Maria Silva: A Table of Her Own

Maria's interest in cooking goes back to when she was seven or eight, watching her mother, who ran a food business on and off from home. She wanted to be part of every bit of it.

"I just wanted to help her with every single thing that went on," she says.

The passion was there early, even if the chance to act on it was not.

Right after graduating, she started a short culinary course, but stepped away from it when she married young and settled into family life. There was no degree and no formal training after that. Everything she knows, she picked up by doing.

Maria is not drawn to fine dining or complicated technique for its own sake. When something intricate does catch her eye, she reworks it until it is easy enough for anyone to make at home.

"Even if I like something complicated, I'll take it and make it so everybody can freely make it at home," she says.

Fusion and contemporary flavors are where she is happiest, but accessibility is the part she will not compromise on. She thinks about the person on the other side of the screen, someone looking for something they can realistically cook after a long day, and builds toward that.

The polished version of MasterChef is a tidy edit of under an hour. The reality, Maria says, was five to six months of near-constant filming, with days that ran fifteen hours or more. As a mother of two, she had to keep things steady at home while she was away for long stretches, and the pace wore on everyone, physically and mentally.

The kitchen itself is its own kind of pressure.

"You can't even cook an egg inside the MasterChef kitchen,"

she says, describing how the stress and the cameras can wipe your mind blank. What audiences never see is the prep, the lighting, the resets, and the hours that stack up behind every short segment on screen.

Maria walked into that kitchen wondering whether she belonged there, and by the end she had changed that thought. The competition did more than test her cooking.

"That's the first time I actually did something big for myself," she says.

It shifted how she looked at her own life.

It also showed her something new about what she wanted. She realized she does not only love to cook. She loves to create content and to create experiences, and MasterChef was where that clicked into place.

Maria is from Colombo, in Sri Lanka's Western Province, a place she describes through hoppers, roti, rice, and a level of spice that runs high across the board. She talks about the variety most of all, and about how much she misses that particular kind of heat and range whenever she travels abroad.

Seafood is central, especially along the southern and coastal areas. She points to regional varieties of crab curries; Jaffna crab curry and the Negombo crab curry as two of her signatures, tied to different parts of the country.

Ask about a childhood dish and Maria goes straight to the crab curry her nanny used to make, one she has since posted herself. It was never an everyday meal. Crab was expensive, and it was considered too "heaty" for the body to eat often, so it turned up rarely and became something to look forward to. She would wait days for it, and beg for it when the craving hit. That patience is part of why the memory stuck.

Beyond the recipes, Maria runs a supper club called Table by Maria out of her own apartment in Colombo. She converted a spare room into a dining space that seats up to eight, then started hosting three and four course sessions for tables of complete strangers. The supper club format is still unfamiliar in Sri Lanka, which is exactly why she wanted to try it.

She does all of this alongside her main profession as a wedding planner, so the food work sits inside an already full schedule. She treats that as normal rather than as a problem to solve.

Maria's process is not really a process. She does not follow a fixed method. She writes things down as they come and lets the ideas arrive on their own, because overthinking tends to shut them off entirely. What is in her head goes onto the page, and that is the recipe.

The same instinct shapes how she shows up online. She works with a team, but she is firm that nothing should feel staged. There is a loose script up to a point, and then she keeps it natural so that people can connect with her. That, she feels, is what sets her apart in a space that has grown crowded since MasterChef Sri Lanka arrived. Because it is not forced and not fake, she can enjoy the work and still see it land.

Ask Maria what keeps her going and she points to two things: her family, and herself. She grew up with a single mother and later spent years as a single mother of her own, and much of her drive comes from wanting to push her limits and show her children what starting over can look like. MasterChef, she says, was the first time she did something big for herself, and she wants that to mean something to them.

"It's never too late. Go out there and do something for yourself,"

she says, and it doubles as her advice to anyone reading. She tends not to overthink the logistics of a full life. She handles what is in front of her, brings her children along when she can, and stays in the moment rather than worrying about the week ahead. Her message about food follows the same logic. It should be easy, accessible, and one less thing making a hectic life harder.

Maria Silva's cooking is the product of a passion that started in her mother's kitchen, years of putting others first, and a competition that finally gave her a reason to do something for herself. The dishes she shares are meant to fit into a real, busy life rather than complicate it: simple, accessible, and rooted in the Sri Lankan flavors she grew up with.

Explore Maria's recipes at chefadora.com/@mariasilva and follow Maria on Instagram at @hey.itsmariasilva, where she shares easy Sri Lankan and fusion recipes from Colombo. Chefadora is proud to spotlight creators like Maria who are making home cooking feel possible for everyone and bringing South Asian kitchens to a wider audience.

Updated on 31 Aug 2026