Episode 38 – Lindsay Jang

This Way Up

For this episode, I interview Hong Kong restaurateur Lindsay Jang, who is behind some of Hong Kong’s hottest restaurants.

I’ve always been fascinated by restauranteurs. Simply because to be a successful one you need to combine a lot of different and varied skillsets – from branding to creating an atmosphere and of course making sure you serve up delicious food. It’s also notoriously super hard to make a success of it. And with Lindsay I got someone who's done exactly that, she talked me through her entire journey into the restaurant business – co-creating not one but three successful restaurants - Yardbird, Ronin and Roti Tori. And having eaten at Yard bird I can say first hand how amazing the experience is.

Originally from Canada, we discussed Lindsay’s upbringing and her different influences including working at her parents’ restaurant and how it led, albeit much later, to finding her passion as a restauranteur. She also credits working everything single job there is at the super-exclusive and world-famous restaurant, Nobu, for teaching her everything she needed to know about the restaurant business. It was there she started creating the master plan for setting up her own restaurant and after a few years of fine-tuning, she took the plunge and hasn’t looked back.

What strikes me with Lindsay is her ability to learn from the best around her but also her confidence to pick and choose what would work best for her restaurants; which she successfully managed by creating fun, exciting and unique restaurants that has certainly resonated with the Hong Kong scene.

And as usual, we go through a lot more than what she is doing now, we discuss how she travelled the world with a newborn before starting her restaurants in Hong Kong, the benefit of going to drama school in order to learn the art of bullshitting and why competitiveness with others is a complete waste of time.

She has an amazing career story that is different to most for sure – I found this conversation fascinating and I hope you do too.
Other mentions: Restaurants: Masa, Zuma, Sweetgreen