Julie Lin wasn’t inspired to become a chef by a careers talk at school or a Saturday job. Instead, her path to the professional kitchen emerged from a hobby and a deep-rooted love of food – she’d always been a keen cook, hosting dinner parties and supper clubs, but worked in retail and as a music teacher before she joined the dots and realised she could turn her passion into a profession. ‘Thinking about what I was cooking for dinner was a big part of my day,’ she laughs. ‘Cooking was always in the background but it didn’t occur to me to go into it as a career. It has been a slow burn, but a natural transition.’

Today, she has certainly found her place in the kitchen of her Glaswegian bar and restaurant GaGa, which celebrates her half Malaysian and half Scottish heritage, and the spirit of the food on which she was raised. ‘There’s a huge culture around food in Malaysia,’ she says. ‘When you greet people you don’t say ‘hi, how are you?’ it’s ‘hi’, have you eaten?’’

Though she grew up in Scotland, as a child Julie spent months in her ‘second home’ of Malaysia every year, watching her mother and grandmother cook. Their Nyonya culture – a unique hybrid of Chinese and Malaysian – marries Chinese and Malay cooking styles and ingredients, including tamarind juice, lemongrass, candlenut, shrimp paste and galangal, creating dishes which are bursting with sweet, sour, spicy and salty flavours. A meal which transports her back to her childhood in particular is lap cheong – smoked and sweetened Chinese sausage, wok-fried with egg and peas – a simple recipe which helped prompt the creativity that is so present in her cooking today.

‘Sometimes mum couldn’t get her hands on lap cheong, so she’d use sweet-cured bacon and whatever she could access in Scotland instead, and turn it into her own dish,' Julie smiles. 'She used to have an abundance of ingredients to hand in Malaysia and when she first came here it wouldn’t have been as easy to get hold of the things she was familiar with, so she adapted. That’s really shaped how I cook today. In Scotland we have a huge larder, and it’s great to do a sambal with Scottish fish, for example. If we have wok greens it will be Scottish greens, deeply wok-fried to get that flavour. With French cooking there can be a lot of rules, but [in this style] it’s quite normal to bend them.’

Rather than lengthy recipes and complex processes, Malaysia’s agak-agak style is all about cooking with soul, relying on intuition, experience and common sense to create dishes which might include the same ingredients but can turn out differently every time. Julie remembers loved ones telling her to ‘season food until your ancestors whisper in your ear to stop’, an ethos which she believes creates more independent chefs who cook using their senses.

It also explains why Julie is more keen to hire cooks who haven’t previously worked in restaurants, but who live and breathe food (she has a Malaysian culinary scientist on the team), after being given a similar opportunity when she was low on experience. It was, after all, only in 2014 that Julie, then twenty-three, had her first taste of the rush of a professional kitchen when she decided to take her pastime more seriously and applied for a spot on MasterChef. ‘There’s pressure that you don’t want, but there is also pressure that you thrive in, where even if it’s hard work, you are enjoying it and figuring out how to get better,’ she says. ‘I don’t think pressure is always bad, it challenges you.’

Having reached the quarterfinals, she returned to Glasgow, left her job and applied for kitchen work, starting under the tutelage of Laurie McMillan at Café Strange Brew, who she says took a leap of faith in hiring her and who she remains close with today. She then headed up the kitchen at Rachna Dheer’s Babu Kitchen, a Bombay street kitchen which not only gave Julie experience in street food events, but also a glimpse into how she could one day serve her own Malaysian food.