sweet mandarin cookery school
Family Origins... Spanning almost a hundred years, the story behind this
restaurant the lives of three generations of remarkable Chinese women. Their
extraordinary journey takes us from the brutal poverty of village life in
mainland China, to newly prosperous 1930s Hong Kong and finally to the UK. Their
lives were as dramatic as the times they lived through. A love of food and a
talent for cooking pulled each generation through the most devastating of
upheavals. Helen's grandmother, Lily Kwok, was forced to work as an amah after
the violent murder of her father. Crossing the ocean from Hong Kong in the
1950s, Lily honed her famous chicken curry recipe. Eventually she opened one of
Manchester's earliest Chinese restaurants where her daughter, Mabel, worked from
the tender age of nine. But gambling and the Triads were pervasive in the
Chinese immigrant community, and tragically they lost the restaurant. It was up
to Helen and her sisters, the third generation to re-establish their
grandmother's dream. The legacy lived on when the sisters opened their
award-winning restaurant Sweet Mandarin in 2004.
