Jasleen Dua: From Restaurant Kitchens to Cooking on Her Own Terms

Jasleen's earliest food memories center on her grandmother, who was a chef in her own time and continued cooking professionally even later in life. By the age of eight, Jasleen had already decided she wanted to do something with food, and her grandmother became her first teacher. The two cooked and baked together for years.

One dish has stayed with her through everything. "It's a very simple thing, it's not complicated at all. It's called a chocolate roll, and my grandmother used to teach it in her cooking classes," she says. As a child, she would sit and watch her grandmother teach the recipe, waiting impatiently for the class to end so she could finally eat it. To this day, she still makes that same chocolate roll, and she made it for the people she worked for as a professional chef.

By the time she reached class ten, she had researched culinary careers and knew with certainty what she wanted to do.

Jasleen entered college thinking she would become a pastry chef. She had already run a home bakery for two years and was confident confectionery was her path. College changed that. She discovered a love for the hot kitchen and ended up working in restaurants and hotels, spending only six of her professional months in a bakery.

She trained and interned through the industry, eventually working at restaurants under hunger.inc, including time at Veronica's. She also worked at Toast Pasta Bar under head chef Devika Manjrekar, an experience that left a lasting impression. "She has been one of my biggest inspirations in the industry," Jasleen says. The restaurant was a majority-female establishment that genuinely treated its staff as equals, encouraged creativity, and built a culture of mutual respect that Jasleen rarely saw elsewhere in the industry.

At Toast, staff meals were not the standard dal-chawal-roti-sabzi rotation. The chef would cook elaborate dishes like Thai curry for the entire team, and on double-shift days, junior cooks were given a list of ingredients and the freedom to make anything they wanted, from a simple meal to a carbonara pasta. "She would actually encourage us to make something exciting and something different," Jasleen recalls. That experience reshaped her view of what a kitchen could be.

Jasleen is candid about the harder side of restaurant work. The hours were long, the conditions often punishing, and the culture in many establishments was difficult, particularly for women. She talks about the orthodox thinking that sidelined women into pastry sections under the guise of protection, and about the verbal abuse that remains common in many kitchens.

Eventually a medical issue with her eye made it difficult for her to stand the heat of professional kitchens for long stretches. Around the same time, she was preparing to get married, and her social media work had started to gain real traction. She made the decision to transition.

Asked Jasleen how she develops recipes and the answer was refreshingly unstructured. She does not sit down and plan content. She opens the fridge, looks at what she has, and starts cooking.

"When I have the ingredients in front of me, I just know what to do," she says. "Even if I've come back from somewhere and there are two random things or three random things in the fridge, I know I will make something out of it."

That intuition is the through-line of her work. It is shaped by her training, her years in professional kitchens, and a deep familiarity with food that started in her grandmother's classroom. If she had to choose one dish to eat for the rest of her life, it would be her mother's home cooking, something she has tried to replicate as a chef and still cannot get quite right.

Jasleen has been on Instagram for about a year and a half. The income from content creation eventually surpassed what she was earning in professional kitchens, which made the transition easier to commit to. But the platform has not been without its challenges.

The biggest one has been her setup. As someone who moves between cities, she has had to rebuild her filming environment from scratch multiple times. Each move resets her reach and forces her to experiment all over again with lighting, aesthetics, and angles. She tried daylight, nighttime, full Victorian-style setups, and finally landed on a low-light approach that worked. Some videos even hit millions of views, helping her account grow significantly.

Consistency has been the other hurdle, especially with exams, marriage, and relocation pulling her in different directions. She is honest about the unpredictability of the algorithm and the strange limbo many creators find themselves in, where reach and follower growth do not always match the quality of the work.

For all the strategy that goes into content creation, Jasleen's motivation is simple. "It is very simple. Hunger," she says. "Hunger keeps me going because I love to feed myself good things." Living with her husband, another foodie, has given her a built-in audience. Cooking for him, for guests, for her mother when she visits, those are the moments that keep her in the kitchen even on the days she feels low.

"No matter how low I feel, cooking always makes me feel better," she adds. "So that is also an escape for me."

When asked what she would tell other women in food, home cooks, or aspiring chefs reading her story, Jasleen does not hold back. The industry needs to change, and she believes change has to come from within. Too many talented people are leaving professional kitchens because of how they are treated, and she hopes the next generation of restaurant owners and chefs will build something different.

To creators specifically, her advice is short and clear:

"Don't let your creativity die. No matter what the industry tells you, no matter what chefs tell you, don't let your creativity die."

Jasleen's story sits at the intersection of formal training, hard-earned industry experience, and a deep personal love of food that has been with her since childhood. She is not just sharing recipes. She is sharing a perspective shaped by years of professional kitchens, by the chefs who lifted her up and the systems that pushed her out, and by a grandmother who first showed her what a life around food could look like.

Explore Jasleen's recipes on Chefadora at chefadora.com/@jasletmecook and follow her on Instagram at @jas.a.chef. Her work brings the depth of professional training and the warmth of home cooking together, with a generous dose of garlic and honesty in every dish.

Updated on 27 Apr 2026