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Within minutes of arriving at Melissa Leong’s home, a renovated terrace in inner Melbourne, it’s clear she knows how to wield a knife.
I’m seated at the breakfast bar while the former MasterChef Australia judge sections a whole poached chicken like a pro despite having no formal culinary training. Her cats, Ghost and Ghoul (or Stephen Ghoul-bert, after the US talk show host), loiter nearby.
Leong is a lover of fashion, as evidenced by her cover shoot with Sunday Life. But at home, she’s more relaxed, dressed down in a mustard Henley tee and jeans, bare-faced and barefoot, her toenails painted a deep burgundy.
The one-time Gold Logie nominee is an enigma – seemingly everywhere (she posts regularly on Instagram to her 373,000 followers), but also private and even a touch mysterious. It’s a balance the 43-year-old has worked hard to maintain while wearing many different hats throughout her life and is a key theme in her new memoir, Guts.
Macgraw “Dorothea” top and skirt. Ryan Storer earrings. Michael Kors boots.Credit: Jesse-Leigh Elford
There’s Melissa the food writer, TV presenter and former publicist. Then there’s Melissa, the daughter of migrants, jiu-jitsu enthusiast and perfume collector. Adding “author” to that list did not come easily for Leong, who refused several earlier offers to write her story. “I was so busy that there was just no way I’d have the mental headspace for it,” she says.
Eventually, the right opportunity came along before Leong had a startling realisation. “[I thought,] ‘Can I handle everything else that comes with writing a book that’s very personal?’ ” she says. “I almost handed back the deposit … I thought, ‘I’m a private person. I don’t really feel I want to share these things, or if I do share these things, how are people going to handle it, because my life has not been super rosy all of the time.’ ”
For lunch, Leong is serving Hainanese chicken rice, a dish she learnt to make from her mother, a nurse, and one of the recipes in her book. Asking her to cook was my idea, both as research into her kitchen prowess and to create a safe space for discussing some darker parts of her life. On her left forearm is a tattoo that says “Existence is pain”, a quote from the animated series Rick and Morty.
As we each form the perfect forkful, balancing the ratio of tender chicken to aromatic rice and piquant sambal (note: she can cook exceedingly well), we begin talking about one of the most traumatic chapters of her life.
Gucci sweater and skirt, Ryan Storer bracelet.Credit: Jesse-Leigh Elford
Last year, Leong was invited to an International Women’s Day event to speak about being a woman of colour on TV, when a speech by a fellow panellist, sexual abuse survivor and campaigner Anna Coutts-Trotter, struck a painful chord. “I identified with [her story] far too much,” Leong says. Through quiet sobs, she finally realised what she’d long avoided admitting to herself: she herself was once raped.
The assault happened about 15 years ago, when she was working in the hospitality industry. “I was so ashamed that I just pretended it didn’t happen, so I didn’t keep proof … I just wanted it to all go away,” says Leong, who has not disclosed the perpetrator’s identity. “For the longest time, I did not identify myself as a survivor of sexual assault.”
While writing Guts, Leong decided – reluctantly at first – to break her silence. “That was a tricky time to be in hospitality,” she says of her time in food PR, long before her first TV hosting role, on SBS’s The Chefs’ Line in 2017. “I let my boundaries be flagrantly crossed, and then I took that blame onto myself for such a long time.”
Leong’s decision to go public about the rape comes amid hospitality’s “great reckoning”, in which female workers at top Australian establishments are speaking out about their own experiences of sexual harassment and abuse. Though she regrets not speaking up at the time of her own ordeal, “we didn’t have conversations about consent back then”, she says.
“This has been simmering below the surface for such a long time. Enough is enough … I have huge admiration for the women who spoke up for that story because that was not easy,” she says, referring to a major investigation into the issue by Nine, owner of this masthead.
Leong has also learnt, sometimes the hard way, the price of speaking up, especially during her three years on MasterChef, the role that made her a household name. She says she has been portrayed as “difficult” or a “bitch” – “all the fun tropes that women are saddled with” – both of which she rejects.
Alémais “Ophira” gown, Ryan Storer earrings.Credit: Jesse-Leigh Elford
“I’ve thought to myself ‘you don’t get it’,” she says, fighting back tears. “I would never do anything … that would make it harder for other people [of colour] to come in after me. And if you don’t understand that, then, what can I say? … I’m not sad, I’m angry.”
Still, working on MasterChef was a mostly happy time for Leong, notwithstanding the shock 2023 death of her colleague, Jock Zonfrillo, and intense speculation around why she left the show soon afterwards. While conceding that “people want to know about how the sausage is made”, she wrote about MasterChef much like the rest of the book: on her terms.
“I didn’t necessarily feel like I wanted to write about some of that [MasterChef] chapter, only because it’s too fresh; it’s not even in the rear-vision mirror yet,” she says.
The experience reinforced to her how far the industry has to go in terms of accurate representation. “I’m not saying the needle’s not moving,” she says. “I’m just saying it’s not moving fast enough.” She also learnt to be more comfortable taking up space. “Now, if you want to put me in the centre of the room, under a spotlight, I will stand there because I know that I deserve to be there.”
Raised in the predominantly white suburbs of Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, Leong is the eldest daughter of Singaporean migrants (her brother, a doctor, is five years her junior). Her childhood, while mostly happy, was tempered by her father’s strict parenting style, which included physical discipline.
She says it’s greatly influenced her decision to remain child-free. “If I had kids, I don’t know if I’d be able to correct the multi-generational damage that has occurred, so I’d rather just err on the side of trying to live my life well and with truth,” says Leong, who speaks to her mother often, and has a goddaughter, the daughter of close friends.
If you want to put me in the centre of the room, under a spotlight, I will stand there because I know that I deserve to be there.
Melissa Leong, TV personality
“People just expect that if you’re polished and you are well presented and you appear ‘unbroken’, that you must have grown up in a solid [family] environment,” she says. “I’m very grateful in many ways [for how] I grew up. But I’m also pretty f—ed up by it, too.”
Rebuilding herself after a setback is a theme that runs through Leong’s story. In her teens, she gave up on dreams of a career in music due to chronic repetitive strain injury. She pivoted to a degree in economics and social sciences at Sydney University, before working in make-up artistry, advertising and food writing, which ultimately led to her TV break.
In her book, Leong writes honestly about her battle with an eating disorder, an autoimmune condition and mental breakdown. In her early 30s, she spent two years living in Tasmania, where she began to heal from the trauma of her younger years, work she says is ongoing.
“If you can’t be vulnerable, you can’t have real relationships,” she says. “I had hardened myself so much that I was never going to be able to have real, proper human connections and relationships with people beyond a certain level, if I didn’t deal with it then.”
Officially, Leong, whose three-year marriage to bar owner Joe Jones ended in 2020, is single. Still, I ask her about a recent Instagram post seeking advice on where to meet prospective partners (the responses ranged from running clubs to Bunnings). She confesses that she has been on a few dates with one of the men who direct messaged her. “We’ll see,” she says, with a grin.
Not that she has much spare time. Leong has just returned from New Zealand, where she filmed a new reality show, Taste of Art (“Lego Masters meets MasterChef,” she says). Since 2023 she’s hosted Ten’s Dessert Masters, and competed in this season of The Amazing Race, a WhatsApp group helping her stay connected with her co-racers after filming ended. Then there’s her genre-busting roles co-hosting UFC Fight Week on Kayo Sports, and starring in SBS docu-series such as The Hospital: In The Deep End (2024).
Away from the camera, Leong’s passions include Pilates and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. “I like martial arts because I have felt very weak in my life … and I don’t ever want to feel that way again,” she says, alluding to the trauma she has endured.
She also finds contentment from podcasts, watching the odd TV series (she’s just revisited Only Murders in the Building), reading and, of course, cooking and enjoying food. “I’m definitely more aware of balance and rest and tempering activity with recreation and things that are good for my mind,” she says.
“I’ve spent a lot of time prioritising other people’s feelings and comfort beyond my own. And so now it’s time to be a little bit more selfish, a little bit more self-focused, in a constructive way, in order to get there.”
Guts: A Memoir of Food, Failure and Taking Impossible Chances (Murdoch Books) by Melissa Leong is out on September 30. Melissa Leong will appear in conversation with Melissa Singer for the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, on October 1, 7pm. wheelercentre.com.
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Fashion editor: Penny McCarthy. Hair: Brad Mullins using Hask. Make-up: Aimie Fiebig using Charlotte Tilbury. Fashion assistant: Abbie Stockwell
Stockists: Alémais; Gucci; Macgraw; Michael Kors.
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