When Felicity Jaime dropped out of high school at 17 in the South Bronx, she didn’t know what she would do next. After working assorted jobs, she channeled her artistic expression into her first brand, a fashion company. But she had no idea that her passion for art would inspire a nationally recognized culinary career.
It is hard to tell what Jaime — better known by her pseudonym, “Chef Bruja” — is most proud of in her food. Every dish blends her Bronx community, Puerto Rican heritage and her own upbringing; she uses her platform to advocate for equal rights; her reach extends to nearly 240,000 followers on Instagram, along with her cookbook and newly released TV show.
For Jaime, all of these parts of her identity combine to form Chef Bruja.
“It’s not just work. Everything for me is community,” Jaime told amNewYork. “It’s the people. Without these people, without supporters, I would be nothing.”
In 2024, Chef Bruja published her first cookbook, titled “Tales Of The Bronx,” which records the “cultural melting pot” of New York City by highlighting the blend of the Bronx and the Caribbean in food. Now, she just began hosting Fallen Media’s cooking show “Bite Me,” which invites celebrity guests for cooking and conversation.
Jaime said she hopes her work can prove to other people with disadvantaged backgrounds that they can aspire to anything they want to be.
“I want to show people you can have a disadvantaged background and still be somebody and still create your own future and your own story,” Jaime said.
From poverty in the Bronx to cooking for private dinners across NYC
Jaime, who grew up in poverty in the South Bronx, is not the stereotype of a modern popular chef. That’s what makes her story, experience and passion so compelling to many of her followers.
“I come from a very rough background, and I think putting that on the forefront of who I am to my core, and showing people you can have a disadvantaged background and still be somebody, still create your own future and your own story, is a big part of just who I am,” Jaime said. “I think that’s why my community is so strong.”
Jaime’s first experience with food was when she was 6 years old, standing in the kitchen with her grandmother on a stepstool to reach the stove. As she grew older, her mother and grandparents had to work long hours, requiring Jaime to cook for herself and her older sister. She got great at it.
“I would watch my grandmother religiously, because she was always in the kitchen,” Jaime said. “So whenever she would make something I was like, ‘Oh, how do you do that, or how to do this.’”
After dropping out of high school, Jaime got her GED, the high school equivalency, at 19 and looked for work. Though she loved food, being a chef didn’t seem like a realistic career choice.
“Nobody went to college, nobody did this,” Jaime said of her family. “So in my head, being a chef wasn’t realistic for me.”
Jaime still didn’t stray far from the kitchen. She worked as a bartender, where she said she gained experience with professionalism and service while meeting people in the kitchen who introduced her to her first catering job. Even though she lacked a professional background in cooking, Jaime convinced the company she worked with to hire her as a private caterer.
But the work was seasonal, and Jaime knew she needed a full-time job. She started at a technology company, working on the marketing team, while working on her fashion brand, called “By Bruja.” Even though she did well in her corporate life, she was laid off and struggled to find another job.
So right before the COVID-19 pandemic, Jaime started hosting private dinners as a way to explore being Chef Bruja — full-time. Her business spread primarily through word-of-mouth, and each dinner was capped at 30 people, designed more as a community gathering than a budding commercial enterprise. The dinners sold out every time.
“You would be able to eat, drink, enjoy music, and it was a safe space for a lot of the people that came and were able to get to know me, get to know my food,” Jaime said. “It really just put a mark on what I was trying to do with Chef Bruja.”
Growing online
During the pandemic, community spaces shut down and Jaime could no longer host her private dinners. So when her friend encouraged her to post videos on social media instead to grow Chef Bruja, she gave it a shot.
It worked.
After six months of posting videos, Jaime had her first one go viral, and then another. The Chef Bruja Instagram account grew rapidly as she started adding more content.
“From that point on, things shifted for me,” Jaime said. “I realized maybe this is something I really could explore full time.”
Being online was a new experience for Jaime — “People who know me know I was never an internet girl,” she said — but she quickly learned to build the Chef Bruja persona through a consistent presence on social media, eventually leading to partnerships with national brands like Hulu and Walmart.
“Maybe this is God’s way of telling me, just do what you want to do, and put your heart and your own into it,” Jaime said.
Cooking for others
Jaime said she hopes Chef Bruja can show the city and the world how much talent there is in the Bronx.
“I’m big on my community, I’m big on speaking on how much raw talent is in the Bronx in itself,” Jaime said. “And I feel like we don’t get that recognition.”
Jaime said she talks about her own story, growing up in affordable housing and having a difficult background, to show other people that it’s possible to break out of cycles of oppression.
“Because of our poverty, a lot of us stay there and stay within that mindset,” Jaime said. “That’s why I feel like it’s so important for me to share my story consistently, because so many people have grown up and are still there, still doing the same things because of how the system is set up for us, especially the Black and brown community.”
Jaime said her cookbook aims to connect people with their family and heritage.
“The book is not just about food, it’s about community,” Jaime said. “It’s about family. I have a section that’s just from New York. I have a section in there that’s recipes that I grew up making, and then things that I ended up modernizing and twisting and turning.”
“I really just wanted to put that out there, to just put a piece of me out into the world and represent what I’m from and what I stand for,” Jaime said.
Jaime said she tries to meet everyone wherever they are by treating people equally and respecting their different backgrounds.
“This is my life, so I put my everything into it, and that’s how I approach people in the community,” Jaime said. “I like to treat everybody equally, because you don’t know what somebody’s walk or path was.”
Cooking is just one part of being an artist, Jaime said, and while Chef Bruja is how she expresses herself now, she looks forward to exploring other sides of herself in the future.
“I don’t plan on boxing myself in,” Jaime said. “I don’t plan on being the number one chef in the world — I could really care less about that. It’s about just being myself.”
