Pointlessly Famous Person Kylie Jenner wants to teach you how to cook. Which doesn't really make sense, because she's not technically a chef. But you know what celebrities excel at? Opportunism. Which is why you might've noticed that, recently, every personality with a platform of any kind wants to tell you about their meatloaf.
First, there was the celebrity chef. Now, there's the celebrity-who-chef: Gwyneth Paltrow, Chrissy Teigen, and, of course, Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, all have lucrative cookbooks. Aziz Ansari has a YouTube special called "Food Club." Tiffani "What Ever Happened to the Amber?" Thiessen has a show on the Cooking Channel. And that's just skimming the surface.
Sometimes, celebrities' passion projects bust spectacularly -- remember Shaq's rap career? But today's celebrity food ventures are not an embarrassment to the culinary world. There's a symbiotic relationship at work here that benefits everyone involved -- from the chefs you'd assume would be annoyed, to the home-cooking consumers.
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This phenomenon is way older than the internet. The beloved Julia Child, for example, wasn't a professional chef at all (she was a spy during WWII!), but she got more people into cooking than possibly any other human in modern history. And the formidable felon Martha Stewart was a model well before Entertaining was published. Anyone is capable of cooking, but it takes a special kind of motivation to convince people to actually get into the kitchen. Celebs-who-chef use their star power -- however it was acquired -- to get people interested in food. There's no reason to revere Child but rebuke Kris Jenner and her nachos if they both get people excited about home cooking. Granted, Child's recipes are significantly more advanced and nuanced, but an entry point into food is still an entry point, and, as Martha says, that's a good thing. Anthony Bourdain, a chef whose celebrity basically overtook his need to continue cooking, agrees.
"I don't have any problem with it [celebrities getting into the food space]. It's worth remembering that Julia Child was not a professionally trained chef and probably the most influential and important cookbook ever written in the English language was The Art of French Cooking. Vincent Price was not a trained chef, but apparently a very good cook. Surely many of them could be branded crap brand extensions. Chrissy Teigen, judging from her Instagram account, is a very serious cook. She is constantly cooking, is really into chefs and restaurants and has a strong Thai background -- cooks with her mom a lot. I have every reason to believe that's a very good cookbook," he said.
The ever-sardonic Bourdain could've easily skewered the trend, and why shouldn't he? The cynic could argue that celebrities' side projects, particularly the numerous exploits of the entire Kardashian clan, are singularly motivated by money, and the need to extend their influence into every imaginable aspect of the consumer's life. For a trained, serious chef like Bourdain, these jokers could easily be viewed as undermining the entire profession.
He didn't challenge it, though, and instead, he chooses to see the value of this kind of intrusion in the food space. And other chefs agree with him. "I've definitely seen more of an interest and response from cooking shows and books with celebrities... and I've definitely seen an increase in interest about cooking, overall, because of it. Cooking shows and books expose people -- who may not have that kind of exposure in real life -- to new concepts about food," said chef Justin Warner, winner of the eighth season of Food Network Star.
Take Teigen. "I think a perfect example of a celebrity doing it right in the food world is Chrissy Teigen. She's passionate, she has fun, and she knows her shit. People love watching her cook and talk about food. It's just an energy that translates so naturally," said Brian Malarkey, chef/owner of seven successful restaurants including Searsucker (San Diego, Del Mar, Austin) and Herringbone (La Jolla and Los Angeles), a Top Chef contestant, judge on The Taste, and participant in pretty much every food-based reality show ever.
"Trust me: I've worked with her, she loves food more than I do. And that's saying a lot," Warner concurred.
Turns out, almost any chef is going to appreciate the exposure celebrity chefs bring to the food world. As chef Vitaly Paley, an Iron Chef champion, and chef/owner of Paley's Place, Imperial, and Portland Penny Diner (Portland, OR) said, "Shows about cooking bring attention to what we do, they bring attention to food, and the people who make it. They only make our field stronger. I welcome anyone that's passionate about food and has a platform, to use it."
But self-interested chefs aside, the people who actually buy the celebrity class' cookbooks are also appreciative of celebrity food ventures. Big-time Teigen fan Lesley Lara, from San Jose, CA, tweeted about her lemon arugula spaghetti and had this to say when we reached out to her: "Her [Teigen's] cookbook not only provides relatively simple recipes, but it also stands up to the high standards of trained chefs -- my roommate loved the lemony arugula pasta -- and the pictures of her and John Legend are definitely an added bonus," Lara said. "Would I have made the recipe if it was some random old person on TV? I probably would have. Would I have gone out to Barnes & Noble solely to purchase that random old person's cookbook? Yeah, that's a hard no."
A functional, serviceable cookbook, app, or television show that's packaged with copious Hollywood glamour can attract people in a way that "no random old person" can. It's not a bait-and-switch, because celebs, like Teigen, have cooking chops that even world-class chefs appreciate. But even Kylie, a decidedly unprofessional chef, can serve an important role in this movement. "I was inspired to make Kylie's tacos because I am obsessed with her and her family and they looked so delicious," said Randi Bernstein, from Bohemia, NY, an avid Kylie fan who tweeted about the recipe. Celebrity adoration is a very real motivation for who tries what recipes when. They're just like us, remember? Randi may never meet Kylie, but they've made the same tacos.
Similarly, fictional characters are breaking down home-cooking barriers to entry with relatability and entertainment. Bob's Burgers, a Loren Bouchard animated series that should need no introduction, inspired its own cookbook, featuring real burgers from the show, with some hefty influence from a fan blog. Jillian Lucas from Brooklyn -- another Twitter enthusiast -- cooks a few times a week. She and her boyfriend are fans of the show. They decided to invest in the book, and made the "Hit Me with Your Best Shallot burger."
"A lot of times, stuff like this can easily feel gimmicky, like it's just another marketing piece for the show or movie or whatever. But because this one was based on a fan-made blog and then transformed into a book, it feels more authentic and more about the food, rather than the show it was inspired by. It's a really good burger recipe book that just so happens to use the punny burger names from the show... there are definitely burgers in the book that I had never heard of or seen anywhere else (or just have really great names) that I definitely want to try out," she said.
Celebrities and cartoons can do things that, simply, most chefs can't. "Look, most chefs aren't the kind of people who can go out and just be charismatic in front of a camera," said Scott Grewe, executive chef at New York's Sutton Inn, "So, if through cooking, celebrities can expose people to unique ingredients, or if a celebrity inspires someone at home to pursue cooking a new dish at home, or enjoy their food more, I mean, that's really cool. It's not the reality of a working chef, but it's spreading a love of food, and that's always good."
Warner echoed the sentiment. "If you have a Venn diagram, with celebrities on one side, and cooks on the other, the overlap in the center is entertainers. There are chefs who don't care about being entertaining, and obviously there are celebrities who don't care about cooking. For me, the overlap in the middle, and people taking advantage of it, is not an alarming trend," he said.
You may remember Coolio spitting rhymes about "Gangsta's Paradise" in Michelle Pfeiffer's face in the early '90s. You may not remember him spitting lines about making a Caprese salad that will "... get them panties, right off." But he sure did in his online cooking show aptly titled "Cookin' with Coolio," which is also the name of his very real cookbook.
As an experiment, I sent my friend Dave Ferrugio five recipes. Four of the recipes were easy meals like grilled cheese and burgers with no celebrity names attached to them. One was Coolio's Caprese salad. Please refer to the Instagram shot above -- he took the bait.
My portal to food culture was Bourdain, my mom's was the aforementioned Martha Stewart. It's possible that someone like Teigen or Kylie or Carlton Banks could induce a new generation to love food and home cooking, in a way that elevates the culture at large.
"I might not want to go to their [the Kardashians'] restaurant if they open one. That's a whole different skill set. Do they have a good recipe for meatloaf? They might well," Bourdain said.
So, Kylie, or Kourtney, or Khloe, or Kim, if you are reading this -- please let us know if you do, in fact, have a meatloaf recipe. Because we would love to try it. The ball is in your kourt.
Sean Cooley contributed to this reporting.
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Wil Fulton is a staff writer for Thrillist. He actually hates meatloaf. Follow him: @wilfulton.