Hi, I'm Marc Matsumoto, and welcome to my secret stash of recipes!
This is my personal stash of original recipes I cook for family and friends. It’s how my journey started in 2007 with No Recipes, and while that site has evolved to focus on teaching global classics, Marc’s Recipes is where you’ll find the stuff I cook on the daily in my Tokyo kitchen.
Like my background, the recipes here draw from a mix of cultures and ingredients, but most are original creations you won’t find anywhere else. I’ve made a few recipes free to try, but the full collection is member-supported. Why? Because I want to keep this space ad-free, distraction-free, and focused on creativity over clicks. Your support lets me skip the search engine algorithm games so I can share my best recipes—not just the ones that rank.
How I got here
It all started in a small fishing village on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where I was born. We moved to San Francisco when I was a few months old, and my mom taught Japanese cooking classes to make ends meet. By the time I could see over the counter, I was in the kitchen helping her and learning everything I could, from creating umami to the subtle art of kakushiaji (hidden taste).
Video games (and eventually computers) drew my attention as I got older. After part-time gigs working with technology in high school, I worked full-time through college, developing websites. This left little time for the typical college experience, so I socialized through food by cooking for friends and family.
By the time I graduated from UC Davis, the tech industry was booming, and I was drawn to Silicon Valley, where I landed a gig at a little-known startup that rented DVDs through the mail in 2001. The success of Netflix led to a job offer in New York, and the allure of THE city drove me to leave everyone and everything I knew behind to start a new chapter of life.
New York was a wildly arousing and terrifyingly daunting place to dive into for this introvert, but it was there that I returned to socializing through food. Naturally, my dinners led to recipe requests, which I'd respond to with "no recipes" and a shrug. This presented a problem when someone asked for a dish again, so I started documenting my kitchen experiments and the techniques that made them work. I believe anyone can learn to cook without recipes if they understand the "why," not just the "how," and this is my focus at No Recipes.
In 2009 I quit my day job in tech to become a full-time food blogger, and I soon realized I didn't need to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. That's why I followed a growing curiosity about my culinary roots and moved to Japan in 2011.
I hope you enjoy exploring my work on No Recipes and Youtube as much as I enjoyed creating it. If you find value in what I do and have the means, I hope you'll consider signing up for access to the private stash of recipes on this site. There are no ads here, just good, original recipes you won't find anywhere else online.