Any hungry person with a Netflix subscription will tell you that this is a golden age for food TV, with opulent, big-budget shows such as Chef’s Table, Ugly Delicious and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat offering feasts for the eyes as well as the tastebuds.
But over on YouTube, a slew of pretenders to the throne are making a virtue of more modest budgets, like canny food-truck chefs giving Michelin-starred restaurants a run for their money. They can’t boast the exotic locations or multicamera setups of Netflix’s shows, but thanks to their wit, charisma and concepts, that doesn’t really matter.
Many are the work of new media upstarts such as Vice Media’s Munchies, First We Feast and Thrillist, whose main show, Really Dough, investigates outlandish pizza variations across New York’s five boroughs, including crusts made out of cauliflower, pancake-bases smothered with kimchi and gold-topped pizzas priced at $2,000. The concept is strong, but the show’s true attraction is the interplay between hosts Scott Wiener – a pizza obsessive famous for his day job hosting tours of the city’s pizzerias and his record-breaking collection of pizza boxes (1,300 and counting) – and Mark Iacono, a hard-nosed Brooklyn pizza chef whose renowned joint, Lucali, boasts Beyoncé and Gwyneth Paltrow as fans.
Wiener says his buddy-movie chemistry with Iacono is unforced. “It’s pretty real,” he sighs. “I’m this goofy guy, and he’s the cool dude getting frustrated at me making him eat all these weird pizzas.” He hopes to explore more exotic pizza-esque dishes such as lahmacun when the third season of Really Dough begins production later this year – if, that is, the crotchety Iacono unbans him from Lucali’s premises.
Gourmet Makes, meanwhile, is the work of Bon Appetit, a 63-year-old food magazine owned by the defiantly old media Condé Nast. Never straying beyond the confines of the title’s test kitchen, the show follows the indefatigable host Claire Saffitz as she attempts to reproduce (and improve) classic snack foods, such as Skittles and Oreos, from scratch. A recipe editor for the magazine, who had studied in a patisserie in Paris, Saffitz had no grand ambitions to be a star before becoming the presenter of Gourmet Makes’ pilot episode, simply by being in the test kitchen on the day of filming. But after Saffitz spent four days applying her MacGyver-esque skills reverse-engineering the impenetrable magic behind a Twinkie, it was clear the show had found the perfect host.
A fan of classic TV chefs such as Julia Child and Martha Stewart, Saffitz initially struggled to understand the appeal of Gourmet Makes. “I was, like: ‘Who’s going to make Skittles at home?’” she says. “But feedback from viewers made me understand what the series was really about: me persevering, being meticulous and just trying to make this thing.” Solving such mysteries as how to make gelatinised sugar ooze from a candy-crisp shell or replicate the gratifying snap of a KitKat, Gourmet Makes has become an unexpected smash: the Skittles episode had more than 10m views.
Alongside shows such as It’s Alive – following the test kitchen’s amiable galoot Brad Leone as he discovers how sausages, knives and mustard are made – the series has revitalised Bon Appetit’s brand. “We get DMs on Instagram from people who love the videos, but didn’t realise we are a magazine, and are now subscribers,” laughs Saffitz.
By contrast to these other shows, Binging With Babish is the work of a defiantly independent self-starter, creator/presenter/editor Andrew Rea. His series has a wonderfully simple concept: attempting famous dishes from TV and the movies, from the sublime (the “prison sauce” from Goodfellas) to the ridiculous (Rachel’s disastrous trifle/shepherd’s pie hybrid from Friends). The show began as therapy for Rea, who was “deeply depressed and needing to exercise my remaining creative muscles” when he filmed his first video early in 2016, recreating the legendary burger cook-off between Ron Swanson and Chris Traeger from Parks & Recreation.
While his ambitions didn’t stretch beyond making the front page of the r/Cooking subreddit, Rea’s impressive home-chef skills and droll narration sent the show viral. An attempt at Ross Geller’s “moistmaker” Thanksgiving sandwich netted several hundred thousand views, and mainstream attention. Newly divorced, he ploughed every hour he wasn’t working as a visual effects artist into cranking out weekly episodes. Twenty months after filming the first episode, he quit his day job, monetising the show via YouTube ads and Patreon sponsorship from fans.
The success of these shows has given the presenters unexpected online fame, with Saffitz in particular inspiring plenty of internet fan art. “It’s a strange, though wonderful, experience,” says Saffitz, who admits she is “an introvert and a little shy”. Nevertheless, Gourmet Makes’ success helped secure Saffitz a baking book with Random House’s Carson Potter imprint. Wiener, meanwhile, wears his stardom a little easier, laughing that he “was always being recognised in pizzerias anyway”.
TV networks have offered Rea his own shows, but he prefers his DIY approach, setting up his own company, Binge Entertainment, to navigate what he describes as a “content gold rush”, including sister shows Basics With Babish, where he teaches cookery techniques, and Being With Babish, where he spends time with fans. But beyond commercial success, the show itself remains Rea’s reward. “It has pushed me out of my comfort zone, and so my comfort zone just keeps on expanding. It’s more than a dream job because I never could have dreamed that this would be my job.”
Rea’s forearm bears a tattoo of a carving fork, a sign of his absolute commitment to the show. In the show’s early days, he bought the utensil for $80 on his credit card, despite being broke, so he could present his pasta Aglio E Olio exactly as Jon Favreau had in Chef. When Favreau later guested on Binging to make Chef’s infamous Chocolate Lava Cakes, he presented Rea with the carving fork from the movie. “It was far and away the best moment of my life,” Rea grins.
Really Dough season three is available on YouTube from Monday
