THE TINY CHEF
LOS ANGELES — The chef stands only 6 inches tall, like an enchanted ball of moss sprung to life. Made of wood, foam latex and metal, he preps vegetables,
simmers sauces and bakes pies the size of bottle caps, all while chattering in a lispy singsong that is mostly incomprehensible.
As the title character of “The Tiny Chef Show,” a series of stop-motion videos, usually no longer than a minute, he has won a devoted following of 400,000 on Instagram.
The posts resonate at a time when chefs are expected to manage multiple lives, not just as cooks, but as celebrities, social media influencers and ambassadors of their own personal brands.
Several segments tell the meta story of the chef as a newcomer to Los Angeles, navigating his rising fame. He reacts to a tattoo of himself on a fan’s body and gushes over meeting actress Kristen Bell, who is now a “Tiny Chef ” producer. In a recent video, shot like a documentary, the chef is seen micromanaging the construction of his new kitchen, shouting about the importance of safety goggles.
His audience has grown rapidly since his first appearance last fall, and in June, Imagine Entertainment’s new family division took an equity stake in “The Tiny Chef,” with plans to develop the franchise across various platforms. A children’s book, “The Tiny Chef ” (Razorbill), will be published in the fall of 2020, and a second book is in development.
When I met the chef for the first time, early this month at a studio in Glendale, Calif., he was sitting in the palm of Rachel Larsen, an animator who created the character out of clay a decade ago and now directs “The Tiny Chef Show.”
The chef wore a rainbowstriped apron and a tall, puffy toque. He was a fuzzy, muted green, with an enormous round belly and long, skinny arms that reached down to his feet.
As Larsen posed him in the kitchen, cinematographer Ozlem Akturk lit the space, constantly adjusting the angle to flatter the chef ’s round face. Writer Adam Reid, paced excitedly and called out suggestions. (“Can you turn him more, so we can see he’s sitting on a spool?”)
In the videos, the chef ’s movements — rolling out pie dough, chopping up garlic — seem spontaneous, almost effervescent. But the team has to shoot them all frame by frame (12 for every second of video), maneuvering the scene for each new frame.
“Stop-motion is so slow, and it’s a ton of work,” Larsen said, “but we want to underplay all of that.”
As she adjusted the props, pulling clay and small pieces of felt from her tool kit — a clear, CVS-brand pill box — the chef became exponentially cuter and more expressive. His eyes seemed to peer into the camera and gleam.
My brain turned to mush, the way it does when I see a puppy navigating a tall stair. I gazed longingly at the chef ’s adorable saucepans and sweet little oven made to look like an old tomato can. Admiring the knife and wooden cutting board on the mini marble counter, I suppressed an actual squeal.
This can be the effect of tiny foods. Edible or not, they’re part of a vast subgenre of miniatures.
Tiny food videos have long been popular in Japan but found an even wider, more international audience a few years ago as amateurs and media companies invested in this surreal form of step-by-step cooking videos, shooting human hands making teensy, edible Victoria spongecakes or trays of dollhouse enchiladas no bigger than a penny.
The couple behind one video series, “The Tiny Foods,” make mini Maggi noodles, dosas and paya (braised goat trotters) for more than 600,000 subscribers on YouTube. Another, “Miniature Cusina,” has increased its audience to nearly 1.5 million, adding an audio component meant to create a euphoric, brain-tingling feeling known as autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR. In a recent video for pork sinigang, you can hear the satisfying, outsize sizzle of teeny onions.
The most compelling videos in the genre have always been simple, familiar and comforting. Everyday kitchen tasks re-created in miniature — a ladle pouring miso soup into bowls at the table, a knife cutting a grilled cheese sandwich on the diagonal — can somehow hold a viewer’s attention in mesmerized appreciation.
You may notice a chip in one of the bowls, the way the noodles cling, or the uneven browning on the bread. The thrill of well-made tiny food isn’t in flawlessness but in meticulous replication, beautiful in its ordinariness and imperfection.
The Tiny Chef focuses on vegan foods, like nut loaves and veggie burgers, pies and pancakes. Larsen, like the chef, is vegan (though Reid prefers the terms herbivore or plant-based).
Larsen worked on the animated movie “Coraline” and met Akturk when the two worked together on Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs.” She started making miniature foods out of polymer clay as a quick creative exercise, after seeing the craft take off on Pinterest.
“It was a way to access a different world within our world,” Larsen said.
One of the first foods she sculpted and painted was a Key lime pie, but soon she was producing complicated props: a wooden cutting board aged with deep scratches and a bunch of thrillingly realistic rainbow carrots with feathery tops and translucent, dirt-smeared peels.
The Tiny Chef appeared on Instagram soon afterward, in 2018, and is now posted to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. In all the videos, he approaches even the most tedious day-to-day tasks of the kitchen with curiosity, glee and a cartoonish exuberance. (His muttering voice is provided by Larsen’s brother-inlaw, Matt Hutchinson.)
In one of my favorite videos — I’ve watched it a dozen times — the chef sings while cutting a slice off a single clove of garlic. It’s already more than he needs. He minces this slice, then saws off the edge of a tomato. Overtaken by pure joy, he holds a basil leaf over his head and closes his eyes.
The chef dances, free and easy, as if a basil leaf was the most magnificent thing in the world. As if half a million fans weren’t watching.