On a warm September evening, H Woo Lee weaves across the floor of Budonoki in Los Angeles’s Virgil Village neighborhood with a bottle of sake in hand, stopping to refill glasses before turning his attention to the kitchen. Soft light from midcentury modern fixtures overhead illuminates his all-black outfit, which looks almost purple against the reflection of a neon Orion beer sign. Toro tartare is the first dish to land, followed by tomato and stone fruit salad and a build-your-own spot prawn hand roll gussied up with uni and caviar. A larger party of eight boisterously welcomes Lee as he delivers a generous platter of off-menu roasted duck with deeply golden skin to the table. A duck confit korokke (Japanese croquette) arrives next, then a dry-aged striped bass with crisped skin and pre-sliced New York strip steak cooked to a pink medium-rare. A jarring flash comes from the end of the bar; someone pans their phone across the food to make a video primed for social content.

My‑Hanh Lac

My-Hanh Lac

Everyone seems to know Lee — a sense of familiarity permeates the interactions, groups approach him like old friends — but likely, most have never met him in person before that evening. Budonoki is a far cry from the home kitchen, miniaturized to a 16-by-9 aspect ratio, where most of Lee’s followers were first introduced to his work. With over 1 million followers on TikTok, he is among a new generation of culinary creators in Los Angeles reshaping what it means to be a celebrity chef.

The earliest version of a celebrity chef can be traced back to 16th-century Italy when Pope Pius IV’s cook Bartolomeo Scappi published a cookbook with over 1,000 recipes. These days, the term describes cooks like groundbreaking chef and cookbook author Julia Child, or Food Network stars like Emeril Lagasse and Ina Garten, who have found their way into popular culture through television shows. Other celebrity chefs, like Wolfgang Puck and Gordon Ramsay, have built their empires with acclaimed restaurants, frozen food lines, and airport kiosks. Now, as TikTok creators cook for the camera at home and build mega followings, they’re redefining what that path to culinary fame can look like.

Lee started posting detailed, step-by-step instructional cooking videos with quick cuts and playful flourishes on TikTok in 2020 as COVID-19 shut down Maru, the underground dinner series he hosted while attending USC. Run out of his college apartment, Maru was inspired by Paladar, an underground supper club started at USC in 2009. A handful of seats were released for each dinner, where Lee would prepare a seven- or eight-course meal for guests.

He had taught himself to cook in the years prior by watching Gordon Ramsay videos on YouTube in response to his dislike of the food options on campus, but never pursued formal training. Lee’s first viral video, posted December 13, 2020, starts with him looking down at the camera and saying, “You’re going to watch me cook for myself,” before holding up a piece of well-marbled wagyu beef. The next minute is all quick cuts and ASMR sounds as shallots are diced and raw meat hits the pan. Culminating in the steak being drizzled with bordelaise sauce and served over pomme puree, the 59-second video with over 11 million views catapulted Lee onto For You pages across the globe.

Around the same time, Brandon “Sad Papi” Skier posted a video asking his small audience if they wanted to learn cooking tips and tricks from a fine dining restaurant chef. One of his first posts, shared on August 8, 2020, was a step-by-step tutorial on how to make a cauliflower puree, followed by a rosemary salt how-to a day later. To date, the puree video has clocked in at 366,000 views, while the rosemary salt has more than 700,000. Less than a month later, Skier posted a simplified walkthrough on how to break down an onion with a knife, making it his first video with over 1 million views.

In contrast to Lee’s self-taught background, Skier came from the world of upscale Los Angeles restaurants: He worked in kitchens like Neal Fraser’s modern American restaurant Redbird in Downtown LA and Eric Bost’s now-closed fine dining restaurant Auburn near the edge of Hollywood. Skier started creating videos after Auburn closed in response to the pandemic. “I just started posting content because I was bored and then I started getting business offers, and [talent] management reached out,” Skier says. “I was like, ‘Oh, shit, you can actually make money doing this.’” Being accustomed to the high-stress fast-moving environment of restaurants, cooking at home took some getting used to.

One of Skier’s first followers was Fraser, who watched his former line cook go from 100 followers to 100,000 as viewers tuned in to see him prepare dishes like buckwheat crepes and mushroom risotto in his well-equipped home kitchen. “I think his authenticity, who he was as a cook and as a chef in our kitchen, really comes through,” Fraser says. Fraser was making his own digital content at the time but struggled with translating who he was as a chef online. “I found it incredibly disheartening and very lonely,” he says. “When you finish service, you feel like you’re high-fiving everybody. Every time I did some sort of Zoom thing, I felt lesser than at the end.”

That feeling of loneliness while cooking at home for the camera is something that Skier felt in his early days of posting cooking videos online. He was used to the hustle of the kitchen, and that moment of connection as diners got to try a dish for the first time. Suddenly, he was cooking at home, by himself, for an audience who would only experience his cooking through the screen. He tried to foster a connection with his online community, but inherently, it was just different. “I would try to respond to as many DMs as I possibly could and as many comments as I could,” Skier says. “So there’s still a little bit of connection in that sense, but it’s a totally different experience, cooking for someone, and seeing them enjoy it in person.”

Even as Lee and Skier spiked in popularity and monetized their work through partnerships with the likes of Calpico and Health-Ade, they still dreamed of taking their cooking off the screen and into a public venue where they could serve their food in real life. For Lee, the opportunity to take that next step came through a chance meeting while dining at Santa Monica’s Pasjoli restaurant in 2021. While there, Lee met Josh Hartley and Eric Bedroussian, who were helping the front-of-house team part-time, and recognized Lee from following him online — they didn’t shy away from greeting him with his tagline. “I said, ‘Welcome to Pasjoli, you’re gonna watch us cook for you,’” Hartley says. While at Pasjoli, Hartley and Bedroussian were concurrently working on their izakaya pop-up, Budonoki.

The trio stayed in touch, and a few months after Hartley and Bedroussian opened a permanent location for Budonoki in 2023, they asked Lee if he wanted to do a pop-up in the restaurant. Lee spent a few weeks in the kitchen as a stagiaire to learn how the team worked together before agreeing to the collaboration. “There’s a huge difference between cooking at home for friends, and then there’s a bigger difference between cooking in a commercial kitchen or restaurant for a much larger group of people,” Lee says. “And that takes 1,000 moving pieces that not everyone even notices, especially as a diner, until you’re really in the thick of it.”

He vlogged the entire process for his YouTube channel, showing viewers a “day in the life” of a line cook as he surgically trimmed away the pith and peel from an orange, skewered chicken thighs for negima yakitori, and precisely cut sheets of nori for hand rolls. Being in the kitchen again felt like he was speaking a language he already knew. “It’s kind of like a universal language,” Lee says. “If people watch The Bear, there’s a language in kitchens that you pick up, and it’s almost like every restaurant has their own dialect.”

While the team at Budonoki expected excitement around Lee, they were still surprised when reservations for the January 2024 pop-up sold out within minutes. “You had to be scrolling on Instagram in that two-minute window to be able to get a reservation to this thing when it was announced, which was kind of crazy,” Hartley says, who estimates that 85 percent of diners attending the pop-up were there just to see Lee. “All I know is, when H walked into the dining room, several people, like fainted at the sight of him,” Bedroussian says.

During the night of the pop-up, Bedroussian remembers feeling pressure to surpass the expectations of guests coming for Lee; for many, that would be the first time they tried his food. “We were an extension of H that night,” Bedroussian says. “I wanted to put our best foot forward for him, perhaps even more than I wanted to do it for us in our restaurant.” The team at Budonoki has since felt the ripples of Lee’s fame, with some guests recognizing Hartley and Bedroussian from their appearance on Lee’s vlogs. “That’s pretty cool to have that range of influence,” Bedroussian says.

A few months later, Skier returned to his old stomping grounds at Redbird in August 2024 to celebrate the launch of his first cookbook, Make It Fancy, with a collaborative dinner. The cookbook is inspired by his time cooking at home, and the ways he learned to “make it fancy” through his years cooking at restaurants. For Skier, returning to Redbird and Fraser’s kitchen was like “visiting your parents.” He thinks around half the guests came for his cooking, while the other half were just familiar with Redbird.

Redbird

Redbird

As Lee and Skier have become public figures, they’ve had to navigate the territory that comes with being recognizable, and, at times, the parasocial relationships viewers develop as a result. Skier says being recognized and approached in public is still bizarre to him. Even as he’s gotten used to people asking for a picture with him or a signed copy of his cookbook, he still questions why people would want that. “It’s still a little strange, but I would say I’m used to it,” Skier says. “I don’t feel like a public figure or anything like that. Like, I’m just a dude in this kitchen.”

For Lee, that in-person dynamic is something that he has adapted to; he’s often recognized while out by people who watch his videos and approach him. “It’s not ridiculous for these people to come to you and talk to you like, ‘buddy,’ ‘friend,’ because that’s the relationship they have with you,” Lee says. “You obviously don’t have that relationship with them, and you don’t know anything about these people.” When Lee is approached by someone who knows him from his TikTok videos, he tries his best to talk to them like a friend, even correcting them when they refer to themselves as fans. “I’m like, ‘Say friend,’ which may not the best [way to set] boundaries, but I’m just trying to personalize myself,” he says.

While serving tables at a pop-up, Lee, who stands at around six feet tall, purposefully kneels to eye level with diners. For most, this interaction may be the only one they have with the chef they’ve been watching for months, or years, and they bring expectations into the moment. “I have one impression to make sure that they have the best time,” Lee says.

Even with over two million followers, Skier doesn’t use the term “celebrity chef” to describe himself. “In the grand scheme of things, I’m still small potatoes,” he says. “But it is cool [to see] the people that I grew up watching following me back and chatting them up like Gordon Ramsay or Matty Matheson. When [Matheson] followed me, I was like, ‘Fuck yeah.’” Even with his hesitancy to prescribe the “celebrity” title to himself, Skier feels a sense of pride around the community he’s built. “I call them ‘regulars,’” he says.

Wonho Frank Lee

That path from the kitchen into the spotlight has been charted by creators like TikTok star Tuệ “Tway Da Bae” Nguyễn, who opened Đi Đi in 2023 after building an audience across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Nguyễn worked as an unpaid stagiaire at Spago in Beverly Hills in 2018, but after years of running through menial tasks, she began to question if she wanted to be in the industry at all. In 2021, Nguyễn hosted her first pop-up in partnership with H.Wood Group at the now-closed Petite Taqueria. The overwhelming response was immediate — the pop-up fully sold out two nights. After seeing the audience Nguyễn could bring in, partners John Terzian and Brian Toll decided to work with her to open a restaurant. “I didn’t really have to pitch the vision because I am the vision,” Nguyễn told Eater in 2023. Đi Đi is still open, with Nguyễn still heavily involved and regularly visiting the kitchen to ensure the menu and experience stay true to her vision for a modern Vietnamese restaurant.

As TikTok opens up new opportunities for creators, an already established generation of well-known and celebrity chefs is trying to adapt. Chef David Kuo (Little Fatty) posts regular videos on his Instagram of himself cooking, and chef Ludo Lefebvre has even started a YouTube channel to showcase his recipes. In Los Angeles, chef Tetsuya Nakao of acclaimed Studio City sushi spot Asanebo has become a bonafide social media star with his whimsical videos and over 400,000 followers. Even Lagasse is posting on TikTok, though he only has just over 350,000 followers. As established chefs try to make their mark on social platforms, well-known online chefs have made their way onto guest spots on network shows; Tineke Younger, who has over eight million followers on TikTok, was a competitor on Next Level Chef on Fox.

Skier calls this moment a “golden age of food” — he says he sees increased respect and visibility for cooks, both in the kitchen and online. The ability to cook at home and post online to an audience has opened up opportunities for chefs to make a name for themselves outside of the traditional kitchen structure and democratized the path to popularity and profitability. “If you make bad food, you’re not going to go anywhere,” Skier says. “But if you’re determined, I think anyone can make it. I mean, just look at me. Five years ago I was an unemployed line cook with $20 to my name, and I just started posting.”

Lee and Skier have bigger plans than TikTok on their horizons — both hope to open restaurants of their own one day, though there’s not a timeline yet. “I wouldn’t go back into a kitchen to work for someone else, probably,” Skier says. “But to be my own boss — definitely.”

Additional photo illustration credits: H Woo Lee photographed by My‑Hanh Lac; Brandon Skier photos courtesy of Brandon Skier and Redbird.