India at that point. I knew nothing about it.”
The pitch nevertheless interested him. The restaurant had a young owner trying to do something different, and diners were increasingly interested in new food.
“I still didn’t want to go because I, at that point, really had no idea what India was like.”
Two hours later, at around five in the morning, the phone rang again. The owner wanted to talk.
“I’m like, this is really fast.”
They spoke for about an hour. Cheung was offered the freedom to come out and rebuild the restaurant. He accepted a six-month contract and assembled a team of people he had worked with across North America.
“We went out guns blazing.”
The restaurant was attempting elaborate fine dining, with dishes of around 20 components and ingredients arriving from Spain, Italy, France and Japan. Cheung remembers waking at three or four in the morning, going out for vegetables and fish, then spending hours in preparation.
“We would prep for like 12 hours. We opened the doors and we fed like one table. It was a nightmare. It just was not working.”
They persisted. Eventually Cheung went back to the owner.
“Either we do something, or we go home,” he remembers telling him. “You brought me out for a reason, why don’t you just give me an opportunity to cook my food? If it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll go home. But at least we tried, right?”
They scrapped the concept. “We rebuilt it. We re-engineered the whole thing.”
The 20-component dishes became five-component dishes. Instead of importing everything, they looked to what they could source in India. Cheung called the approach “comfort fun dining”.
“And then overnight it just exploded. It became a thing. It became a phenomenon.”
Six months became more than 10 years.
There were other restaurants and eventually Delhi, where another opening was planned when Covid-19 hit. The enforced pause gave Cheung something his father had warned him the profession would rarely allow. Time. He was in Vasant Vihar, Delhi, with Andrea, his wife, and son Bodhi, then a baby.
“The three of us just enjoyed life for a year, which was magical because that doesn’t happen in a chef’s life. Every day we’d wake up, we’d go downstairs, we’d get our chai from the chaiwalla, then we’d go to the parks,” he says. They would stop for vegetables from the local vendor, go home and cook.
“It was a beautiful family time. It was actually fantastic for us.”
When life began moving again, Cheung started looking elsewhere.
India had given him a decade, his son and friendships he still describes as lifelong. But he wanted a different quality of life for his family and a place where he could create a brand of his own.
Dubai was in focus. Cheung says he had been coming here since around 2016 or 2017, scouting the market as companies he worked with considered expansion.
“We had come several times just because we knew that the potential was here.”
When the opportunity finally arrived through his current partner, “it was an automatic yes”.
“We knew that this was the place we wanted to be.”
For Cheung, the decision was as much personal as professional.
“We wanted something that I knew was going to be a place that I could create my own brand, a place that was safe for the family, quality of life.”
He says, “It’s one of the best places in the world, if not the best place in the world, for family. The quality of life, what you’re able to provide for your kids.”
He also believed Dubai would give an original restaurant a chance.
“I firmly believe Dubai is a place where, if you can create a brand that is original, if you create something that is high quality, it’s the perfect, perfect place for that.”
What he eventually created here was Jun’s, his flagship restaurant in Downtown Dubai, which is Michelin Guide ‘Selected’. Cheung had looked at the market and seen accomplished chefs already cooking Asian food. He did not want to open another restaurant defined as Chinese, Japanese or generically Asian.
“I didn’t want to follow suit.”
Instead, he began drawing together the places that had formed him: his parents’ restaurants, North America, Europe and India.
The term he uses is third culture cooking.
“I call third culture — it’s me,” he says. “It’s the Canadian Chinese, Hong Kong kid who nearly took until now to really kind of accept and bring in his journey and his cultural identity, the kid who is not Chinese enough for the Chinese and not foreign enough for the foreigners.”
“But it’s me. It’s all of that kind of blended into one.”
He no longer saw a reason to separate the influences.
“The food doesn’t have to have a label. It doesn’t have to be, here is a plate of Chinese food. Here is a plate of Japanese food. Why can’t this plate just be Kelvin’s food?
“It's essentially borderless cooking. There should be no blocks. Now, if I cook Kelvin's food, I'm able to take flavours from China, India, Vietnam, and put all in one plate. And that's authentic because it's authentically me. It's traditional because it's traditionally me, you know. And I'm still using the same flavours and techniques that have been on for thousands years, but it's uniquely mine because it's a beautiful blend of all that coming together into one.”
A pani puri dish on Jun’s menu offers the argument in miniature. It includes lobster, a sauce from Macau that he grew up eating in his father’s restaurants, French technique, Japanese togarashi and Mexican aguachile.
“There’s five different cuisines or countries or cities represented,” he says.
He is wary, however, of claiming invention. Asked whether he brought third culture cooking to Dubai, he says, “I would never claim to be the inventor of anything.”
He believes they were among the first to use the term, but goes no further.
“I think it’s very boastful or egotistical to think that you created something when essentially, I firmly believe this, cooking has been around for so long. There’s very little things that have never been done before.”
Jun’s itself took time. When it opened, Cheung says diners were accustomed to restaurants with immediately recognisable culinary identities.
“A lot of people would come in when we first opened with those preconceived notions. Oh, he’s a Chinese chef. Hence, they were expecting Chinese food. It took a bit for them to really kind of understand what we were trying to build here. The idea behind June's was to offer this kind of craveable comfort food. It's a restaurant where you crave the food. It's a restaurant that you come back to all the time. It's great value, and it became that. We are very blessed to be supported by mostly regulars. On a daily basis, 56 to 57 percent are all regulars. It's people that I feed multiple times a week … build relationships, became friends.”
For Cheung, there is something fitting about the fact that the food found its audience in Dubai.
“Third culture essentially is Dubai.”
It is here that the language of the chef, immigrant and resident starts to overlap.
“People who grew up halfway across the world are now calling themselves people of Dubai. They’re not just residents anymore,” he says. “We are Dubai. Like, we are Dubai people.”
The international population, he believes, made it easier for diners to understand food that carried several places within it.
“I’m almost certain every single country in the world lives here,” he says. “Anyone has the freedom to be here, to thrive and to live together respectfully.”
The city’s pace mattered too.
“Global trends happen instantaneously. When something happens across the world, it’s here.
“I’m one of the biggest loudspeakers and champions for Dubai because I firmly believe this is the best place in the world, and I think that’s the magic of Dubai.”
The community, he says, supported the restaurant from the beginning. That has allowed the business to grow, although he is adamant that growth for its own sake is not the point. His Dubai portfolio now extends beyond Jun’s to Little Jun’s at Time Out Market Dubai and the concepts Jooksing, 852 Bakery and Liu by Jun’s.
“We’re taking things at a slow pace. We’re not rushing things. We’re not opening just to open.”
Does his journey fit in with the Dubai-It concept of achieving remarkable success at an efficient pace with hard work, tenacity and determination?
“A 1,000 percent! Again, Dubai is the place that has the leading edge on everything, whether it be fashion, luxury, food, drink, it's a perfect place for it. We're always going to be under the global microscope. Everyone's always going to have their eyes on us. There's a reason why everybody is trying to open here. All the biggest chefs in the world, the biggest hotels in the world, everybody is coming here to open. It's definitely leading in the forefront of the region itself, which says a lot.”
There is another part of Cheung’s life in Dubai that brings the story back to the conversation with his father.
Cheung is now 47. Andrea Brown, an American national, whom he met in India, works full-time with him, managing the strategy side of things. Their son Bodhi is eight.
Asked whether his father’s warnings about a chef’s family life proved correct, Cheung does not pretend he somehow beat the odds.
“I’m very blessed because Andrea is like the perfect person to help me. Not only as a life partner, but as a best friend, as someone who has supported me, has carried me, has picked me back up after multiple failures.”
She works full-time while doing, by his estimate, “probably 99% of the heavy lifting with my son.”
“I was blessed to find that one person out of the eight billion who understands what my life is and my little craziness in order to make it happen.”
His father had told him, at 22, that he would have to be extremely lucky to find such a person.
Cheung has been in Dubai for five years now. “This is home. To be honest, whenever you ask me where home is, it’s wherever my wife and son are. We can be home anywhere. But this is home for now. We have no plans of leaving.
“We’re still cooking. We’re still here,” he says. “And we’re here to stay.”
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Anupa Kurian is a Dubai-based senior editor and writer with nearly 28 years in journalism. She has been a food editor. Anupa writes across gastronomy, culture, health, environment and the people who make a city what it is, drawn to stories that reveal themselves in the details.