THE NEW ISSUE
ISSUE 29
feel like I have a job. I think work and jobs are different. People say if you love your job, you never work a day in your life. I'm like, yeah. I don't even know. Everyone f*cks with you because you're so real. Why is it so important to you to show the real side of cooking? Even if you took the best f*cking chef at home, 80 percent of the time he's going to make something awesome, 20 percent of the time he's probably going to make some f*cking dumb sh*t. When I'm cooking at home, I'm making some f*cked-up sh*t too. And I don't give a—I'm not a restaurant, “Here's this perfect chicken and here's all this awesome stuff.” I'm showing people how to f*cking cook. All I want is people to f*cking cook. That's it. Everything doesn't need to be so precious; it's precious that people try. I just want people to have hope towards cooking. I think cooking really builds self-esteem. It's such a nice way to do something for somebody else or for yourself. Humans are horrible to each other, but somehow food can instantly make you feel better. We're all f*cking broken. Life is f*cked. I'm broken as f*ck, I'm a mental case. But making food genuinely makes me happy. It also genuinely stresses me out when I'm shooting these f*cking videos sometimes. And that's okay. It stresses people out when they're cooking at home. Sometimes you can't find a spoon, sometimes you can't find a bowl. That's the stuff that's beautiful. The chaos and the, “Where the f*ck is the towel? What the f*ck is this?” That's everybody at home, because nothing's perfect.
I was funny enough, engaging enough, that we kept making stuff and it started taking me away from the restaurant. I never had a vacation, ever. You would maybe get a week in a whole year. You wouldn't even have two days off in a row. All of a sudden I was like, “Oh, I'm gone for two weeks. I'm going to shoot three episodes of this show.” And the partners of the restaurant were like, “What are we doing? We're paying you to travel.” Eventually I was making so much content for the show that I was never at the restaurant. I'm not an actual partner at the restaurant. This is just a job. I make more money [working with VICE]. I had to make a really hard decision.
Your first cookbook is very family-oriented and your food is very welcoming, approachable and down to earth. Have you always been drawn to this mentality towards food? I think so. I haven't really changed that much. Even when I was in the restaurant business, I always cooked for my friends. On my days off, I would cook. We would make tons of meals. We would go over to my friend’s house and we would have these big dinners. All my friends were sh*tty
I spent the last five years doing my thing. Making TV shows, making content, traveling the world, writing books. It's wild what my life has turned into. I'm very grateful that people f*ck with me. I could've been a chef that was making 65K a year and that was my job. I work every day and I still don't
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