San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The joy of eating — on camera
YouTube food star eats (a lot), shoots and leaves
Ray Laquindanum wields a collapsible-tripod selfie stick the way a conductor wields a baton. Outside 1608 Bistro, the new Filipino-American brunch spot on Russian Hill he’s vlogging about for his eponymous YouTube channel, up goes the camera at full extension so he can film himself introducing the place. It twirls around to catch a greeting from Vaughn Mendoza, friend and co-eater for the day, who throws up some hand signals. They do it again — best take! — then spin the camera again to capture the front of the restaurant. Then they eat a four-entree meal.
The Daly City-based Laquindanum, 28, is a YouTube evangelist for hedonistic eating whose binge-eating stunts with his crew have gained a clandestine purpose: turning people on to small, local restaurants. He wears a pressed short-sleeve shirt and gold chain for today’s shoot, his bangs sprayed into their customary steep cliff. The good lord has granted him a Food Network smile, and the 200 videos he has posted to date have brought 40,000 subscribers to his channel, “Ray Laquindanum”
Laquindanum says he’s always been a big eater. Two years ago, he and his co-workers at Smart & Final, where he’s now a manager, always joked about they should race each other through tubs of ice cream or bags of snacks. One day they gathered around a picnic table at Lake Merced to see how many Burger King Mac ‘n’ Cheetos they could eat in 60 seconds (the winner did four). Laquindanum added a few special effects to the video, like slo-mos and text overlays, and posted it online.
They had so much fun they posted a few more eat-offs in the month that followed: Oreos, Krispy Kreme donuts, a three-man takedown of 100 lumpia. The video that blew up was a Costco roast chicken race, where Laquindanum and two friends each tore into a whole bird and the two losers had to do pushups on camera. Currently, it has almost 1 million views. “People commented from Canada and Australia,” he says. “We didn’t know how that was happening. There are thousands of videos getting uploaded a day.” YouTube enrolled him in its revenue-sharing program so he could get a portion of ad sales.
Laquindanum moved his film studio from Lake Merced into his garage and bought a better camera, and began releasing one or two videos a week, editing them all himself. Each video features a friend or group of friends, with a rotating cast of extreme eaters such as Mario, Johan, Anthony and his little nephew Jacob. Laquindanum added trips to Bay Area restaurants, mostly small places that don’t get much media attention, like Marugame Udon in Stonestown or Fuji Sushi Buffet in Vacaville, where he and a friend gorged on dragon rolls and salmon sashimi, gasping by the end.
Some people respond to a video camera like it’s a light switch, their actions going high-definition the moment they sense the lens focusing on their face. At 1608 Bistro, there’s no gap — no segue, even — between the cheery, jocular Laquindanum who places his order with the server and the Laquindanum who asks his viewers to let him know in the comments whether they’re pancake people or French toast people.
He and Mendoza take turns filming each other, as well as individual forkfuls of food, inhaling ube French toast, adobo chicken tostadas, an adobo pork banh mi, pandan pancakes and tocino bacon as if they’re no more filling than a granola-yogurt parfait.
“Aw yeah, look at that! Look at that!” Mendoza says as Laquindanum crunches into a tostada and beams at the taste. “It’s bomb, right?”
“No words, dude,” Laquindanum replies. While they eat, his camera and both of their cell phones — this is all documented for Instagram and Snapchat, too — buzz around their plates like drones. Laquindanum found out about the six-month-old restaurant from the owners, childhood friends Gina and Kevin Guevarra, but he and Mendoza pay for their meals. They’re awed by the creative, Filipino-inspired dishes. “10 out of 10!” Laquindanum says of the ube French toast. “I don’t know, dude, I’m dishing out tens today.” Also a 10: an Instagram-bait stack of pale green pandan pancakes smothered in coconut cream and topped with berries and a poof of cotton candy.
He and his friends eat exuberantly, greedily, except when they’re doing pepper-spiked challenges like eating an entire cheese pizza smothered in spicy Korean ramen, which attract exponentially higher numbers of views because Laquindanum’s suffering is so evident. They talk with their mouths full. They egg each other on. Sometimes Laquindanum calls out “OVERDRIVE!” — the word flashes on the screen, too — and they cram their food into their mouths, sprinting for the finish line.
Several months into the YouTube channel’s life, Laquindanum began adding the word “mukbang” to video titles. According to an Eater history of the phenomenon, mukbang — a Korean term referring to people who webcast themselves eating massive amounts of food — videos first appeared on YouTube in 2015 and peaked in 2017. In Korea, some mukbang livestreams draw thousands of online witnesses. In the United States, mukbang videos tend to resemble Laquindanum’s channel. He doesn’t consider what he does mukbang. It’s entertainment. But viewers tell him all the time that they just love watching him eat. Laquindanum and Mendoza film themselves so their faces appear close enough to study them swallowing. Friend distance. Lover distance. The popularity of mukbang speaks to our collective loneliness and our comfort with distance, as well as to the strength of our attachments to the people on our video screens. To watch Laquindanum and his friends eating, chatting with us as if we’re there with them, is both intimate and comfortingly impersonal, like nurturing a crush on Ryan Gosling or only communicating with your high school best friend through Facebook Messenger.
With 40,000 subscribers, Laquindanum is starting to get recognized at doughnut shops and bars. He met his girlfriend, who lives in Southern California, when she stumbled on a video and messaged him through Instagram. When he attended his first family party with her, her cousin’s husband recognized him and challenged him to a spaghetti eat-off. (“I’m like, nah.”)
Laquindanum loves being an entertainer. When subscribers comment that they look forward to his videos, it makes him want to make more. Regulars hit him up with suggestions of food challenges to try or restaurants he should visit. When he hasn’t posted a video for a while, they message him to ask if everything is OK.
“My family and my friends, they care about me and they say, hey man, watch what you eat,” he says. “You’ll get diabetes.” On his off days, he eats acai bowls and salmon, nothing anywhere near as ridiculous as the five pounds of pancit he shared nine months ago. Mostly, he works out. Most of his co-stars work out, too. Mendoza says they’re headed to the gym after their meal at 1608 Bistro. Laquindanum plans to edit the video and post it within a few hours.
1608 Bistro: 1608 Bush St. (at Franklin St.), San Francisco, (415) 346-1608, www.1608bistro.com.