This Is Not Your Traditional Path To Culinary Stardom — And That’s A Good Thing

There’saTikTok Martha Stewart posted a few months ago that perfectly encapsulates the phenomenon of food influencers. She’s standing in a kitchen next to an attractive, energetic content creator known best for his devotion to sandwiches.

“This is Owen Han,” she says, in classic Stewart nonchalance. “He’s a self-taught cook. But he’s very popular.” And then they go on to make (and gently argue about) sandwiches. 

Owen Han is indeed pretty popular. The content creator, who is of Chinese and Italian descent, has 4.3 million followers on TikTok alone and is currently on tour for a cookbook he dropped last spring. He proudly draws inspiration from the culinary traditions from both sides of his family and riffs off them constantly, culminating in a journey to food stardom that’s a contemporary fairytale.

“I was working in a hospital, delivering food to patients, thinking I was going to go back to school for dietetics,” Han says. “And one day my roommate introduced me to TikTok. He pushed me to start posting.” 

His ideas never run dry, he explains, because he constantly dips back into what he grew up eating: shrimp toast from his Chinese grandma (the recipe is included in his cookbook), nonna’s meatballs lovingly smashed into a sub — everything he cherished from his young childhood in Italy and his dinners as a teen in Florida, where his father reintroduced him to Chinese ingredients and flavors.

And in an endless abyss of internet foodies, Han says that authenticity helped him rise to the surface. He’s not a fancy chef but he knows what he does well and he knows where he comes from — and his followers literally eat it up. He also acknowledges how revolutionary it is to be able to become a leader in his field without formal training, which can be largely inaccessible to many people.

There’s nothing wrong if you want to do the traditional route, he says, but it’s also incredibly cool to not have to — and still dive deep into your passion for food.

“Social media has created an outlet where you don’t need to follow that traditional route,” Han adds. “It’s crazy. A lot of my friends in the space who have built a food empire do not have any formal training whatsoever.”

Latina content creator Aisha Ruperto, also known as Food Got Me Wasted, whose largest following is at around 2 million on Instagram, dove into the social media foodie scene with restaurant experience that she believes helps her make seemingly complex foods seem approachable.

“That’s what keeps me going. Getting people into the kitchen and showing people that food is really easy to make and making it accessible,” she says.

Being a social media chef can be such a paradox. There are Gen Z foodies who dream of living this life, replete with fancy partnerships and big payouts for 30-second videos, millions of adoring fans commenting with fire and thirsty emojis, and free cookware sent by brands hoping to be spotted in a post.

However, alongside all that is often the intention to open up the world of culinary wonders to regular people with regular budgets and skill levels. So many food influencers, much like Ruperto, are really trying to grant access to their audience — to give them permission to participate in a world of food adventures that have historically been linked to luxury and privilege and deemed only for rich people.

Watching these content creators get so “popular” is a sign that you don’t have to go to culinary school, work in a Michelin-starred restaurant or even own a sous vide machine in order to create beautiful foods in the kitchen and serve them to the people you love. All you need is your phone and a few items from Trader Joe’s. Food influencers with millions of followers symbolize a new wave of capitalism, yes. But they’re also the ultimate equalizers, especially influencers who are women and/or people of color. And that dichotomy is fascinating to witness.

As Han notes, this is in no way knocking the fancy Food Network stars — Giada De Laurentiis, Alex Guarnaschelli — who did formally train in France. These chefs deserve all the respect they get. But these social media cooks have blasted dynamite through bedrock to create a whole new lane, and they’re demanding the respect they deserve, too.

To watch Stewart stand alongside Han is not just genius marketing from both teams — it’s the future. Eventually, some online chefs might even totally cross over.

Such is the case with Nadia Caterina Munno, best known as The Pasta Queen. Born and raised in Rome (her accent tells no lies), Munno may not have what’s considered “formal” training, but she’s been making pasta since she was 5 years old.

Her virality surged at the height of the pandemic, when many of us were locked inside with nothing else to do but make and eat comfort food. And there was Munno, in all her red-lipsticked glory, helping us do it the way her nonna taught her. She swiftly spun her rising fame into a New York Times bestselling cookbook and now her own Amazon Prime show that debuts on Oct. 24.

Munno (alongside Ruperto and Han) will also appear at this fall’s upcoming New York City Wine and Food Festival as part of its FoodieCon event. The all-day occasion will bring several viral online chefs out for panels and Q&As so their local followers can meet them in person.

While Munno did get to kitchen stardom by bypassing some of the absolute fuckery that ensues when you’re a woman in the culinary world, she still acknowledges the double standards that have seeped into her career.

“There is still the feeling that you are alone. There is a type of pressure. I’m like, almost having to prove myself even more. The stakes are higher,” Munno says about cooking alongside lauded male chefs — trained or otherwise.

Despite this, she has advice for anyone who feels like they might not belong in the world of cooking — whether through social media or not.

“Show up and do it anyway. I am always a little bit scared even if it might not look that way. … That fear motivates me and I transform it into excitement,” Munno says. “Fear can either shut you down or propel you.”