2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
They're Gentle. They're Seasonal. They're Soft Boy Cooks.
I first noticed them when I came across the British chef Julius Roberts's videos on Instagram, where he showcases his idyllic farm life and seemingly effortless, seasonal cooking (which I wrote about last year). Then I kept seeing them: youngish men whose cooking on TikTok and Instagram felt gentle, understated and sincere, even though it sometimes veered toward the cheffy.
On social media, these sensitive men with palpable charisma are a little heartthrob, a little boy-next-door and entirely devoted to food.
I've come to call them 'soft boy cooks,' everything the cultural bent toward protein-maxxing and large hunks of beef is not. They are not 'purposefully slamming ingredients down on the counter, haphazardly throwing things into pots,' as the chef (and my friend and colleague) Ham El-Waylly described it. Instead, they nurture produce rather than contort it into foams. The soft boy cook observes the arrival of ramps and tomatoes like holidays. Dessert is fruit.
This straightforward sensitivity is the antithesis to a more hypermasculine cooking that snatches your attention online with excessive portions, aggressive editing and thunderous noise. A more tender approach requires not just a glance, but your sustained focus. A soft boy cook makes you lean in.
In his senior year at Columbia University, Jonah Reider made people lean in when he started a supper club out of his dorm room that landed him on late-night television and got him written up in seemingly every media outlet, including this one. His delicate cooking and thoughtful, market-driven dishes also put him on my soft boy cook radar. Rather than pursue a career as a restaurant chef, Mr. Reider, now 31, said he'd peek at dishes through dining room windows and then interpret them in his own kitchen.
When his father took him to the chef Gabrielle Hamilton's former restaurant Prune, in New York, 'it was life-changing,' he said. The food, he added, was delicious — 'simple but not' — a sort-of ease conveyed only with years of experience.
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