By Dave Hunter
This is likely to be a big year for Glasgow chef Julie Lin.
In recent years Julie, the founder of Julie’s Kopitiam and co-founder of Glasgow restaurant Ga Ga, has evolved into a TV personality, chef consultant and writer.
Her first cookbook – Sama Sama – is due out in May.
Growing up in a Malaysian household, food was always a big part of the family culture, but Julie told SLTN it wasn’t until she left home that she really started to take an interest in learning how to cook.
“It’s when supper clubs became a wee bit trendy,” she said.
“People were doing them in London. These secret supper clubs. Maybe around the time Rachel Khoo brought out her book – Little Paris Kitchen – that was when the first ideas started to happen in my head. She’s got a big part to do with it, along with Ms Nigella, of course.
“I remember just watching what she was doing and thinking ‘I’d love to do that’, because I loved cooking for friends.”
In 2014, at the age of just 22, Julie appeared on Masterchef.
“I did it and came back and thought ‘I don’t really know what I’m doing with my life, but I know I want to do food now!’”
Leaving her job in retail, Julie moved into professional cooking for the first time when she took a job with Café Strange owner Laurie Macmillan.
“You can fall into a kitchen with a tyrant easily. I was very lucky.”
It was a match made in cookery heaven.
“She is an amazing chef,” said Julie. “She used to work at Balbirnie House Hotel in Fife.
“She was one of the exec chefs up there. So she was really good to learn from. My training was really all from her.
“You can fall into a kitchen with a tyrant head chef quite easily, so I was very lucky to work with her. And we’re still really good pals.
“I truly don’t think I would be where I am today if I hadn’t met Laurie then. She’s kind of silently got this thing in Glasgow where she’s actually trained up so many chefs to go and open up their own places.”
A stint at Indian street food restaurant Babu followed, before Julie opened her first venture: a pop-up stall on Glasgow’s Gordon Street.
And, before long, she was looking for something more permanent – and that’s where Laurie Macmillan came in again.
At the time, Macmillan’s Café Strange Brew was based out of a small unit on Glasgow’s south side.
But the booming business was in the process of outgrowing the 16-capacity unit and so Macmillan suggested that Julie take it on instead, allowing Café Strange Brew to relocate to larger premises.
Julie’s Kopitiam (meaning ‘coffee shop’) opened its doors in 2017, offering a mixture of traditional Malaysian and Malaysian-inspired dishes.
And the intimate, bustling little restaurant soon proved popular with the southside community.
“We [operated on] a first-come, first-served basis which, at the time, made a lot of sense. But now I’m like ‘god that’s really annoying! I don’t want to wait for a table!’
“But it was great. I loved the buzz of it. It was a very special place to me just because it was so close to my heart, cooking for my mum and family and stuff. It’s funny when a business becomes part of your family, almost.”
Like so many businesses across Scotland, the pandemic hit Julie’s Kopitiam hard and, faced with challenges including the availability and price of products, Julie took the difficult decision to close the venue in early 2023.
However, it wasn’t long before another opportunity came along.
Glasgow operator Marc Ferrier, who runs Partick pub The Thornwood, had met Julie during her pop-up days and the two had kept in touch.
Now, Ferrier had his eye on another Partick unit. And he had a specific chef in mind as a business partner.
“It actually took a couple of rounds with Marc being like ‘I think this is a good idea’ and by round three I was like ‘right. Fine!’”
With Julie on board as a partner, the new unit would become the Malaysian-inspired Ga Ga Kitchen & Bar.
This would be a very different venture to Julie’s Kopitiam, with the Malay-style dishes accompanied by top quality cocktails from head bartender Scott Stevenson and his team.
“I have a really good time working with Scott. The staff are so respectful towards Malaysian flavours and will ask loads of questions and what words mean.”
In fact, Julie reckons there are parallels between those cooking up recipes in the kitchen and the staff shaking them up behind the bar.
“I think chefs and mixologists could actually give each other a hand, because there’s quite a lot of creativity within chefs that doesn’t get seen or given the appreciation that I think mixologists get for their creations,” she said. “At the same time, I think mixologists have method which I think could be really good to apply within the chef world. I do see quite a lot of similarities there.”
The team dynamic certainly seems to be working, with Ga Ga having just earned a mention in the Michelin Guide.
“Everyone can do their own entrepreneurial thing.”
And yet there continues to be challenges, as Julie and the Ga Ga team work to meet price points while maintaining margins.
She explained: “We had monkfish on the menu for a while but we’ve taken it off because it just reads too expensively – but it genuinely is how much it costs us to get it in, prepare it and cook it.
“But in saying that I think that’s also part of the job – being on the ball on how you can be creative with what you have. And just, for example, using all the waste products; we’ll use cauliflower leaves in the wok-fried greens. We’ll use any kind of waste products we can in another dish.
“For example, day-old rice is perfect for nasi goreng, so when we have a batch of rice on for the day and there’s a bit left over it’ll be used and it’ll work even better for nasi goreng the next day.
“That’s always been a challenge, though – to make a menu that doesn’t cost loads, that you don’t have to charge people loads for.
“Because we’re not in the business to rip people off. We’re in the business to make sure that customers can come in and have a nice time, and also come in quite frequently. We’re not a once a year place. And so there’s more pressure there to make things affordable for people.”
These days the day to day running of Ga Ga’s kitchen is the purview of head chef Dawid Wieczorek, freeing Julie up to work on menu development for the restaurant as well as her other ventures.
In addition to Ga Ga, she consults for a range of companies and clients, including developing recipes to pair with specific spirits.
TV appearances have included BBC shows like Corner Store Cook Off, Hairy Bikers Go North and, most recently, Saturday Kitchen. And there’s also a podcast – Use Your Noodle.
All that’s in addition to the upcoming cookbook.
Julie reckons her way of working isn’t original, per se, but in the past it has tended to be male chefs that have made it work.
And she’s keen for other up and coming chefs to know that it can work for them, too.
“I find it really interesting, because there’s been lots of guys before me that have done an entrepreneurial-style thing with restaurants, but any time I’m out on a Saturday night I always get asked ‘so if you’re out, who’s in the kitchen?’
“And I’m like ‘oh god! I totally forgot!’ It’s so annoying.
“I think that’s also a part that I want to communicate to other people that maybe haven’t been in those roles before – that there is a way you can do it.
“Everyone can do their own entrepreneurial thing. Not that I’m necessarily following the career of the bigger chefs that have done it, but it’s something that is possible and it should be more normal for everyone to do.”
And as to what the future might hold for the entrepreneurial chef, author and TV personality, Julie was very much adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach.
She said: “Somebody asked me the other day, if I could envisage what I want to do. I don’t know, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
“I think it’s just like you go where the world is taking you at that moment and be open to many things.
“It’s quite exciting.”
