![]() How was I not happy?’: Andrew Rea in his YouTube kitchen at home in New York. “That was just where the camera happened to cut off! But I think it helped my rise – there was a bit of mystery.” “I had no intention of being anonymous,” Rea says. You couldn’t see his face, which would become his hallmark. ![]() ![]() He set up a tripod, started recording, and made a smoothie. He put $4,000 worth of camera equipment on his credit card, but realised the only place with enough space to test it out in their apartment was the kitchen. A marriage break-up, a professional falling-out and a bout of depression later, he found himself, in 2016, living with a friend in Queens and wondering what to do with his life. He’d graduated from film school in New York and planned to direct documentaries. To hear him tell it, Rea, who is 34, razor-bald and hipster-bearded, became the most famous chef you’ve never heard of by accident. As for the rest, Rea has a larger YouTube audience than Jamie Oliver (5.5m), Nigella Lawson (305k) and Tom Kerridge (9k) combined. Only Gordon Ramsay, with 18m YouTube subscribers, has a bigger online reach. He may not be first-name famous, or indeed first- and-last-name famous, but if someone is getting their culinary fix online – and if they’re under 30, you can bet they are – they’re likely getting it from him. Rea’s videos, meanwhile, regularly rack up hits in the tens of millions. Nigella Lawson’s latest TV series – Eat, Cook, Repeat, which aired during England’s second national lockdown – was considered a ratings smash with 3m viewers, over 1m more than her previous show. Rea’s YouTube cookery channel, Babish Culinary Universe – named after his favourite character from The West Wing, a slightly incongruous call that rapidly became too big to fiddle with – currently boasts 9.5m subscribers. He’s not, he’ll happily admit, a professional cook in any meaningful sense – apart from the fact that he now earns millions doing it. He once took seven attempts to make cacio e pepe, a pasta dish famous for including just cheese and pepper. To watch Rea cook is as much an instruction of what not to do. He is almost entirely self-taught, he says, from watching cookery videos online. He has never worked as a chef, nor attended culinary school. Andrew Rea is one of the biggest chefs in the world, though that’s no guarantee you’ve heard of him. ![]()
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