Manchi Wan (67) will be shutting the doors of her current establishment, Gorey’s Jade Garden, for the final time on Saturday.
She said that her retirement had come about as a result of her chef moving on, and remarked that there is now a shortage of high-quality Chinese cooks in the Island.
‘The timing is to do with the fact that my chef has given me notice, as he is moving on, and it is so hard to recruit a really good Chinese chef in the catering trade nowadays.
‘A lot of the good ones are retiring and the mediocre ones are still going, and you can’t bring any fresh blood into the Island due to population regulation,’ said Manchi, whose daughter, Suyin Geddes, is a local dentist.
‘When I first arrived in Jersey there were many more Chinese restaurants, but unfortunately a lot of the long-established, traditional ones are now starting to close, because the restaurateurs are retiring and their children now have established careers so don’t want to take them on.’
Born in Hong Kong, Manchi first moved to England in 1965, aged 15, to join her father at his restaurant in Gosport, Hampshire.
After finishing school she did a degree in sociology and politics at the London School of Economics and spent her summer holidays working in Jersey.
She worked for many years as a co-ordinator at the education department for Hampshire, but in 1992, when the Portsmouth Institute at which she worked closed because of budget cuts, she had a change of career and home, buying a Jersey restaurant and moving to the Island to run it.
‘Food was in my blood, as I was brought up in a restaurant from the age of 15,’ she said. Manchi first opened the Bamboo Garden, in Burrard Street, and ran it for four years. Due to its success she then moved to the larger Noble House on Victoria Avenue in 1996, which she ran for ten years.
She retired in 2006, but was persuaded to come out of retirement a couple of years later to run the Beach House at Gorey, before opening Jade Garden, on the site of the former Village Bistro, in 2010.
Although she now calls Jersey her home, Manchi often visits her two sisters in Hong Kong and for a number of years has regularly attended the Beijing Academy of Medical Science in China to study Chinese medicine.
