Our story

I go by Mr. Chilli around here — you’ll understand why by the end of this story. But it starts before me, with two people who came to Liverpool in the 1960s and built a life here from nothing.

My father, Ken, opened a convenience store on Berry Street in the heart of Liverpool’s Chinatown, the oldest Chinese community in Europe. Around the same time, my mother, Mary, ran a bookstore next door. They were one of the first Chinese couples in Liverpool to have a white wedding, an event covered by national and local newspapers. Ken was also a co-founder of the Wah Sing Chinese Community Centre, helping the local Chinese community hold on to their mother culture and roots — a small piece of local history in its own right.

By the 1970s, the Hong Kong couple had started a food business on Rice Lane, then went bigger on Lark Lane. In 1974, they opened one of the first restaurants on Lark Lane, Tung Kong, serving authentic Cantonese cuisine. Regulars packed in night after night, and everyone knew it as “Mary’s” — my mother was a popular host, and the name stuck long before anyone knew the family behind it.

The restaurant thrived, and in the early ’90s I took over the family business and gave it a new, modern name: The Regent. By the end of the decade, appetite for the food had outgrown the dining room, and the family started making siu mai, wor tips, spring rolls and soy sauce to sell beyond the restaurant, moving into manufacturing. The restaurant itself stayed in the family; our cousins, now grown, run it today as Chy and Yam Cha Restaurant. It was the siu mai side that really took off. By the late ’90s and into the 2000s, the family moved production into Parliament Business Park in Toxteth and became pioneers of siu mai manufacturing in Liverpool — a business still run by my sister, known across the city simply as Brenda’s Siu Mai. Today it trades as mémé.

While all this was happening, a close family friend was quietly building a legend of his own. Raymond Tsang had spun off from San Ho’s (Golden Dragon) Singapore Chilli Sauce to create his own version: the Malaysian Special Chilli Sauce. Back then there were hardly any imported brands on Chinese supermarket shelves in the UK, and Raymond’s sauce became the one every Chinese restaurant in Merseyside reached for, and a fixture on Chinese and ethnic supermarket shelves across the region. Think of it as Merseyside’s answer to Heinz ketchup — if a household loved chilli sauce, chances are there was a bottle of Raymond’s in the fridge. Decades on, it’s still arguably the best-balanced chilli sauce you’ll ever taste.

When Raymond passed away in 2007, his family needed someone they trusted to carry his life’s work forward. There was really only one choice — the Lee family, who’d known him and his family for years, stepped in to keep his recipe alive. They brought it together with everything they’d learned making dim sum, and Kwok Wing Foods Limited was born: one family’s restaurant roots and another family’s chilli sauce legacy, under one roof.

Everything we’ve made since has grown from that same idea, take a recipe worth keeping, and do right by it. Our Sweet Hoi Sin Sauce, one of our most popular, is formulated properly as a ready-to-use restaurant sauce for crispy aromatic duck and pancakes, or crispy chicken, not the thinner, sweeter stuff you’ll find in most supermarkets. Our Lemon Sauce and Sweet & Sour Sauce carry the same idea into chicken, pork, ribs and fish.

None of this happens without Liverpool. The Port has been welcoming spices and ingredients from around the world for centuries, and that’s no small part of why this chilli sauce found its flavour here first. Sailors and travellers docking in the city used to take bottles with them wherever they were headed next, which is really how the Kwok Wing name first crossed the seas, long before we ever thought about it as “export.”