On MasterChef Australia, Hong Kong’s Mimi Wong is ‘very proud’ to celebrate Asian cuisine

“She just pointed at a few things, and then went, ‘This is how you switch on the wok, and this is what you’re supposed to do. I’m just gonna leave you to it, and we’ll see what happens’.”

The resulting dish – a glistening plate of ketchup shrimp – was a success. Fast forward to today and Wong, now 26 years old, has continued cooking up a storm not just in Hong Kong but also in Australia, where she is competing in the 16th series of the reality cooking competition MasterChef Australia.

Some of that nation’s best home cooks compete in a series of challenges every week in the hope of winning A$250,000 (US$167,000) and becoming the next “master chef”.

Wong, who was born in Hong Kong, spent her early years in Sydney before returning to the city at the age of 11, after her parents separated.

It was here that she learned the fundamentals of cooking from her mother and grandmother – Wong’s “second mum” – but her passion for cooking grew exponentially during the coronavirus pandemic, after she had moved back to Australia for university.

“It’s me and my brother in Australia, and everyone else is back in Hong Kong, so there had to be someone to take on that matriarch role of enforcing tradition on somebody else, like: ‘I don’t care what you’re doing, you just have to come to my house’. We have to eat nian gao [rice cake] on Chinese New Year, we have to make soup on this day,” she says.

“My brother wasn’t going to do it because he’s lazy,” she says with a chuckle. “So I was like, ‘I’m going to call mum or ah por and figure out how to do it’, so that there’s still reason and purpose, and something to keep the culture and family alive between my brother and I.”

Before long, cooking Cantonese dishes, as well as new fusion creations, became a way for Wong to reconcile her dual Eastern and Western upbringing.

“It just became a way for me to process a lot of discomfort in those experiences,” she says.

Wong began posting her dishes on Instagram, where her photos caught the attention of a MasterChef casting producer, who reached out with an invitation to apply for the show.

From there, the whole process was a whirlwind, Wong recalls. She took time to write her application but forgot to save the document and lost it.

As a result, on deadline day, her boss sent her home early so she could finish it – she submitted her application 45 minutes before the cut-off time.

“I still think back to that time, and how surreal it all felt,” says Wong. “The students were so supportive, my colleagues were super excited. It gives me goosebumps.”

Wong has now – spoiler alert – cracked the top seven on this season of MasterChef Australia, and will be heading to Hong Kong with the rest of the cast for the next episodes, but her journey so far has been filled with ups and downs.

On day two of the competition, she took on the role of team leader in the first team challenge, which saw all the contestants prepare dishes for 40 previous MasterChef contestants.

“That is still No 1, the most ridiculous day,” recalls Wong. “Just to walk into the kitchen, day two, with Julie Goodwin, Declan [Cleary], Jess [Liemantara], all these big names standing in front of me – I was just like, ‘I can’t believe I get to be a part of this now’.”

Wong’s purple team served a three-course menu with pork wontons, lamb backstrap and a grapefruit-soaked date sponge, but ultimately lost to the burgundy team –because their main course lacked cohesiveness.

For Wong, the transition from home cooking to competitive cooking required incessant preparation, which involved learning new skills, techniques and cuisines before the competition and during the downtime between challenges.

“It was definitely very, very terrifying. You watch a show, and you’re like, ‘There’s no way I can do that’,” she says. “I was just glued to cookbooks or to Instagram reels and YouTube videos.

“I had never let my brain absorb so much food content in such a short amount of time.”

Although Wong made it through the first two weeks of the competition without hiccups, in week three, she narrowly escaped elimination with her recreation of judge Jean-Christophe Novelli’s sugar-glass-encased “Jack in the Box” dessert.

It was Wong’s split chocolate mousse part of the dessert that landed her in the bottom two, just above fellow contestant Khristian Walker.

If Wong had left the competition then, she would have been crushed, she says.

“After that bottom two, I had such a fire. I let loose a little bit, and was just like, ‘OK, I almost got sent home, and if I did, I would have regretted it and I would have been really, really hurt. What can I do now to prove myself, but also just enjoy the process of being there? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’,” she says.

“Gauging the rest of the room, I found confidence in knowing that I have a creative upper hand against everyone else.

“Everyone either had really strong ties to their culture or were very technically equipped in certain areas of cooking, but if there was one thing I could do to make myself stand out, it was the power of creativity, because I’m from two cultures and because I’m from the East and West.”

From there, Wong made a range of – as she describes them – “rogue” dishes that were highly praised or saved her from elimination, including a tonkatsu-inspired oatmeal, which was born out of her frustration at mixing up oats with flour during a previous taste test, and honey butter crisps with corn ice cream and Parmesan cheese.

Meanwhile, Wong’s unconventional take on turnip cake – a deep-fried version with poached egg and dried scallop hollandaise that served as an ode to her brother’s maximalist foodie tendencies – earned her a top three shoutout during week five’s mystery box challenge.

That same week, Wong served up fortune cookies for a microwave hack challenge. Featuring langue de chat with salted egg jam, banana cremeux, caramelised white chocolate and Pu-erh sugar, the cookies were served in a dim sum basket – a tribute to her Hong Kong upbringing.

“That was a special one for me because I really wanted to put a dish out there that encapsulated a lot of the great memories I have with my friends growing up in Hong Kong,” she says, adding that the dish was inspired by her and her high school best friend’s favourite dim sum, salted egg custard buns.

Since then, Wong has also served a trio of Cantonese dishes for chef Rick Stein’s seafood elimination challenge: garlic prawns; clams with black bean sauce; and dried scallop fried rice.

Although her prawns were overcooked, Wong’s flavours allowed her to avoid elimination once again despite being in the bottom two.

More recently, she has dished up her immunity-winning “Bouche-kin” – a croquembouche consisting of chocolate-spiced choux au craquelin filled with miso pumpkin creme patisserie – and her spicy pork scissor-cut noodles, which was declared the best dish of the day for Nagi Maehashi’s mega mystery box challenge.

At the time of writing, MasterChef is still airing, so Wong’s fate in the competition is unknown. But one thing’s for sure: she is the first MasterChef Australia contestant with a Hong Kong background who has made it past the top eight, a fact that she does not take lightly.

“I’m very proud,” she says of the opportunity to showcase her upbringing and culture in the kitchen. “The ability to celebrate Asian cuisine on such a grand stage – I don’t think you can encapsulate in words the gravity of that.”

For Wong, growing up in densely populated Hong Kong meant she “always felt quite mediocre as a person, like I was just another face in the crowd”, she says. “I’ve always felt like I have to work 10 times harder to get places and be heard, understood and valued.

“Standing in the kitchen today, it makes me very emotional to mitigate some of that feeling, and to show people in Hong Kong: you can dream, you can achieve things, you can go far and you can push to stand out.”