Jessica Menezes laughs when she admits she “used to hate cooking.” Growing up in Macao, she did everything she could to stay out of the kitchen.
“I was the pickiest eater,” she said. “I wouldn’t even eat eggs unless I saw someone crack them.” Meals at home were usually cooked by her family’s helper, her mother, or occasionally her father, who favoured hearty ribs and prawns made entirely “from feeling, never a recipe.”
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Today, more than 430,000 people follow @thatfoodiejess, where the 27-year-old shares easy weeknight dishes, nostalgic Macao flavours and third-culture comfort food. She now works with major food and lifestyle brands, a long way from the girl who once survived on badly marinated chicken in a student kitchen. Menezes has been a full-time food creator since January this year, but the journey began long before Reels, algorithms and brand partnerships.
From rice cooker disasters to finding home
Menezes left Macao for boarding school in the UK, and later moved to Canterbury for university. She didn’t expect food to anchor her sense of home as much as it did.
“The first thing I missed was char siu and siu yuk,” she said, referring to the iconic Cantonese roasted and barbecued pork. “In Macao, you can get good siu mei [roast meat] anywhere. In Canterbury, the char siu was dry, and the sauces tasted strange.”
She tried recreating childhood dishes – her helper’s chicken adobo, her mother’s prawn curry with no written measurements – but the flavours never quite matched. Still, one thing always brought her back instantly: garlic and onions hitting a hot pan. “That smell is home,” she said.
Her first attempt at cooking at university was rice and chicken breast made in a rice cooker, which her parents insisted she bring. “It was so bad,” she joked. “But I had to learn because I refused to live in catered halls. I was too picky.”
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For a while, cooking was purely functional. By her second year, that began to change. She grew close to friends from across Asia, and their Wednesday food nights became a small community, rotating between kimbap, hot pot, Korean fried chicken and whatever else they felt like experimenting with.
One dish changed everything. In 2019, Menezes made Vietnamese-style fish sauce pork, swapping the chop for pork belly.
“My friends kept asking for it again and again,” she said. “They’d play Mario Kart while I cooked batch after batch. That was the first time I thought, okay… maybe cooking is actually fun.” Their encouragement and repeated requests for the recipe planted a seed.
Turning a passion into a full-time career
Menezes first entered social media through Hangry Gals, a food review page she started with two friends in 2020. They set up the account on the spot in a Japanese restaurant, then finished the branding at a branch of Costa – a popular UK café.
When the pandemic hit, reviews shifted toward home cooking. “We were just posting pictures of what we made,” she said. “No Reels, no videos yet.” As her friends became busier with work and studies, Menezes naturally took over, eventually launching @thatfoodiejess and applying everything she had learned – consistency, approachable recipes and her own personality.
Her “rabokki” recipe, a mash-up of the Korean rice cakes tteokbokki and ramen, went viral in 2021, pushing her following from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Another surge came with her dalgona honeycomb candy, timed perfectly with the Squid Game craze.
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Like many children from immigrant households, Menezes said her parents were cautious at first. Unsure whether content creation could be a stable career, they encouraged her to pursue a more traditional path.
“I kept thinking, if I don’t do it now, I’ll always wonder what if,” she said. When brand collaborations began matching her corporate salary, she felt ready to take the leap.
Her parents’ perspective shifted quickly once they saw her discipline and the income she could generate. Today, they are her unofficial PR team, proudly mentioning her Instagram page to friends and restaurant staff – much to her embarrassment. “It’s a nice change,” she said. “From worrying I wouldn’t get a full-time job to now being proud of what I do.”
Menezes’ content blends Macao nostalgia with everyday comfort food – dumplings, soy-based braises, and quick noodle dishes – recipes shaped by her third-culture upbringing. Her Third Culture Eats series highlights Macanese and Goan recipes, aiming to introduce followers to food cultures shaped by migration, memory and home cooking. “What resonates most with my audience,” she said, “is the personal side, like why a dish matters, not just how to make it.”
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She still uses the same small rice cooker from her first university meal, a quiet reminder of how far she has come. “Cooking became the thing that made me feel grounded,” she said. “And now I get to share that feeling with other people.” To anyone intimidated by cooking, her advice is “Just cook. It might be bad, but who cares? You’ll be more annoyed you didn’t start sooner.”
It’s a philosophy that took a picky eater from a university rice cooker to a full-time food creator with a global following, proving that the best stories don’t always begin with passion or family recipes, but with curiosity and the courage to try.
