Claudia Kwong: Keeping Hong Kong Home Cooking Alive in London

Before the recipes, there was fashion. Claudia studied Fine art, painting at university and went straight into retail at 21, and at 24 she started working as a personal shopper at a large London department store. She spent about five years in that world before she started to feel the ceiling of it, sensing there was not much more room to grow.

Food had been there the whole time. She traces the interest back to childhood, to being around seven years old and always curious about what she ate and how her family cooked. But when she was growing up, the path into food felt narrow. In her mind, becoming a chef meant culinary qualifications and formal courses, so she went the fashion route instead. Social media changed that calculation. Watching other creators share what they cooked at home, some trained and many not, she started her own page for fun while she was still working her job, mostly to see what it was like.

The decision to start did not come out of nowhere. Claudia was going through a difficult period at work, which pushed her to think hard about what she loved and what she would do if she ever left her job. Looking back now, she reads that stretch differently.

"Such difficulties at work were a blessing in disguise, otherwise I would have never had the courage or reason to start this page."

There was a concrete ambition behind it too. She had noticed that a recipe platform called Mob, which helps people with everyday cooking, often brings in chefs to develop recipes, and that the chefs it works with tend to have social media pages that double as portfolios. Building her own account and sharing her own recipes felt like a way to one day put herself in the running, even without formal experience or qualifications.

"At least I have an online portfolio to show people that I can actually recipe develop and cook."

She is also quick to credit the people around her. Without her colleagues' encouragement, she says, the page would never have existed. In the beginning, they were her only followers.

There was no formal training, and no culinary school. Part of that was cost. In London, she found culinary courses are expensive, so she taught herself the way many home cooks do. She asked her family how to make certain dishes, watched a lot of videos online, and cooked every single day. With that mixture, and enough repetition, she kept building.

Claudia's recipes are shaped by the pace of the two cities she knows best. Hong Kong and London both move quickly, and both leave people with only a handful of hours between finishing work and going to sleep. In that window there is dinner to cook, a kitchen to clean, a lunch to pack for tomorrow, and maybe a little time to unwind. Her food is built for exactly that reality.

The recipes are the ones she actually makes in her own daily life: quick, simple, and healthy-ish, either reminders of home or meals suited to a busy schedule. Most follow the same easygoing shape, a carb of rice or noodles, a protein, and some vegetables on the side, with no need to run four burners at once. She keeps the videos short, usually between 30 and 45 seconds, and posts two recipes a week, a rhythm she committed to at the start of the year.

"Cooking doesn't have to be hard, it doesn't have to take five hours, you don't have to have 25 different ingredients."

At home, rice is a constant. Claudia grew up in a family of four where a meal meant rice, vegetables, and protein, sometimes with a broth alongside, and that pattern still shapes how she eats and cooks in London. Though she moved to the city 20 years ago and has now lived there longer than she lived in Hong Kong, she has held onto her culture rather than letting it slip.

When it comes to a single favorite dish, she cannot quite commit, but she knows the category. Something with broth, eaten hot, is the thing she comes back to.

"It'll be some sort of noodle dish with broth."

Part of what drives the page is a sense of community. Claudia has noticed how many people from Hong Kong have moved to London in recent years, and how, for someone who relocates as an adult, food and language can become one of the last strong threads back to home. She cooks dishes that Hong Kongers will instantly recognize, some traditional and some simply part of growing up there, in the hope of building a space where people can find their own culture and share stories through it.

She sees it in her own life too. Many of her closest friends did not grow up the way she did, and while they share plenty, there are memories that only someone from the same place can fully picture. A Hong Kong breakfast set or a cup of Hong Kong milk tea needs no explanation to the right person.

One thing sets Claudia's page apart, though she is careful to say it is not a strategy. She is not in it. Her face does not appear, and until this interview, no one following her knew what she looked like. That is deliberate. She keeps her own life fairly private and was nervous about stepping into a world she does not otherwise spend much time in, so she made a choice at the start to let the recipes carry everything.

"I am the brand, but I also want the food itself to have a strong enough identity to drive the brand."

She does not chase trends or copy the way other creators film, and she does not plan a rigid weekly menu either. Much of what she makes comes down to mood and appetite on a given evening, the same way she decides what to cook for herself. When she cooks something she does not feel like cooking, she says, it never comes out as good.

Everything on the page is made by Claudia alone. She films first thing in the morning, before distraction sets in, then edits entirely on her phone, often on the bus, on her commute, or during a lunch break at her desk. The voiceover comes last, and she writes every caption and subtitle by hand rather than letting a tool generate them.

That last part is a point of principle. She does not use AI for her recipes, both because she wants the captions to read cleanly and because she believes shared, original ideas are worth more than something anyone could generate. If she has cooked and created a dish herself, she would rather pass on her own version of it.

The growth has been quick. Claudia began the year with 992 followers, hit 10,000 by the end of June, and reached around 19,500 by mid-August. She is proud of that, especially as someone who does not consider herself a social media expert and is simply posting what she likes. Her boyfriend put the number in perspective for her: 19,500 might sound modest online, but standing in a room with that many people would fill a stadium.

Even so, she tries not to pile on pressure, since the whole point was to keep it fun. A single message from someone saying they made one of her recipes, or a note from a stranger who has just moved to London and started cooking more because of her, already counts as the goal reached.

The trickiest part of the whole process, in her experience, is not the filming or the editing. It is writing out the captions, and specifically the measurements because it takes a lot of time since she doesn't use AI to generate the captions.

. Asian home cooking, as she describes it, is intuitive and generous, everything going into the wok by feel rather than by the tablespoon. Translating that instinct into precise amounts that a stranger can follow was the real learning curve.

For Claudia, the motivation is partly about proving something to a younger version of herself who assumed this field was closed to her without formal qualifications. Every small win, from a better-edited video to a moment of sharing her culture, counts as a win worth having. She is also candid that hard things are hard precisely because they matter, and that trying and failing sits far easier with her than never starting at all.

"I think regret is probably the worst feeling ever for myself, so if I want to do something I will just go for it."

That same drive is pushing her toward something new. Alongside the page, she is quietly working on a personal brand of her own, one rooted in her Hong Kong heritage, still in its early stages.

Asked what she would say to the people reading, Claudia kept it encouraging. Even if cooking does not come naturally, she wants people to try something simple and make it themselves.

"You will feel a great reward when you do it, because you took the time and made it yourself*."*

She also sees cooking as a way to meet people. In London she is drawn to the idea of supper clubs, informal gatherings where you can turn up alone or bring someone and end up sitting with strangers who share the same interest, and sometimes the same background. For anyone living far from where they grew up, she says, it can be a small way of feeling closer to home.

Claudia Kwong's page is the work of one person with a phone, a wok, and a clear idea of what she wants to share. The dishes are the ones she grew up eating, adapted for the pace of city life and stripped of anything that might make cooking feel out of reach. The execution is careful, the recipes are genuinely her own, and the mission is steady: keep Hong Kong home cooking alive, and make it feel possible for anyone willing to try.

Explore Claudia's recipes on Chefadora at chefadora.com/@somethingsscooking, and follow her on Instagram at @somethingsscooking, where she shares quick, culturally rooted Hong Kong recipes for busy home cooks. Chefadora is proud to spotlight creators like Claudia who are keeping their food culture alive and making home cooking feel welcoming to everyone.

Updated on 20 Aug 2026