Jing Liu

Chef · Culinary Consultant · Culinary Educator

Jing Liu is a professionally trained chef, culinary consultant and culinary educator based in the Washington, D.C. area. Born and raised in Guangdong, China, where food and tea are deeply woven into everyday life, she moved to the UK as a teenager and later earned a master’s degree from the University of Manchester Business School. Before pursuing a culinary career, Jing worked in financial consulting and investigations, including experience with a Big Four firm and an international organization in Washington, D.C.

Jing later trained at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, where she received the Grand Diplôme in Cuisine and Pastry. Through JingsPalate, which she founded in 2013, her work now spans culinary consulting, menu and recipe development, tasting experiences, pop-ups, culinary education and collaborative events.

Her cooking is rooted in Asian culinary traditions while drawing on techniques and experiences gathered through her international background and professional training. Her recent work has explored contemporary Asian cuisine, tea gastronomy, dim sum, pastry and plant-forward food, often using seasonality and cultural storytelling as starting points for developing dishes and experiences.

Jing has collaborated with restaurants, markets and cultural organizations on culinary events, classes and product development, including an ongoing collaboration with Chinese Street Market. She is also the founder of TRY SUM, a dim sum-inspired concept exploring contemporary bites, plant-forward desserts and tea-based drinks.

Alongside her culinary practice, Jing is currently pursuing an MSc in Food, Nutrition and Health at University College Dublin, further developing her interest in the relationship between culinary practice, nutrition, sustainability and how people experience food.

Christine Tan

Owner of Superette Baking

Christine Tan, owner of Superette Baking, first introduced herself to us at Chevy Chase Farmer's Market where she said our fresh handmade noodles "were as good as the ones she grew up eating in Vancouver BC." She also revealed that she was a self-taught baker who started baking in graduate school as a way to break up long stretches of research and writing in Chinese art history. Later, while juggling a young family and academic museum work at the Freer Sackler, Christine continued to refine her baking craft and creative process - most often in the middle of the night while the rest of her family was asleep. In 2019, Christine launched Superette Baking with a sold-out Thanksgiving pie pop up, and has since offered cakes, pies, cookies, and macarons to customers in NWDC and beyond. Using fresh florals and other lyrical touches, Superette pastries are known for their attention to detail, respect for cultural traditions, and dedication to flavor and seasonality.

Yuxuan Cai

Historian and Food & Culture Educator

Yuxuan was born to a Teochew-Zhenjiang/Yangchow family in Beijing. As her father is a TCM orthopaedist, mother a formidable home cook, Chinese culinary and medical traditions converge on the family’s dinner table. Outside, she would experience some Beijing food and other regional cuisines of China, which can easily find in the metropolis.

Now, as a young historian, Yuxuan mainly works on the early modern Ottoman Balkans. She is a fresh Georgetown graduate and a Ph.D candidate at University of Cambridge, also the Chinese translator of several academic monographs on the Ottoman Empire. Travels around the East Mediterranean World and the multilingual skills she earned along her studies opened up a whole new culinary world for her. Being an open person, she is always seeking new cuisines to try; still, over reading and experiments, she has become increasingly aware of the parallels between the cuisine of the southeastern coast of China and that of the Northern Mediterranean Sea, despite different climates. Similar produce, similar ways of ingredient pairings and food presentation, and the celebration of the simplicity of flavours where “umami (鮮味)” comes from, which is the most important elements in the food philosophy shared among coastal peoples.

Yuxuan’s recipes are fairly traditional and authentic, neither fusion nor over-fancy, but she allows herself poetic license and updates them to make the most of local growers and artisan charcuteries. Yuxuan hopes to serve the community with food made from what she gets locally by observing the Farm-to-Table movement.

Eric Chiu

Aspiring Guest Chef

Eric is a Chinese-American designer and researcher whose father immigrated from Hong Kong in the late 1960s for university in California. Since his household spoke exclusively English as a family, he resorted to learning about his Asian heritage through non-verbal means such as art, folklore, and cuisine. Growing up in the suburbs of New York City and spending summers with his family in Kowloon, Eric was exposed to some of the most active Asian food cultures.
During his formative years, he and his family relocated to Augusta, GA, where they found a lively but more modestly sized Chinese community. While welcoming, this environment also came with its fair share of close-mindedness from both neighbors and classmates. His biracial appearance ensured only one feeling: that he was too white to be asian, yet too asian to be white. As an adolescent navigating nascent realizations of a deeper queer identity, this created ruptures in his idea of self. For Eric, food has always evoked an honest, non judgemental space where he's free to explore his identities and define his own sense of home.
Through years of healing and self-discovery, Eric's learned to celebrate all parts of himself and recognize how they intersect. Recently, Eric and his parents are documenting their family's recipes through writing and pictures.