PLATES of steaming hot jiao zi, boiled dumplings filled with chicken, pork and coriander, are quickly followed by fresh cucumber salad, tender green beans cooked with chilli and guo tie, pan-fried dumplings.

We hardly have time to pick up our chopsticks before more plates arrive, with crispy Northern beef, spicy fried potatoes and sweet and sour pork ribs.

Now I know what Jian Wang meant when she warned: “Make sure you’re hungry” when we arranged to meet for lunch.

The chef and proprietor of the hugely successful Chop Chop restaurants in Glasgow and Edinburgh is filling me in on the secret of her success. It’s a delicious tale as mouthwatering as anything on the menu.

With plans to expand the chain across the UK, she is actively looking for premises for the next opening. World domination awaits, and I don’t doubt it for a second.

This is the woman who made memorable TV viewing when she stopped F-Word host Gordon Ramsay in his tracks and he proclaimed her home-made dumplings the best he had ever tasted.

What made a classically trained violin player who ran her own successful advertising company in China move to Scotland with her young son to start a new life?

“When I set my mind to do something, nothing gets in my way,” she laughs. The smile belies the years of sheer hard work Jian has put in. “It was very difficult but at the time I didn’t think about it, I just got on with it.”

With a love of food nurtured as a teenager growing up in Changchun in north-east China, Jian was the youngest of four children who parents worked for the government. She always wanted to be a chef but her plans were put on hold when she studied the violin at university.

“I made some money in China with my advertising company and wanted to put it to good use: to invest in my son’s education,” she says.

“We arrived in Edinburgh in 1997 and when I went to a Chinese supermarket I couldn’t find any dumplings. That’s when I got the idea to make my own.

“That was the start of a hard journey for six years. I cried every day – it was difficult setting up a business when nobody knew me, my English wasn’t good and I was homesick. My money ran out, it was a real struggle, but it isn’t in my character to give up.”

Recipes learned from her mother and grandmother were recreated in Jian’s kitchen at home in Edinburgh and slowly but surely, building up contacts, she sold them to the Chinese community, starting with a women’s group in Glasgow.

Word spread and over the following years, Jian set up a small industrial unit and then her own factory producing dumplings, selling them to more than 50 Chinese supermarkets across the country.

Now she also has a deal to sell them in Aldi stores.

“At the back of my mind I always wanted to open my own restaurant. When restaurants asked me to sell them dumplings I always refused,” says the 54-year-old, who is now married to her business partner Roy King and has an 11 year-old daughter. Her son is now grown up and has two daughters of his own.

Unlike the Cantonese cuisine Scots are familiar with in their local Chinese restaurant, Jian’s menu features choice dishes from north-east China, including those fabulous dumplings. It was a learning curve for diners at first but they soon fell in love with the delicate flavours from Jian’s hometown.

“When people came in at first they asked for chicken curry and chips. I didn’t know what a curry was. I would say to, ‘Eat whatever you want, if you don’t like it you don’t need to pay’. Even now, I still do that. It people don’t like the food I don’t charge,” she says.

As more food arrives on the table, Jian goes on to explain how her loyal customers – there are 24,000 of them signed up to Chop Chop’s loyalty club – now help to shape the menu.

“The dumplings are my signature dish and they never change on the menu. Every November I invite my members over two weeks to come in and try a new dish for free,” she explains, as we try sunset prawns, one of her newest recipes.

“I think of my customers as like my extended family and their opinion counts. They score the dishes and the most popular go on to be served in the restaurants.”

Though she doesn’t do much of the restaurant cooking these days, Jian still keeps a strict eye over the kitchen.

“If something isn’t right I notice immediately. Even if the cooking odour is not right, I can tell that means something is wrong. It might not be cooked for long enough, or for too long,” she comments.

When chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsay filmed Chop Chop for the Channel 4’s F-Word he asked Jian what one word summed up her restaurant.

The answer was simple. “Love. I am passionate about food,” she says.

It is rolled into the dough that makes every dumpling, no wonder we can’t stop eating them.

Chop Chop, 43 Mitchell Street, Glasgow. Visit www.chop-chop.co.uk