Photography: Michael Thomas.
When Melissa Leong was asked to spend a month in Queenstown filming a new food-focused TV series, she didn’t hesitate. The former MasterChef Australia judge has visited Aotearoa often, touring luxury lodges as a travel journalist, and exploring areas like Kaikōura and the Marlborough Sounds.
“I’m very fond of New Zealand,” she tells Woman’s Day.
“I’ve done a number of road trips there and it’s probably some of the best in the world. So would I like to go back for a month to work and eat incredible food? It was a no-brainer for me.”
Last winter, Melissa, 44, filmed new series Taste Of Art alongside top Kiwi chef Vaughan Mabee. The show challenges the cooks behind some of our leading restaurants to push the boundaries.
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A foodie’s dream job
“It’s easily the best food I’ve ever judged in the context of a TV show,” she raves.
“I take judging food incredibly seriously and I’m truly impressed at the calibre of culinary talent New Zealand has to offer.”
While her job sounds like a foodie’s dream, Melissa does have to be prepared to eat some weird and crazy things. There’s no refusing to taste someone’s creation because she happens to not like an ingredient in it.
“I’ve eaten what you might deem weird foods,” she admits.
“Last year, I was in Nepal, where I ate an ancient Kathmandu dish that was ox bone marrow in a stomach-lining dumpling, served withva side of boiled ox spinal column. Those foods might make you squeamish, but what you’re eating is culture.”
Life beyond the kitchen
Since leaving MasterChef in 2023, Melissa’s career has taken her to some interesting places. She judged the spin-off show Dessert Masters, made her runway debut at Australian Fashion Week and competed in the celebrity edition of The Amazing Race Australia.
She also spent a very intense six or seven weeks writing her autobiography. While describing herself as a private person, Melissa has opened up about her rollercoaster of a life in the memoir Guts, published late last year. She shares her experience of depression, anxiety, bouts of loneliness and her struggle with bulimia, as well as revealing for the first time that she’s a rape survivor.
“There are some dark things, but other people have gone through them and knowing that kind of helped me get over the privacy thing,” she shares.
“If I’ve been through something and managed to emerge stronger on the other side, then I want to be able to share that with other people, so it helps them in some way.”
Facing the past
Melissa hadn’t been planning on writing about the sexual attack she suffered at the hands of an unnamed man some years ago.
“It was something that I hadn’t faced,” she says.
“I’d repressed it to the point where some of my best friends and my family weren’t aware it had happened to me. But it emerged in recent therapy.”
Sharing her story
Talking about that part of her life while promoting the book has been tough. At reader events, people have confided their own experiences of sexual violence and that’s been heavy too, although Melissa feels honoured they trust her.
While sharing what happened has also been therapeutic, she says she’s “still working through the pain and shame of it all”.
A complicated relationship with food
One of the highs of Melissa’s life has been her TV career, although she acknowledges the irony in being a famous cooking personality while also having had an unhealthy relationship with food.
“My eating disorder was about a lack of control in my life at the time,” explains Melissa.
“Sometimes you need to see food simply as essential nourishment, then gently you find the joy in remembering a dish that means something to you.”
After separating from her husband in 2020, Melbourne-based Melissa is now happily single and in a good place.
Open to love, on her terms
“I’m open to meeting people, for sure, but the way I see it is I have a great home, great friends and a beautiful life as it is, so I’m not going to make space for someone unless they bring something
to the table,” she says.
“I put every single molecule of myself into a relationship and I’m only going to do that again if the same courtesy is shown in my direction. So it’s not a no, but I really am not looking. I’m very content in
my life and in my skin. It’s going to take a very special person to ever change that.”
Taste Of Art premieres 7.30pm Thursday on TVNZ 1 and TVNZ+.
If you’ve experienced rape or sexual harm, call 0800 044 334 or text 4334 to speak to a trained counsellor. For help with an eating disorder, phone 0800 233 269 or visit ed.org.nz.
