The Takeaway

Growing up in the kitchen of her parents’ Chinese restaurant in Beddau, food writer Angela Hui hated being the ‘takeaway kid’. Now, she’s returning for the first time in years, to understand the strange but special place Chinese takeaways hold in British culture.

Sixty years ago, the first Chinese takeaway opened in the UK, offering affordable new flavours to working class Brits who’d never even heard of soy sauce. Since then, these takeaways have often been seen through a lens of exoticism and racism. The workers are framed as unskilled and unhygienic, and yet they are the keepers of something instinctively British - “Fancy a Chinese?”

Food critic Angela Hui experienced that dichotomy first hand, spending her childhood in the kitchen of the ‘Lucky Star’, her parents’ Chinese takeaway in the former mining town of Beddau. She lived and worked there, bagging prawn crackers, counting cash and manning the phones while still in primary school.

During lockdown, we consumed more takeaways than ever before - but Covid opened the door to a 300% rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. Angela wants to shine a light on the families behind the takeaways we take for granted.

In this programme she explores the labour and love that goes into every tin foil tray and microwaveable tub, discovering that this supposedly ‘inauthentic’ Chinese food is in fact a culture unto its own.

Produced in Cardiff by Alice McKee.