THIS GUY CAN COOK
Montreal-born ‘Queer Eye’ co-host takes his lumps from critics calling his dishes overly simplistic
Antoni Porowski never said he was a chef, but he definitely knows his way around a kitchen.
As the resident food and wine guy on “Queer Eye,” which had its première on Netflix in February, he is responsible for imparting humble lessons in home cooking to men who are undergoing weeklong transformations. Porowski’s food demonstrations are just part of a series of selfimprovement seminars the show’s subjects attend. They go shopping with Tan France. They are groomed by Jonathan Van Ness. They experience “culture” with Karamo Brown. And the show’s interior designer, Bobby Berk, makes their homes livable and often gorgeous.
These makeovers are master classes in empathy. The Fab Five pepper their subjects with compliments, I-know-where-you’re-coming-froms and hugs.
But the cooking classes have brought out the worst in viewers, many of whom feel that Porowski’s dishes are overly simplistic. Their loud critiques have fuelled what The New Yorker’s food correspondent Helen Rosner called a “culinary conspiracy theory.”
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, at his Brooklyn apartment, Porowski whipped up a minimalist spaghetti and meatballs that proved that sometimes simple is anything but simplistic.
The tomato sauce was an adaptation of Marcella Hazan’s recipe: San Marzano tomatoes; one onion, halved; and a stick of butter. Porowski threw in fresh basil and Parmesan rinds for an added kick.
“It’s such a beautiful thing that you don’t have to waste,” he said of the oft-discarded end of the cheese block.
While the sauce simmered, Porowski, wearing a thin white T-shirt and slim-fit jeans, prepared ground turkey meatballs with crushed fennel, chili flakes, honey and more cheese. Behind him, a bowl of fresh spaghetti sat below the mouth of an extruder. He would have to make more for a dinner party that night, where he was to feed his boyfriend, Joey Krietemeyer, and three of their close friends.
On “Queer Eye,” a reprise of Bravo’s “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which ran from 2003 to 2007, Porowski shares recipes that are useful for easy entertaining. He teaches Tom, who has been divorced three times and is trying to rekindle love with his most recent ex, how to make a creamy guacamole with Greek yogurt. He fries up grilled cheese for Neal before a release party for his app. He shows Jeremy, a firefighter, how to dress up hotdogs to serve at a fire station fundraiser.
Think pieces criticizing these “basic” recipes swiftly followed. Out magazine called Porowski’s use of Greek yogurt in guacamole “absolutely blasphemous.” Bowen Yang, a writer at Vulture, wrote that Porowski prepares “food a child would make when they’re old enough not to need a sitter. Any queer loves a grilled cheese, but it’s not a revelation to cut it into four triangular pieces.”
Porowski, who turned 25 Wednesday, said that he tries his best to ignore the noise, but admitted that it hurts to hear, not least because he knows that an act as elementary as cutting open a fruit can be eye-opening for some people.
“Tom Jackson never saw the inside of an avocado before,” he said. “We had all these other components that we made for that food demo that I wanted to show him how to make if we had a chance to. But when I cut open that avocado, he looked over in this childlike wonder and was actually amazed.”
He lamented that negativity was a natural response to a program that elevates ordinary people to “hero” status. “I think that’s why the show is doing so well,” he said. “It’s about kindness, and we haven’t seen that in a really long time.”
Porowski was born in Montreal after his parents emigrated from Warsaw with his two older sisters. They spoke Polish at home, and he learned English and French simultaneously from television and in school.
After studying psychology at Concordia University, Porowski moved to New York to pursue acting. He took food service jobs to make rent, and eventually worked his way up to management at the sushi restaurant BondSt. All the while, he was auditioning for acting gigs with limited success.
“It’s usually like, ‘I’m Antoni Porowski, 5-foot-11-¾. Here’s Polish Terrorist No. 2,’” he said. “And then you scream when you leave the room, and it’s done. And you never hear back.”
His luck changed at a book signing for Ted Allen, who was the original “Queer Eye” food and wine expert on the Bravo series. The two became fast friends and Allen hired Porowski as a personal assistant and became his mentor. A little over a year later, when one of Porowski’s friends who works at Untitled Entertainment alerted him to the Netflix reboot, Allen was the first person Porowski called for advice.
“He’s like, ‘Antoni, do you really want to do this?’ ” Porowski recalled. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, but I think that I should try.’ ”
Allen put in a call to the show’s co-creator David Collins, and after a gruelling series of auditions and chemistry reads, Porowski was welcomed into the new Fab Five.
Though the show required him to relocate temporarily to Atlanta, Porowski lives with his boyfriend of seven years in Brooklyn.
“For the most part, it was never assumed that I was gay, and I’ve had people be sort of surprised that I was gay or act apologetic like they didn’t know, which would just make me really uncomfortable,” he said. “And I never had shame for it, but I never felt like introducing myself as: ‘I’m Antoni, I’m gay. How are you?’”
Porowski eschews labels generally and prefers to think of himself as a student, a human and, if he must, a self-taught home cook.
The pasta was good, by the way.