Vivien Wong grew up in the Nineties spending her weekends and school holidays in her parents’ bakery in Wembley, which sold desserts to Chinatown’s restaurants. She would help with local deliveries and packing boxes of traditional mochi — steamed rice flour balls — which she and her brother, Howard, loved to eat too.
Then Howard landed an internship in New York, Vivien visited and the pair tried mochi combined with ice-cream. “We both loved it — the combination was magic, and we thought, ‘one day let’s bring this to Europe’.” They returned to London “and had careers for eight years,” until, in 2008, Wong quit her job at Barclays Capital.
