Bill Poon, the chef and restaurateur who did more than almost anyone to reshape how Britain understood Chinese cooking, has died at the age of 81. His death on 1 July 2026 was reported by the hospitality trade press, which remembered him as a quietly determined craftsman whose restaurants carried the family name across London for three decades, as noted by Restaurant.

Born in Shunde, in China's Guangdong province, during the years of the Japanese occupation, Poon came from a long culinary lineage. By his family's telling he was a master chef many generations deep, an inheritor of a tradition in which cooking was treated as a serious craft to be studied and honoured. His family's kitchens stretched back through the years, and the restaurant his grandparents ran in Macau was locally famous, with a grandmother celebrated for her knife work. Poon trained under a Swiss pastry chef in Hong Kong before sailing for England in the mid-1960s, arriving with formal European technique and a deep inheritance of Cantonese cooking.

In his early London years he worked as a pastry chef at the Playboy Club in Mayfair, but he was dismayed by the Chinese food then being served to the British public, which bore little resemblance to the cooking he had grown up with. In 1970 he and his wife, Cecilia, began making wind-dried meats and sausages at home from a treasured family recipe. Three years later, in 1973, they opened their first restaurant, Poon's & Co, at 27 Lisle Street in the heart of Chinatown.

The couple's ambitions grew quickly. In 1976 they launched the more refined Poon's of Covent Garden at 41 King Street, a room that would become one of London's most talked-about tables. Poon set the kitchen at the centre of the dining room and wrapped it in glass so that guests could watch every movement. His daughter Amy later explained the thinking behind it, telling Great British Chefs, "My father wanted to shatter the preconceptions British people had about Chinese food, so he built the kitchen in the middle of the restaurant surrounded by glass." For Poon the theatre was also a lesson. "My father wanted to educate people as much as feed them, and allowing them to see the techniques in the kitchen was a key part of that," Amy recalled.

The approach was vindicated in 1980, when Poon's of Covent Garden was awarded a Michelin star, a rare distinction for a Chinese restaurant in Britain at the time. The dining rooms drew a glittering clientele. Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, Sean Connery, Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra all ate there, and Sinatra was known to have Poon's cooking sent up to his suite at the nearby Savoy.

At the height of the 1980s and early 1990s there were as many as seven Poon's restaurants operating across the capital, from a branch that opened in Geneva in 1985 to Poon's in the City, several of them run by members of the wider family. Through it all Poon kept faith with the ingredients and methods he had brought from home, and his wind-dried bacon and sausages remained a signature that customers sought out long after. He was known less for showmanship than for a patient insistence on doing things properly, letting the quality of the cooking make the argument on his behalf.

Poon stepped back from day-to-day restaurant life in the early 2000s, though he never truly gave up the craft, continuing to produce his wind-dried meats to the old family recipe. Even years later, former regulars were said to telephone in the hope of tasting his cooking once more, according to the restaurant's own history. Beyond the kitchen he remained active in London's Chinese community, serving as chair of the Euro-Chinese Literature Association and as permanent president of the Shunde UK Association, and in 2006 he was recognised among nominees for the Pearl Awards for the promotion of Chinese cuisine.

His influence outlived the restaurants he closed. The chef and restaurateur Jon Spiteri summed up his impact simply, saying that when Poon's opened in the early seventies, Bill and Cecilia forever changed the way Chinese cuisine was perceived in England. In recent years his daughter Amy revived the family name, opening a Poon's pop-up before establishing a permanent home for the restaurant in central London, carrying her parents' standards to a new generation of diners.

Bill Poon is survived by his wife, Cecilia, and their daughter, Amy. He leaves a legacy measured not only in Michelin recognition or famous guests, but in a lasting shift in taste. He asked the British public to look closely at food they thought they already knew, and in patiently showing them the care behind it, he helped an entire cuisine earn the respect it had long deserved. The glass-walled kitchen he built was, in the end, an act of generosity, an invitation to understand rather than simply to eat. The many cooks and diners he taught to see Chinese cooking differently remain his most enduring dish.