Harkajeet Lama: Keep It Simple, Keep It Short

Harkajeet didn't grow up with a particular passion for cooking. What caught his attention at home was technique, specifically watching someone chop on a chopping board really fast. He found it intriguing and would always try to learn it himself.

His sister watched a lot of cooking shows like MasterChef. Harkajeet wasn't especially interested at first and mostly watched to keep her company, but over time the shows drew him in and planted the idea of taking cooking further.

The food he grew up eating shaped his taste more than any show. The cooking at home didn't rely on heavy spices or heavy ingredients, and curries were built around whatever was in season and available from the family's kitchen garden.

"For me, food always tasted the best at its simplest form."

Asked about the food scene in Nepal, Harkajeet is upfront that he never really explored the food industry there. From what he knows, much of the popular food is a fusion of Indian, Nepalese, and Chinese influences, with momo and chow mein among the most familiar dishes.

He points to Newari food as especially popular, describing a whole community built around food and cultural heritage. In his view, it's what people in Nepal often prefer over anything else.

If he could eat only one dish for the rest of his life, the answer comes easily.

"It would be something hearty, like the one we have in our country, momo. I can die for it."

Harkajeet arrived in Australia in 2022 for his studies, and the first stretch was hard on him. He had never really liked eating food outside home, and in a new country everything felt different, from the smells to the taste of the food. He says it didn't sit well with his appetite.

Even basic ingredients were a letdown. Cilantro and tomatoes, he found, lacked the flavor of the produce grown organically in the kitchen garden back home. Small differences like these bothered him a lot in the beginning, and it was only once he began pursuing cooking seriously that he started exploring the food around him more and more.

During his studies, Harkajeet needed a part-time job to support his education, and he found one in a Lebanese restaurant. At the time he had no real knowledge of the food industry or of any cuisine besides Nepalese food.

The longer he kept at it, the more he learned. Eventually he found himself wanting something more from cooking, and that is how his path into the industry began.

On his days off, Harkajeet would cook something new purely for his own learning and take photos of the results. Later, a friend suggested he start creating videos of those recipes instead.

His first videos were noodle recipes and basic home cooking. Toward the end of 2025 he began consistently uploading full recipe videos, and he says he got better with each one, which kept him going. He shares his cooking on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and is also on YouTube.

As he kept posting, Harkajeet noticed that people liked his pasta series more than anything else he made. He followed that response and began focusing on pasta dishes.

His day job feeds directly into that focus. He works as a junior sous chef at an Italian restaurant at SkyCity, and he credits it as the place where his pasta cooking really started. He says he is very grateful for the opportunity.

"That's where I get my inspiration for pastas and everything."

The algorithm has reinforced the choice. In his experience, his other cooking videos tend to get limited reach unless they're pasta, so for a while he stuck closely to what was working and didn't explore much beyond it.

As a student, Harkajeet had two days of classes a week plus part-time work, which left him enough time to learn and create. That changed when he started working full-time. His shifts typically run from around 1 or 2 in the afternoon until 11 or midnight, so filming dropped to once or twice a week.

He was recently promoted, and since then keeping up has been even harder. He admits he hasn't been keeping up with the cooking videos lately.

Not every video lands the way he hopes. Harkajeet says he'll often make something he finds different and interesting, to the point of rewatching it again and again, only to see it get little reach once it's posted.

Early on, figuring out what people would like and how to engage with them felt like a real challenge, and his answer was to stick to what performed. Lately, busy with work, he has loosened up and started posting whatever he feels like. He knows it's tricky with the algorithm, but he wants to push something different so he can keep growing.

Harkajeet isn't trying to outdo anyone in a crowded space. Asked whether he sees himself as competitive, he says he'd rather go with the flow.

That attitude carries into his videos. He keeps the editing as simple as his cooking style, with no unnecessary extras.

"I just try to keep it simple, keep it short."

It's an approach that echoes the home cooking he grew up with.

When he first started, Harkajeet looked to creators whose style he liked and thought about how he might present himself in a similar way. As he followed and connected with more chefs and content creators, he began scrolling through their work for ideas and looking for his own variation on what they were doing.

Over time he came to believe that community matters more than the algorithm or the views. In his view, the restrictions creators follow just to get views fall away once there's a real community behind them.

"That breaks the boundaries when you have a better community."

He's honest that he doesn't have a great community yet. For now, engagement mostly happens through comments and the occasional DM, and he has been trying different things and collaborating with others to connect more. He sees it as something to learn and grow with.

Harkajeet sometimes gets questions from people asking how to start. His answer is the one he lives by.

"I would say just give it a go, just don't overthink about anything."

Once you start uploading, he says, you get better each time you post. That's how he learned, and it's what he tells anyone thinking about starting someday.

Explore Harkajeet’s recipes on Chefadora at chefadora.com/@harkacooks and follow his journey on Instagram at @harka_cooks. Harkajeet's path has been built on learning by doing: a student job in a Lebanese kitchen, day-off experiments that became recipe videos, and an Italian restaurant that turned pasta into his focus. Through all of it, he has held on to the idea he grew up with, that food is best kept simple.

Updated on 26 Oct 2026