I was born in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of Kuala Lumpur, and moved to London at eleven. The first thing I noticed was that food in this country was not the centre of the day. The second was the cup-a-soup vending machine at school, quite different from the food court of freshly cooked food I was used to in Malaysian primary school! I qualified as a corporate lawyer in the City in 2007 and made salaried partner by 2012. In 2013, following burnout, I left.

I started a Malaysian street food stall. I wanted work that felt fully mine - culturally, physically, in every way that law never quite did.

Over the next five years I built Sambal Shiok from a market stall, to pop-ups and supper clubs, into a permanent restaurant in Highbury, north London, which opened in 2018. It went on to win Ching He Huang's Best Innovation Award 2019, Timeout's London’s 50 Best Restaurants 2023 & North London Best Loved Restaurant 2022, and was reviewed by Jay Rayner, Grace Dent, Giles Coren and Tom Parker-Bowles.

I closed my restaurant in 2026 after eight years as a bricks-and-mortar laksa noodle bar and thirteen in the industry - well-reviewed but no longer financially viable due to the labour intensive nature of making my food from scratch.

This arc - immigrant daughter, City lawyer, restaurant founder, the decision to stop - shapes everything I do now.

My expertise in taste-making has spearheaded the UK’s love for laksa and wider recognition of Malaysian cuisine globally.

I work with food and hospitality businesses on the things that decide whether a concept holds together - the brand, the menu and what the numbers say underneath both. The lawyer-plus-operator combination is unusual. Most consultants have done one or the other. I have structured deals, negotiated leases, written menus that work and lived through every cost line on a P&L. The work is grounded in that, not in frameworks.

I also work with retailers, manufacturers and restaurant groups on recipe development and range strategy in East and Southeast Asian categories - the part of the work where culinary authority and commercial viability have to be solved at the same time.

I am the author of Sambal Shiok: The Malaysian Cookbook (2021, 30,000 copies sold, nominated for the Fortnum & Mason Debut Cookery Book, Guild of Food Writers and André Simon awards) and Simply Malaysian (2025). I teach at the Jamie Oliver Cookery School, appear regularly on BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen and MasterChef: The Professionals, and sat on OpenTable UK's Restaurant Advisory Board from 2024 until 2026.

I write on hospitality economics and the cost of authenticity for the Guardian and am regularly interviewed on this subject in national press such as The Times and BBC Two Newsnight .

London-based. Open to commissions across the world.