The Accidental Baker

How Jocelyn Turned a Pandemic Gamble Into Kuching's Tart Obsession

(PAUDIN COLLAB, JOCELYN)

At Roots & Bliss, Jocelyn never set out to be a chef. She just wanted to run a good cafe — and ended up baking one of Kuching's most talked-about tarts along the way.

Not every great food story starts in a kitchen. Jocelyn's starts in a classroom in Taiwan, in a food and beverage programme that had far more to do with service and operations than with pastry technique.

She never trained as a chef. She never enrolled in a baking course. If you ask her directly, she will tell you, plainly, that she isn't one — she is a business owner who happens to love to bake. 

A Job That Became an Education

Jocelyn spent five years in Taiwan during her college years, and it was there, almost incidentally, that the foundations of Roots & Bliss were laid — not in a lecture hall, but on the floor of a local cafe where she took a part-time job simply to get by as a student.

"I wasn't thinking about opening my own place at the time," she says. "I just needed a job while I was studying."

But the job became something more. Under her boss's guidance, she absorbed the unglamorous, essential mechanics of hospitality — how a cafe is actually run day to day, how service flows, how a small business survives. She speaks of that opportunity with real gratitude, aware now of how formative it was. "I'm very thankful for that. I didn't realise it then, but it changed how I think."

The Move Nobody Would Recommend

Covid-19 sent her home earlier than planned. What followed was, by her own admission, one of the least sensible business decisions imaginable — and also the one that changed everything.

A friend approached her with a proposal in the middle of the pandemic: open a cafe together, as partners, right when the F&B industry was at its most uncertain. Looking back, Jocelyn doesn't dress up the decision as a masterstroke of entrepreneurial vision. She's candid about it.

"Honestly, I wasn't really thinking straight at the time," she admits. "Now when I look back, I feel like I was too eager. It was such a risky move to open a cafe during that period." And yet — she doesn't regret it. Five years on, Roots & Bliss is still standing, still growing, and still hers.

Five Years In

What began as a pandemic-era leap taken without a fully thought-out plan has, five years later, become a fixture of Kuching's cafe scene. Jocelyn still doesn't call herself a chef — and she probably never will. But ask anyone who has had the tarts, and the label starts to feel beside the point.

Roots & Bliss Cafe
Ground Floor, Sublot 68, TT3 Plaza, 93350 Kuching, Sarawak

Mon–Thu: 10am–8pm
Fri–Sun: 11am–10pm