About Us

Welcome to SCMP Cooking

SCMP Cooking is made up of a small team of food lovers who are fortunate enough to live in Hong Kong, where they can indulge in all types of cuisine. Several of them - Susan, Nellie and Jonathan - have been working together for years to cook, style and photograph the enticing photos you see in Susan’s recipe column in the SCMP Post Magazine.

Our aim at SCMP Cooking is, well, to get you cooking. But that’s not all; we want to spread the news about the huge diversity of food in this part of the world - not just new dishes to try, but also interesting ingredients that you may be curious about, but which you don’t know how to prepare.

Meet the team below!

Susan Jung

Food and wine editor

While attending UC Berkeley Susan cooked for her friends as a way to de-stress, but it wasn't until after she graduated with a degree in English literature that she thought of pursuing a career in cuisine. She trained as a pastry chef and worked in hotels, restaurants and bakeries in San Francisco, New York and Hong Kong before joining the South China Morning Post as food and wine editor. Susan travels extensively to eat, visiting everything from humble street stalls to Michelin-starred restaurants. The inspiration for the recipes she writes for her weekly cooking column in the SCMP Post Magazine come from dishes she tasted on her travels, looking at her friend's social media feeds to see what they're eating, her training in classic French and Italian pastry, the dishes she ate growing up in California, and her imagination.

Susan is academy chair for the Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan region of the World's 50 Best Restaurants and Asia's 50 Best Restaurants.

Paul Buck

Chief production editor

Paul Buck has worked in various editorial roles for the South China Morning Post since 1996. For him, cooking is a way to de-stress. He roasted his first chicken when he was 51. He is in awe of the intuitive Filipino cooks in his family.

Nellie Ming Lee

Food stylist

Nellie Ming Lee's family owned restaurants in Canada, and she learned more about cuisine when she attended the hospitality and gastronomy programme at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

Jonathan Wong

Photographer

Jonathan Wong was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and studied Fine Art at the University of Brighton in the UK. He has worked as a photographer for SCMP for more than a decade, and likes photographing food because he's always hungry, and more importantly, because it doesn't talk back!