You can learn yoga interactively online, so why not cooking? Hong Kong pair celebrate first anniversary of their World Kitchen Club with fundraisers
- Friends Grace Wu and Jenny Leung founded World Kitchen Club to promote home cooking online and connect people amid the coronavirus pandemic
- To mark its anniversary they are holding a Vietnamese cooking class to raise funds for the family of a Vietnamese-American who died of lung cancer and Covid-19
Grace Wu and Jenny Leung first met as 12-year-olds at St Francis’ Canossian College in Hong Kong. Though they have since been living in different countries for decades – Wu left the city when she graduated from secondary school in 1990 and went to the United States to study – common interests helped them stay connected, including a love of food and food culture.
Now the long-term friends are organising an international cooking class fundraiser through their website World Kitchen Club. Set up in April 2020, when many countries went into lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, World Kitchen Club has a roster of seven professional chefs from the US, Mexico, Europe and Hong Kong – as well as an expert on healthy living and two mixologists.
While the club hosts virtual corporate events and private parties, its latest project is to run two cooking class fundraisers in aid of a family in need. A 55-year-old Vietnamese refugee named Jack Ha, who lived in the US, recently died of the combined effects of lung cancer and Covid-19, leaving a wife and two young children.
For the two World Kitchen Club class fundraisers, Vietnamese chef My Tran will host a Zoom class that begins with a virtual tour of a traditional market in Ho Chi Minh City, hosts a talk from one of Jack’s relatives, and ends with a lesson on how to cook a traditional Vietnamese pancake, known as banh xeo, which Jack used to cook for his young relatives.
The first fundraiser for Jack, scheduled for April 18 (Hong Kong time), is now full with 12 participants, and a second will be held on April 25.
