He fed Gordon Ramsay chicken feet: MasterChef winner Daniel Lee on changing perceptions of Chinese food in the UK

After chef Daniel Lee won Britain’s acclaimed reality-television cooking contest MasterChef: The Professionals in 2021, job offers came flooding in. But one by one he turned them down – even the chance for his name to be above the door at a prestigious London address: “Dan Lee at Park Lane”.

Instead, the half-Chinese, half-English-Irish chef took up a residency at the laid-back Hockley Social Club in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, the city of his birth. There, he cooks his own take on Asian street food for as little as £6 (US$7.30) per dish.

Lee’s decision is surprising considering his training in classical French culinary techniques at University College Birmingham and his experience working at fine-dining hotspots around the world.

He was senior sous chef at Table65, in Singapore, where he helped the modern European restaurant win its first Michelin star in 2019 within a year of opening, and did stints at Bangkok’s acclaimed Nahm, and London’s two-Michelin-star Ikoyi.

But Lee, inspired by hawker centres and street-food stalls in East Asia, is on a mission: he wants to democratise top quality food in Britain.

“In Asia, you have such amazing food and it’s so affordable. Street food in the UK is usually deep fried and unhealthy, all loaded fries and burgers, and still not that cheap,” he says. “I want to make very good food accessible, especially in the current economic climate.”