From corporate high-flyer to Australia’s culinary queen: How Nagi created a multimillion-dollar empire

She quit a finance career to pursue a longtime hobby: how did RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi become a home-cooking juggernaut? AdvertisementGood WeekendFrom corporate high-flyer to Australia’s culinary queen: How Nagi created a multimillion-dollar empireShe quit a finance career to pursue a longtime hobby: how did RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi become a home-cooking juggernaut?By Jane CadzowMarch 7, 2026Nagi Maehashi is “probably the smartest person I’ve ever worked with”, says a former colleague from her corporate world, adding, “She never told me she could cook.”Louise KennerleySaveYou have reached your maximum number of saved items.Remove items from your saved list to add more.ShareAAAThis story is part of the March 7 edition of Good Weekend. See all stories.Astrange thing happened early last month. The death of a 14-year-old golden retriever named Dozer was reported by Australian news outlets with a sadness and solemnity usually reserved for the demise of beloved public figures. Human ones. The obituaries enumerated Dozer’s sterling qualities – his faithfulness, his friendliness, his love of the outdoors, his enthusiasm for food. On social media, there was an outpouring of grief. People posted that they were “heartbroken”, “absolutely sobbing”. One person noted that the desolation crossed generations: “My 12-year-old son is crying with me, too.”Dozer was the canine companion of Nagi Maehashi, Australia’s reigning cookery queen. He was genuinely appealing – I encountered him in the course of researching this story – but, as I think he’d have been the first to acknowledge, it was his association with Maehashi that made him a star. She published charming pictures of him, wrote fondly of his winsome ways, portrayed him as her trusty sidekick. “I loved him fiercely and completely,” she declared in a memorial video, sending everyone into further floods of tears.Before Dozer died, I had spent many hours with Maehashi and interviewed everyone from her mother to her publisher. I had thought I fully understood the Maehashi phenomenon. But suddenly, watching the online mass mourning, I wasn’t so sure. On Facebook, someone asked: “Why am I sitting here bawling my eyes out for a beautiful dog and beautiful woman I’ve never met?” Good question.Maehashi with her faithful sidekick Dozer. She loved him “fiercely and completely”.Rob PalmerWeeks earlier. On a warm morning in the affluent Sydney suburb of Hunters Hill, Maehashi is standing at a marbled kitchen counter in a large, modern house, assembling a triple-layer chocolate cake. It is not going well. “My mousse is too sloppy,” she says, referring to the goop she is slathering between the layers. She can see what will happen: the layers will slip out of alignment and the cake won’t stand straight. “Look at that. It’s sliding. Oh yes, this is not cool.”To her fans – who call her Nagi, no surname needed – Maehashi is an inspirational figure: a self-taught home cook who has turned her hobby into a multimillion-dollar business. Along the way, she has assumed the role of national culinary coach. Should garlic be chopped or crushed? Is it OK to use imitation vanilla essence? What, exactly, is a rolling boil? Australia looks to Maehashi for the answers. As we stand at our stovetops weighing up whether to add more salt to a sauce, or stare into our fridges wondering what on earth to make for dinner, the question we ask ourselves is: what would Nagi do?AdvertisementThe kitchen in which I’m watching the chocolate cake go sideways is the nerve centre of Maehashi’s operations. It is here that she devises and tests the recipes she publishes on her popular food blog, RecipeTin Eats. The website gives highly specific instructions for everything from boiling an egg to rustling up coq au vin for eight. According to Maehashi’s brother, Goh, who is RecipeTin Eats’ IT manager, it has 16 million visitors a month. “Entire Nation Seemingly Unable to Cook Without Consulting RecipeTin Eats”, ran a headline on the satirical news site The Betoota Advocate. A fictional sociologist quoted by the Advocate warned: “If RecipeTin Eats ever crashes, we’re in real trouble.”Mind you, we have Maehashi’s two cookbooks as back-up. Her first, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner, published just over three years ago, was the highest-selling book in Australia in 2023. The next year, it was the second-highest seller, beaten only by Maehashi’s follow-up volume, Tonight. Between them, Dinner and Tonight have sold about 1.2 million copies. Such is Maehashi’s influence over the way we cook and eat that The Australian Financial Review placed her at the top of its 2025 cultural power list.Maehashi is known for her sunny disposition. Even her long-standing concern about Dozer – who in 2024 was diagnosed with laryngeal paralysis, making it difficult for him to breathe – hasn’t stopped her radiating good cheer in the photographs and videos that accompany the recipes she posts online. There’s no camera rolling at the moment, though, and this chocolate cake is starting to seriously annoy her. Having nudged the layers back into place and finished spreadi