J. Kenji López

Jul 26, 2023

By Brett Martin

Photography by Ian Allen

I know this kitchen: the range with its broken starters. The worn gray kitchen mat in its vaguely Arabic lattice print. The hideaway pantry shelves that slide out on smooth casters, like the archive stacks in a library. The brick wall of knives of every size, shape, and provenance. Aside from the key light and miniature camera hanging above the stove, those knives are the only obvious sign that this is anything more than your average, nicely appointed kitchen on a hilly, tree-lined Seattle street—that it is, in fact, the domestic and professional headquarters of J. Kenji López-Alt.

It is quite possible that you know the kitchen too, or at least its output. It's where López-Alt shoots Kenji's Cooking Show, the YouTube series he launched in April 2020, which quickly amassed 1.1 million subscribers. It's the place where, for the past year and a half, he has tested and developed recipes for his New York Times column and the articles he writes for Serious Eats, the food site where he got his start and for which he remains a culinary consultant. More recently, this is where he perfected the ideas and the dishes featured in his new cookbook, The Wok: Recipes and Techniques, the follow-up to his massively successful debut, The Food Lab, of which there are now a million copies in print. He takes most of his own food photos here too. In the dining room next door, there's a stack of digitally printed fake tabletops, for the purposes of shooting finished dishes, usually by the diffuse Pacific Northwest sunlight coming in the window. When López-Alt's hands are required for a shot, his five-year-old daughter is on shutter duty.

If you’re conversant with the behavior of protein strands in eggs; if you have strong opinions about the varying heat-transfer properties of cast iron and carbon steel; if you have reverse-seared your prime rib or blasted pretty much anything besides crème brûlée with a culinary torch, chances are you owe a debt to López-Alt's kitchen. (Not incidental to his popularity has been his suggestion that the virtues of learning about food and feeding your loved ones are best achieved by buying a home flamethrower.) In this home kitchen, and previous iterations in New York and Northern California, López-Alt has spent a decade and a half influencing and changing how America cooks and thinks about food.

On this morning, López-Alt pads around the kitchen in socks, hair in a small topknot, preparing to shoot an episode of Kenji's Cooking Show. Despite his YouTube success—he has six times as many subscribers as, say, Alison Roman, and more than twice as many as the entire New York Times Cooking channel—López-Alt takes an assiduously casual approach to the show, shooting episodes only when the spirit moves. "The rule is that it has to be something I was already cooking for my family, and I have to be alone in the house," he says of the videos, for which he accepts no sponsorships, relying on YouTube ad sales for revenue. "To me, it has to remain a fun side project."

Otherwise, López-Alt (whose wife, Adriana, is a digital cryptographer and principal security engineer at Square) enforces a strict two-day work week: Thursdays he takes his daughter out of school; this winter they’ve usually gone skiing. Mondays and Wednesdays he spends with his newborn son. He builds wooden shelves. He practices piano. All the while, his YouTube "side project" has brought in around $200,000 in the past year.

Given the intensity of López-Alt's early persona, this frankly dreamy state of affairs comes as something of a surprise. But then maybe it shouldn't. While he has consistently marched to the beat of his own drummer, it's a drummer that seems to routinely lead him into the center of the zeitgeist: He became a restaurant chef at just the moment that job began its revolutionary shift from a working-class trade to a vaunted profession. He moved to media just as food began dominating the cultural conversation. He was right on time for the parallel rise of the blogosphere and of nerd culture—particularly that bro-heavy intersection that fetishized analytics, pop culture, arguing online, and playing with fire. So, should it come as a surprise to find him here in 2022, an avatar for the widespread reexamination of life and work priorities that's come along with the Great Resignation?

The two of us had begun the day at a Chinese grocery store, where we’d gone to pick up ingredients for a few recipes for The Wok that López-Alt planned on filming for Kenji's Cooking Show. From there, we’d headed to Zylberschtein's Delicatessen & Bakery, in Pinehurst, to grab bagels—a food that López-Alt takes especially seriously. He had recently caused a mini uproar online after comments he’d made praising the local bagel scene to a Seattle Times writer were taken as a declaration that Seattle's bagels are better than New York's. López-Alt and his family moved to the city last year from San Mateo, California, and his eating, as chronicled on Instagram, has been closely watched in his new home. Another Times headline called him "Seattle's Most Powerful Food Influencer."

In a previous life, that lofty position might have included calling out restaurants he found wanting, but time, the pandemic, and a few stressful years as an owner of a restaurant himself (of Wursthall, in San Mateo, which López-Alt left when he moved north) have changed his ways. He now pursues a policy of praising things he likes and ignoring things he doesn't. The influence, in any event, is apparently real: The owner of Zylberschtein's stuck his head outside to thank López-Alt for a recent post on the restaurant's pastrami, which had been selling out ever since.

López-Alt grew up in Manhattan, so he has some authority on such matters. His family lived near Columbia University, where his father and his maternal grandfather taught genetics and organic chemistry, respectively. His grandparents, who had followed his mother when she emigrated from Japan, lived in the apartment directly below the Alts. A basket on a string connected the two apartments’ windows, sending the day's Japanese newspaper down and returning with treats from Grandma. Japanese was López-Alt's first language. (The all-but-unused J. in his name is for James; he added López when he and his wife, who is from Bogotá, combined their last names.)

López-Alt attended Dalton and then MIT, where he studied biology, tracked to follow his father and grandfather into science. He soon realized he had no taste for the cloistered drudgery of research, preferring instead the fast-paced, practical-minded laboratories of professional kitchens around Boston—he did stints at prestigious restaurants from the likes of Barbara Lynch and Ken Oringer. "It wasn't just to piss my mother off, but it did piss my mother off," López-Alt says. "She still thinks I made the wrong decision, but that I just got lucky. Which is probably true." (He did graduate, with a degree in architecture, and his mother has recently been partially mollified by his New York Times column.)

López-Alt eventually found a middle ground in 2006, when he moved to the test kitchen at Cook's Illustrated, the beloved publication that applies rigorous experimentation, scientific principles, and a certain Yankee dryness to its recipes. In 2009, he contributed a piece on hamburgers to Serious Eats, then a three-year-old website in search of a clear identity. Its founder, Ed Levine, suggested that he start a food science column. López-Alt went home and turned in more than 2,000 words on boiling eggs, complete with charts, diagrams, photos of eggs at every interval of temperature and time, a discussion of water pH values, and more. Also, a lot of egg puns.

"It was one of those things where you read it and you go, Holy shit, who thinks of this stuff?" Levine says. "His talent was just screaming at me."

The post got 10 times as many views as any recipe the site had published before. López-Alt got $30, which Levine stresses was $5 more than the site's going rate.

López-Alt wrote all kinds of things for Serious Eats, from reviews to essays, but it was "The Food Lab,"conceived as a sort of kitchen Mythbusters, that all but single-handedly transformed the site. Recipes came to rule the day, trumpeted as "the Best," "the Perfect," and "the Ultimate" versions of their kind—now a near universal trope for recipe sites in search of clicks. López-Alt was not the first to explain cooking through science, or apply scientific rigor to recipe development, but his writing was tailor-made for that optimistic online moment: natural, funny, rife with pop culture references, and giddy with the infinite space the internet promised. He was like a Bill Simmons of the smashburger. (Though, when I mention Simmons as a possible influence, he tells me he has never heard the name.) He was willing to take a silly conceit to its furthest extremes—whether that was tasting every item on the In-N-Out secret menu or constructing a baroque double-blind experiment to test the old canard that what makes New York pizza distinctive is New York water. In these days of massive food-media oversaturation, it is hard to imagine how such things once felt part of a shelf of culture that had largely gone unchronicled, an expanse of virgin snow waiting to be romped through.

López-Alt matched the moment in other ways. He was an active Twitter combatant and a picker of righteous fights, as when he got into a feud with David Chang over the $5 price of a Coke at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. His output was maniacal—eventually tallying several thousand posts for Serious Eats. In an effort to keep his new star, Levine promoted him to culinary director, though López-Alt had little taste for managing others. In the way of that era's start-ups, Serious Eats was a place where work and life were implicitly expected to be indivisible. "We would spend time inside and outside of work together," López-Alt says. "It wasn't abnormal for people to respond to emails at three in the morning. I would go to the office at 10 a.m., leave at 8 p.m., write more at home until midnight, and then work on my book from midnight until 4 a.m."

López-Alt says he has come to regret the role he played in fostering that culture, partly as a result of talking to former coworkers: "Thinking back, it's like, whose lives did I make more difficult by setting those kinds of expectations without thinking about it?"

His star treatment at the website is also a source of remorse. "I didn't like managing people, so I was like, I’ll focus on the writing stuff. But in retrospect, what that ended up meaning was that other people had to pick up the work that I had been hired to do, and didn't really get asked their opinion on it. I got to do what I wanted to do all the time, and other people were just kind of expected to work around it. It worked out good for me, but I don't know that it did for other people."

He's worked to shed the competitiveness that once drove him. In the old days, he would have obsessively tracked the success of other cooking video shows, like Andrew Rea's Binging With Babish, which has some nine million subscribers; now, he barely pays attention. He quit tweeting last year, and Facebook before that, though he still pokes around Reddit, chiming in on food debates, scolding the odd troll, and taking the occasional pin to some of his own mythology. Five months ago, when López-Alt hopped into a discussion about the correct amount of water to use when cooking pasta (you need far less than what you probably use, he insists), a fan gushed: "Having him comment in a thread I posted was like touching the edge of God's cloak." To which López-Alt replied, "FYI: I just ate a cold leftover enchilada straight out of the fridge and am having a glass of dry rosé with an ice cube in it because I forgot to chill it."

Now, with no fanfare beyond switching on the bright key light and pushing record on a camera trained on the stove, López-Alt swings into filming today's video. He begins by holding a GoPro in front of him for a selfie introduction, then straps the camera on his head: the effect to the viewer being a brief, dizzying barrel roll; a glimpse of kitchen floor, often with López-Alt's own bare feet or the wagging butt of one of his dogs, Jamón or Shabu; and then a sudden reemergence into his POV, his hands becoming yours. He selects a knife from the brick wall and begins cutting scallions and shallots to make a burnt-scallion oil, one of an arsenal of relatively simple dressings for noodles that are a highlight of The Wok, keeping up a fluid but informal patter as he works.

López-Alt happened on this signature style after seeing an ad for the movie Hardcore Henry, which was filmed like a first-person shooter video game. "I’m not good at working from a script, and I also get nervous in front of cameras, so for me strapping the camera to my head is really what made it all work. I just pretend I’m teaching someone who's with me how to cook." He often improvises on the show, changes directions midstream, makes mistakes.

Of all the changes that have come over López-Alt, this may be the most striking, a deliberate step back from the goal of perfection. "The Best," after all, has always carried a toxic whiff of conquest, as though one were wrestling a recipe to the ground and planting one's foot on its neck. And there's a fine line between busting a myth and telling people the things they believe they like are wrong or stupid. (See also: baseball analytics heads talking about the stolen base.) López-Alt no longer uses Best or Perfect or Ultimate. One of the most popular videos on his channel currently is for Really Good Beef Stew.

He even wrote a book about his transformation, albeit one for children. Every Night Is Pizza Night, which came out in 2020, is on the surface a kind of multi-culti, Montessori Green Eggs and Ham, about a girl reluctantly trying new foods. (It got my daughters to demand, if not appreciate, tagine and bibimbap.) But it's also about a science-minded obsessive who learns that all the data in the world can't account for the myriad ways people experience food, and that there's no such thing as a definitive "Best." It suggests that in addition to the so-called Six Conflicts in Literature—Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Self, Man vs. Society, and so on—we may need a seventh: Man vs. His Own SEO.

López-Alt says, "My idea was always ‘I’m going to teach you all these different elements of technique and food science, and then when you’re in your kitchen actually cooking, you’ll be able to pick and choose what's important to you.’ But I think a lot of people ended up not reading it that way. Or I didn't explain it well enough." The Food Lab ethos, he says, "got picked up by this sort of bro cook culture that tends to put people down. People weaponize knowledge in negative ways—which wasn't my intention, but probably a thing I also used to do." His following remains somewhat astonishingly male; Kenji's Cooking Show subscribers are 85 percent men, which he notes is at least down from above 90 percent when he launched.

Science is still present on Kenji's Cooking Show, but it tends to flow naturally, generously. "As we know…" López-Alt may say, about how meat tenderness depends on the length of its protein strands, or how the sugars in scallions caramelize at a certain temp. So, too, in The Wok, which began life as a section of The Food Lab's 1,600-page first draft. The book is less pedantic than its predecessor, less evangelical about transcending mere recipes to reach a higher plane of pure technique. (I have always been dubious of this anti-recipe trend, knowing from experience that there is a hard cap on people's interest in food but believing all should be encouraged to cook without shame.)

That is not to say that The Wok partakes in the cult of ease that dominates much of the recipe world these days. In the weeks that I spent cooking from it, I often finished with nearly every bowl in my house piled in the sink, alongside assorted pans, cutting boards, knives, and ramekins; it may make the case that the wok is "the most versatile pan in your kitchen," but this is not one-pot cooking. For several years, I’ve operated under a domestic consent decree with my girlfriend that prevents me from adding to the collection of condiments that threatens to take over our pantry and refrigerator shelves, but The Wok still pushed my stores to the limit, allowing me a thrilling reprieve at my local Asian supermarket. Revelations abounded: There's a trick for tenderizing beef using baking soda that represents a signal victory in the battle to replicate takeout Chinese at home. Also to that end, López-Alt pursues the grail of "wok hei," that intoxicating, smoky "breath of the wok" distinctive to Cantonese restaurant dishes. (Enter the flamethrower.) There are noodles of every style—from Sichuan "ants climbing trees" (the ants being bits of pork clinging to cellophane noodles) to the slippery "garlic noodles" found in San Francisco Vietnamese restaurants—and personal dishes, like López-Alt's mother's softer, Japanese-flavored version of classic mapo tofu.

That last is one of many recipes for which López-Alt provides a personal context, which, along with his scientific approach, has helped him largely dodge the culture wars that have flared around recipe writing and cultural appropriation. He is also an assiduous researcher and prodigious creditor of sources. "Having a kind of ambiguously ethnic name probably helps," he says.

Now, with shooting done and the GoPro powered down, we slurp chewy round noodles bathed in scallion oil and burnished with dark soy sauce. The remainder will be ferried up to López-Alt's wife and what has to be the luckiest nanny on Earth. Maybe it is the power of a good noodle, but it occurs to me that this new manifestation of Kenji López-Alt might just represent the digital utopia we were once promised. You don't hear much about it anymore, but that dream was of a world where a weirdo with a vision could set out on their own, find an audience, work without interference, and earn a living without being made sick and crazy. In Kenji's kitchen, I have the thought, for the first time in a very long time, that the internet might just be the Best.

Brett Martin is a GQ correspondent.