If you are into TikTok, chances are, you have spotted this guy on your feed, showing his cooking skills in stylistic slow-motion videos.

Subash Shrestha, who goes by the username @subasx on TikTok, has racked up 911k followers. One of his recent videos clocked 177 million views and 8.2 million likes.

Son of a restaurateur couple, Shrestha is a trained chef who’s worked in Abu Dhabi and Macao. He fell in love with cooking when he was a young boy, having spent most of his childhood in his family restaurant and at home watching cooking shows on TV.

Shrestha says he was a chubby kid who loved eating, and inspired by his parents, it didn’t take him long to learn to cook.

“I started helping out in the restaurant kitchen from the time I was a kid,” shares the now 28-year-old. “My mother loved my cooking and she used to tell me that I’d one day become a great cook.”

After completing his plus-two in computer science, Shrestha got enrolled into a Bachelor’s degree program in Information Technology. But he soon realized IT was not his cup of tea.

In 2012, he dropped out and decided to take a diploma course in cooking at Master Chef Institute, Kathmandu. At the time, says Shrestha, cooking wasn’t a common career option in Nepal. Still, he thought there was no harm in getting trained in cooking, an important life skill.

During the eight-month-long course Shrestha not only honed his culinary skills, but also discovered that cooking was the career path he wanted to pursue.

After getting his diploma, Shrestha started applying for jobs at restaurants and hotels in different countries. In 2013, he got an internship offer at Andaz Capital Gate, a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi.

Leaving home at the age of 20 to go work in a different country was a nerve-wracking experience, says Shrestha.   

But the risk paid off. “In Abu Dhabi, I learned what it was like to be a chef,” he says. “Watching senior chefs work with such patience and love for their dishes was inspiring.”

Shrestha worked and learned the tradecraft from senior chefs at Andaz Capital Gate for two years before he got a better offer from the Dubai-based Somewhere Hotel. There, he only worked for only six months but still learned a lot about Italian and Mediterranean dishes. Shrestha then worked at the Marriott Hotel for two years.

“Working in many places in Abu Dhabi taught me a lot. I got to learn, explore and experiment with different dishes, which would have been impossible had I stayed put in a place,” he says.

Shrestha’s spirit of exploration and experimentation took him to Macao, China. He had been working at Sheraton Grand Macao Hotel for 18 months when covid hit and he had to return to Kathmandu.

It was supposed to be a two-month leave. But international lockdowns and travel restrictions wouldn’t let him leave Nepal for the next two years. And it was during the lockdown that Shrestha’s TikTok journey began. 

He utilized the lockdown period to spend more time with his friends and family and treat them with new dishes.

“The idea of creating TikTok videos started as a fun experiment with my 16-year-old neighbor, Shashin Chamling,” Shrestha says.

The first video they posted was of Shrestha making a pizza that would go on to get more than 300k likes. Neither Shrestha nor Chamling expected the video to explode on TikTok.  

“I knew there were some TikTok creators who posted cooking videos,” he says. “But we weren’t interested in making regular cooking videos. We figured entertaining food content was what the Nepali TikTok-sphere was missing, and we gave just that to people.”

Chamling, now Shrestha's creative partner, vividly remembers the day they made the first video.

“It was Dahi Chiura Khane Din and we filmed the video on pure whim,” he says. “To our surprise, it went viral.”

They duo regularly post TikTok videos @chefsubasx. Chamling says he has learned a lot about videography while creating TikTok content with Shrestha.

 “I’ve known Subash dai all my life and it is fun to be around him,” he says. 

The popularity of the TikTok channel was an eye-opener for Shrestha, who is now exploring other social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube.

Now Shrestha is planning to go to the UK to work as a professional chef. His ultimate dream is to open his own restaurant.

“As a chef, I think about how I can enhance the food we eat every day,” he says.

Cooking for people gives Shrestha great joy. It also gives him the permission to be creative. TikTok was one way of expressing his creativity that he discovered fortuitously—for which he says he is ever-so-grateful.