There are chefs who build their careers around technique, accolades and perfectly composed plates.

And then there are chefs whose food tells you exactly where they come from.

Chef Jackie is firmly in the second category.

A Queens, New York native with Latin and South Korean roots, Jackie grew up in a city where cultures don’t simply exist beside one another — they collide, blend and create something entirely new.

You can taste that upbringing in Chinas y Latinas.

Bold. Colorful. Loud. Familiar. Comforting.

It is food with unmistakable New York energy, inspired by the neighborhoods, people and cultures spread across Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island. Asian and Latin classics share the same table, while the Chino-Latino flavors Jackie grew up around become the foundation for something deeply personal.

But Chinas y Latinas isn’t simply a fusion concept.

It’s Jackie’s story.

And after spending more than a decade inside the demanding world of professional kitchens, it’s also what cooking looks like when a chef finally gives herself permission to have fun again.

Raised by the Melting Pot

For Jackie, food has never existed separately from culture.

She comes from proud Latin and South Korean backgrounds where food is at the center of family, identity and connection. Add growing up in Queens — one of the most culturally diverse places in America — and her culinary perspective began developing long before she ever stepped inside a professional kitchen.

New York exposed her to an endless exchange of flavors and traditions.

Chinese. Korean. Latin. Caribbean. Italian. Street food. Neighborhood institutions. Corner spots you swear by. The pizza place everyone argues is the best. The bagel shop you wouldn’t dare replace.

It all becomes part of your culinary vocabulary.

For Jackie, so did the culture surrounding it.

Hip-hop. Fashion. Art. Street culture. Movement. Personality.

Chinas y Latinas brings those worlds together.

The cooking celebrates Asian and Latin classics while exploring the deeply rooted Chino-Latino culture that has long existed within New York City’s culinary landscape. The result isn’t food designed simply to look interesting on a plate.

It’s storytelling.

Every dish carries a little piece of the city that raised her.

A Chef Forged in Serious Kitchens

Before Chinas y Latinas became Jackie’s creative playground, she spent more than a decade building a career in the restaurant industry.

Her experience took her through fine dining, private events, high-profile cooking and three-Michelin-star kitchens — environments where precision isn’t optional and expectations are relentless.

That experience gave Jackie an extraordinary culinary education.

It also eventually showed her what she didn’t want her life to become.

Like many chefs who climb through the restaurant world, success came with a cost.

At its most demanding, Jackie’s life meant 80-plus-hour workweeks, few days off and precious little time for friends, family or anything outside the restaurant.

And as she advanced, something else happened.

She started cooking less.

During her final years in restaurants, much of her time was spent in an office managing numbers, completing performance reviews, answering emails, dealing with administrative responsibilities and approving other people’s vacations while rarely getting to enjoy one herself.

Her sous chefs were running the kitchen.

Jackie was running the business.

For someone who fell in love with cooking, the higher she climbed, the further she found herself from the thing that brought her there.

Eventually, she walked away.

Learning to Cook Free Again

Leaving restaurant life didn’t mean Jackie stopped being a chef.

It meant she had to rediscover what being one meant to her.

More than five years removed from restaurants, Jackie describes the way she cooks now with a word you don’t often hear associated with professional kitchens:

Freedom.

There is a rebelliousness to it — the kind of cooking that values instinct, personality, curiosity and experience over rigid expectations.

It’s a philosophy reminiscent of the late Anthony Bourdain, a chef Jackie references when describing the freedom she has found outside the traditional restaurant system.

Today, she works as a private chef for clients from Atlanta to Columbus, creating intimate dinners, events and elevated culinary experiences without surrendering the parts of herself that exist outside the kitchen.

And in May 2026, she added something entirely different to the adventure.

A food truck.

Chinas y Latinas gave Jackie a new canvas for everything she had accumulated along the way: Michelin-level discipline, New York swagger, Korean and Latin heritage, street-food energy and the confidence to stop worrying about whether those worlds were “supposed” to exist together.

They already existed together in her.

Now they’re on the menu.

Bringing New York Flavor South

Jackie relocated south in 2022.

This time, she says she’s here to stay.

And with Chinas y Latinas, she’s bringing a piece of New York with her.

Not a watered-down interpretation of it.

The real thing.

The flavors are robust and unapologetic. The food can be playful without losing its roots and elevated without becoming unrecognizable.

That’s an important distinction.

Jackie has cooked at a level where food can become extraordinarily technical, but Chinas y Latinas isn’t about proving how sophisticated a chef she is.

Her résumé already does that.

This chapter is about cooking food she loves.

The food she remembers.

The food that feels like home.

And sharing it with a new community in Georgia.

There Is More to Jackie Than the Chef Coat

Spend enough time talking to Jackie and it becomes clear that cooking is only one expression of a much bigger personality.

She roller-skates and rollerblades.

She salsa dances.

She loves art, fashion and plants.

She’s multilingual, speaking Korean and Spanish along with some Italian.

Her favorite foods aren’t necessarily elaborate tasting-menu creations, either.

Give her oysters, pizza or a great New York bagel.

And then there’s running.

Of all the things outside the kitchen that have shaped Jackie, running carries perhaps the most weight.

In her words, running saved her life.

After years spent inside an industry that demanded nearly everything she had, movement became part of finding herself again.

Cooking, running, skating, laughing, traveling and chasing new experiences became more than hobbies.

They became therapy.

They became a way of building a life where being a chef no longer required sacrificing everything else.

A New Chapter, Served Her Way

Maybe that’s what makes Chinas y Latinas so interesting.

The food comes from a chef with serious credentials, but the concept isn’t trying to feel serious.

It has personality.

It has history.

It has a little rebellion in it.

Most importantly, it feels like Jackie.

This is a chef who spent years learning the rules at the highest levels of the industry and eventually discovered that the most fulfilling chapter might begin when she stopped allowing those rules to define her.

Now, from private dining tables to the window of her food truck, Jackie gets to cook on her own terms.

Queens is still there.

Her Korean and Latin roots are there.

The Michelin kitchens are there.

The difficult years are there, too.

But so are the art, the fashion, the hip-hop, the salsa dancing, the roller skates, the miles she’s run and the new community she’s found in Georgia.

It all makes its way into the story.

Because with Chef Jackie and Chinas y Latinas, what’s on the plate was never supposed to be just food.

It’s culture.

It’s memory.

It’s freedom.

And it’s a little piece of New York City, finding a new home in the South.