A Grumpy Line Cook's Rant about Social Media "Chefs"
A long(ish) read in defence of knowing what you're talking about
Hello dear readers,
Welcome to The Recovering Line Cook. The newsletter where I, some guy called Wil Reidie, share recipes, stories from my career in restaurant kitchens and insights into great cooking with a Nordic flavour.
This week, I’m looking at what is often called a “social media chef”
Strap in.
In summer 2015, I spent a great many hours in a hot and muggy central London basement slicing potatoes into a tray of liquid duck fat.
I had to use one of those terrifying Japanese mandolins and lived in constant fear I’d lose a fingertip with each slice.
The specifics of the job were important as well. The slices (of potato, not my fingers) needed be no more than 2mm thick, the duck fat was to only lightly coat each slice, and, of course, the seasoning needed to be spot on. The potato was then carefully layered and gently baked before being pressed and refrigerated to firm up overnight. The next day they’d be sliced and deep-fried to order.
This does sound labourious, I agree, but the result was the most popular side on the menu at Portland Restaurant: the “mille-feuille potatoes”.
They had originally been developed by Shaun Searley at Portland’s “sister” restaurant The Quality Chop House (also in London) where they were called confit potatoes. And in the months and years after I helped make them at Portland, I would always feel a twinge of pride on reading articles about how popular they had become and occasionally even celebrated by Britain’s food writers.
It was only a fancy fried potato, I know. But it felt good to have a hand in making something that people really loved.
One of the things I did on becoming a restaurant cook was to consume as many books and videos I could about food and cooking. An important part of this was following all the cooks and food writers on Instagram I could find.
In a very real way I’m still suffering from that decision today.
Following Twitter’s implosion, Facebook being redundant, and my not understanding TikTok, I don’t use much social media anymore.
Instagram, however, I just can’t stop myself from scrolling through at least 30 times a day.
Hanalei Souza’s ladylinecook account, for example, is always a joy. I will never tire of the hilarious chef memes from for_the_chefs. The allezceline account might just be the funniest cultural artifact in existence for a restaurant cook like me.
I’ve started by listing these favourites in an attempt to balance the negativity of what follows.
Bare with me as I try to summarise the food horrors to be found on social media in 2024. This is what I call The Bad, The Ugly, and The “Good” of food “content”.
Ugly: from Old Norse uggligr ‘to be dreaded, fearful’
The world is a noisy place. The sad truth is that beautiful writing and images often aren’t loud enough to draw much attention.
This doesn’t matter to The Uglies of social media food content because beauty is the least of their concerns.
Their goal is to create nightmares.
And nightmares are very hard to ignore.
For The Uglies, food is the paint and canvas with which they create the monstrous, the gag-inducing, the should-not-be-seen-anywhere-other-than-a-particularly-nasty-David-Cronenberg-film.
In my feed recently, courtesy of such Ugly accounts, I’ve seen: