Jonah Reider’s gentle style of cooking and thoughtful, market-driven dishes are part of what makes him a “soft boy cook.” Photo / Scott Rossi, The New York Times
Jonah Reider’s gentle style of cooking and thoughtful, market-driven dishes are part of what makes him a “soft boy cook.” Photo / Scott Rossi, The New York Times
Hide your tomatoes: These charismatic chefs are on social media, a counter to the harder-edged chefs.
I first noticed them when I came across British chef Julius Roberts’ 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 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 The New York Times. 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, 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 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.
A former Buzzfeed video producer, Pierce Abernathy left his day job to cook at a restaurant full-time in 2019 and started posting online cooking videos a year later. Photo / Scott Rossi, The New York Times
Pierce Abernathy, a model, social media star and undisputed soft boy cook, cites Alice Waters, whom he recently cooked for, as a major influence, as well as his mother, a home cook. “I was lucky to have a mom that cooked very simply,” he said, preparing food (like fish sauteed in olive oil, with lemon, a little salt and steamed broccoli) “that tasted like it was.”
That the soft boy cook can find fame and financial success by cooking in ways women have for generations is a glaring tension. But because they appear demure in a landscape dominated by supercharged machismo, they can afford to be precious with their food, even rewarded for it, while filling a widening gap for sensitive men.
The road to cooking gently was a long one for Abernathy, 31. A former BuzzFeed video producer, he left his day job to cook at a restaurant full time in 2019, but it wasn’t until he moved back home to Kentucky during the pandemic that he felt comfortable enough to be himself in front of the camera: just a guy who loves cooking vegetables.
In 2020, Abernathy posted a video of himself making baba ghanouj, his debut as an internet cook. Now, he has hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok, where he posts quiet videos of himself, turning peak produce from the farmers market into dips, salads and other vegetable-forward delights.
When I interviewed Abernathy, I was struck by how much he was like his online presence. “You know what gets me excited?” he said, looking genuinely excited. “Going to the market, finding an ingredient and just trying to figure out how I want to transform that.”
In videos for his more than 330,000 Instagram followers, Chuck Cruz seems incidental to the food itself, so soft that the cooking shines that much more. Photo / Scott Rossi, The New York Times
When I asked Chuck Cruz, 34, which of his recipes best represents his soft boy cooking style, he said some take on Filipino adobo, probably, with a side of peeled Sun Gold tomatoes to munch on.
“Peeled?” I asked, thinking of the tediousness of stripping each tiny tomato of its skin.
“I don’t know why I said that,” he said, chuckling. But peeling tomatoes for a concassé was something he did often during his years cooking at Cellar Door Provisions in Chicago. And is there a better way to respect a summer tomato?
In videos for his more than 330,000 Instagram followers, Cruz seems incidental to the food itself, which is another avenue for soft boy cooks on the internet: to be so soft that the cooking shines that much more. Without speaking, he blanches herbs and folds pasta to a smooth soundtrack for dishes like sweet pea-and-miso filled tortellini, celery vinegar braised beef and unique takes on au poivre.
In addition to his partner, chef and cookbook author Hailee Catalano, and his mother, Cruz cited California chefs Jeremy Fox and Paul Bertolli as influences on his fresh produce-inspired, ingredient-first cooking. I thought of the Bertolli quote “the trouble you take will also be your enduring pleasure” while telling Cruz the story of how I spent seven hours reducing 2kgs of tomatoes to make a quarter-cup of conserva, which made him laugh.
The soft boy cook knows that this type of slow, honest food takes more patience than the average cook is willing or able to put in. But that’s the thing about cooking: Tenderness takes time.
