Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tiffany Alexandria. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Tiffany thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I moved to America when I was 26 from Taipei, Taiwan. Never have I questioned what it meant to be a Taiwanese, nor have I had to REALLY cook for myself as eating out was so convenient and affordable in Taiwan. It wasn’t until I moved to Rochester, MN, people started to confuse me as “Thai”, or ask me what Taiwanese food is like, that I started to really deep dive into my own culture and cooking everything from scratch in order to learn more about my own history and story, I’ve been taking all of it for granted.

In order for me to tell an impactful story, I needed better visuals, that’s when I got into food photography. I have a background in fashion design, so I’ve always been obsessed in making things look good and photography. Food photography seems straight forward enough but there are so many details- the lighting, the color, the ingredients, and on top of that the story behind each dish, the story I want to tell. There’s a memory and feeling behind each dish I share, sometimes I think I cook for nostalgia- I want to recreate a memory when I bite into a dish, as strong as the Pensieve is in Harry Potter.

I learned to cook from memory. While I was too busy to cook much in Taiwan, I have taste memory and scattered memory of my mom (who is a phenomenal cook) in the kitchen prepping and talking about foods a certain way. I started making everything from scratch, lots of trials and errors until I find what works- ingredients is the biggest hustle in recreating food from my memories, condiments and ingredients can taste very different in the USA even when they’re called the same things.

Food photography is also learned through trial and error with lots of practice. I learned through attempting to analyze other’s photos and recreating the same mood, but finding my own style and voice has been the hardest part.

Tiffany, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

CHOOCHOO-ca-CHEW tells visual stories via food photography, words, and short videos. CHOOCHOO-ca-CHEW started as a food blog, my original intention was to blog about food I’ve tried and loved throughout my travels. When I was younger, my mom and I love recreating a dish we tried and loved at a restaurant at home, I think that’s what I wanted to do with this blog.

I moved to Rochester Minnesota from Taipei, Taiwan when I was 26, most people in Rochester confuses Taiwan with Thailand, that’s when I know I had to make some changes to my blog and focus on my own heritage and tell the stories of Taiwan and introduce people to Taiwanese food.

With no friends in Rochester, I looked to social media to build my brand. Visual story telling became a big part of my adventure. Through eye-candy food photography, I was able to catch people’s attention and introduce them to Taiwanese food as well as promote local foods, farmers, food products and underappreciated restaurants.

I became a one-person marketing team. With my background in Fashion Design, my love for local foods, passion for marketing and style in photography, local businesses started to seek me out to create brand designs, manage social media, paint murals, and create campaigns for them. What makes me unique is that I am a perfectionist who has done and tried a lot of different “careers” while being a small business owner, I’m able to create beautiful visuals that is true to the businesses’ core while resonating with the customers.

Rochester Minnesota is a unique place. With Mayo Clinic at the core of the city, it brings a lot of diversity to the area yet it’s hard to see or notice at a surface level. I love telling stories of the road less travelled, and I want the small business community to thrive, the unique personalities they bring to the table is often what I love about a place. In 2021, due to the pandemic I hadn’t been able to go home, I wanted to bring a little piece of Taiwan to Rochester while creating a incubator space for local and bipoc businesses- The Night Market was born. (https://nightmarketmn.com)

The Night Market brought over 20,000 people to the events both in 2021 and 2022 and supported over 100 vendors each year, many of them first-time vendors, and most of them are BIPOC. It showed a different face of Rochester, one that’s often neglected. Multiple citizens commented that they had been living in Rochester for over 10 years and had never felt like they belonged until this event. During the events, I was able to help these BIPOC businesses tell their story and highlight them for their voices to be heard, plus helping many vendors fulfill their dreams of selling food and sharing their culture with people, those are my favorite things about The Night Market.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’m always pivoting. I’m still pivoting. CHOOCHOO-ca-CHEW was started as a blog, and the goal was to be able to travel while writing this blog, now I would call myself a visual story teller / content creator. First the blog was going to be about traveling and food from around the world, then it pivoted to focusing on Taiwanese food when I learned that most people don’t know much about my culture; then I realized that no one’s going to seek out food they’ve never tasted before I started selling foods at the local farmers market, created pop-up dinner experiences, and hosted cooking classes. After that, covid happened. I started promoting and helping local food businesses market digitally because I didn’t want them to go out of business, so I gained some marketing and content creating gigs. I wasn’t able to travel home, so I created The Night Market to incubate small BIPOC businesses and became an event planner and one person marketing team. All this while doing food photography, creating art, and writing content for anyone who asks.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

What do I ACTUALLY do? I simply can’t put it in one word nor is there a easy way to describe what I do. I create and I enjoy learning new things and challenges. I think that’s why I’ve done so many different things. None of the things I’ve done are streamlined, I think they’re more a bunch of circles touching each other within a larger circle. I’m not sure what that bigger circle is yet, but everything I’ve done and learned in my life has always come back and benefitted me in my next project. I’m addicted to trying and learning new things.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://choochoocachew.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/choochoocachew
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/choochoocachew

Image Credits
CHOOCHOO-ca-CHEW | Tiffany Alexandria