https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voQ6uPFj2Dw
▶️ WATCH ABOVE: Interview with Adam Liaw on ‘Uncommon Ground’

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For most of us food is rarely just food. A familiar dish can transport us across decades and continents. A smell can remind us of a grandparent, a childhood kitchen or a country we no longer live in.

Recipes are handed down through generations, sometimes with meticulous instructions, more often with little more than instinct. And for migrant families in particular, food can become one of the strongest connections to the place they left behind.

Liaw was born in Malaysia to two doctors. His mother has English, French and Indonesian heritage, while his father is Chinese Malaysian. The family moved to Australia when Liaw was three and settled in Adelaide, where his grandmother also lived with them.

With both parents working as doctors, his grandmother played a major role in his childhood and having worked at a rest house in Malaysia, helped Adam establish a relationship with food that would eventually shape his life.

Liaw and his brother learned to fend for themselves from a young age. Both were academically gifted and, when their parents moved overseas for work, the brothers remained in Adelaide to continue their education. Liaw finished school early, studied law and science and began working as a lawyer at around 20.

Food was always a passion, but it took moving to Japan for cooking to become something more.

By 2009, Liaw had built the kind of career many migrant parents dream of for their children. He was a lawyer working in Japan for one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world. It was stable, prestigious and secure.

It was also becoming boring.

The Global Financial Crisis had slowed business considerably and Liaw, having spent years making his legal department as efficient as possible, suddenly found himself without enough to do. Around the same time, a friend suggested he apply for the second season of MasterChef Australia.

He sent in an application almost on a whim, then went travelling with his girlfriend, who is now his wife. When producers called and asked him to audition, Liaw initially turned them down.

It didn’t make sense. He had a career. He lived overseas. Walking away from a secure profession to audition for a reality television cooking show was hardly the obvious next move.

Surprisingly for Liaw it was his father who helped change his mind.

He expected the familiar migrant-parent advice, “keep the good job, protect what you have, stay safe.” Instead, his father pointed out that Liaw had barely stopped working since childhood. He had started university at 15, gone almost immediately from study into law and later moved between jobs with barely a break.

Why not take some time off?

Liaw took the advice and returned to Australia to audition for the show. What he discovered there surprised him.

“There was something about the process… it wasn’t even cooking at that point. It was just storytelling, talking about food, something that I’ve loved all my life.”

Liaw went on to win MasterChef, in a finale watched by millions of Australians. From the outside, it looked like the moment that changed everything.

But despite the enormous audience, the commercial opportunities he expected never really materialised. Instead, his defining break came later when SBS needed a replacement presenter for Destination Flavour. Someone involved with the production happened to follow Liaw on Twitter and thought he might be right for the role.

That chance opportunity led to years of television, including a series filmed in Japan where his language skills, knowledge of the country and love of food suddenly came together.

“Being able to tell stories about food was kind of my dream job.”

More than a decade later, Liaw has written around 11 books, hosted numerous television programs, established a production company and serves on several boards. Yet when asked what his career has taught him, he doesn’t point to talent or even hard work.

For Liaw, success is partly about putting yourself in places where opportunities can find you and then having the judgement to recognise the ones worth taking.

“You have to be able to fail multiple times. You have to be able to fail and have that not destroy you to be able to take advantage of the next opportunity.”

It’s an interesting philosophy from someone whose career can appear, from the outside, to be an uninterrupted string of successes. Liaw started university at an age when most teenagers are barely thinking about it, became a lawyer, moved overseas, won the country’s biggest cooking competition and built a successful media career.

But he doesn’t see his life that way. Failure exists. He simply refuses to give it much permanence.
“I don’t characterise a lot of things as failure,” he says. Instead, he tries to see what can be learned before moving on.

It’s perhaps why his career has moved so comfortably between disciplines. Liaw describes himself as a generalist rather than a specialist. Law, cooking, writing, broadcasting and television production might look like separate careers, but each has given him skills that have proved useful in the next.

His legal training still informs the way he thinks and runs businesses. Japan gave him a language and a deeper understanding of food. MasterChef introduced him to television. Television eventually gave him the chance to tell the stories he had always been interested in.

Moving forward Liaw says he wants to become more comfortable saying no. He wants more time with his wife and three children, but also more time alone. His ambitions for the future are becoming smaller in the best possible way.

After a lifetime spent moving quickly from one opportunity to the next, Liaw is beginning to question whether success might also mean having enough time to do something simply because you want to.

Food may have made Adam Liaw famous, but his story is becoming less and less about cooking and more about curiosity and the unexpected usefulness of everything we learn along the way.

You can listen to the full Uncommon Ground interview by clicking on the link at the top of this article.