Everyone Wants to Snack on Pierce Abernathy

I like to cook. It’s how I show love,” Pierce Abernathy tells me while deftly slicing an eggplant. I try not to swoon, staring at his hands. I mean … his knife skills. “I was going to butcher a whole fish for you. I thought that might be a little too much,” he says.

We’re in Abernathy’s full-floor Crown Heights apartment — high ceilings, pocket doors, big fireplaces (he says it once belonged to a fur trader) — making a couscous salad. With a message. This particular couscous we’d be eating, he informs me, comes from a women’s farming collective in Palestine. “Good grains!” he chirps.

Pretty much everyone I know has a crush on the 29-year-old Instagram chef and model these days. Scroll his socials — he has 454,000 followers on Instagram and 3.5 million likes on TikTok (where his handle is @pierzza for some reason) — and it’s easy to fall into a fantasy of this wholesome boy with long, center-parted locks and wire-rimmed glasses serving you breakfast in bed in his plaid robe and bringing you flowers from the farmers’ market. Watching him at home washing a cucumber or licking labneh off his pinkie finger, I almost let out a completely inappropriate “Yes, chef,” though to be honest, his version of kitchen life couldn’t be further from the sweaty scramble seen on The Bear. For Abernathy, it all seems to come together without much fuss or mess.

But we don’t follow this sample-size kid from Kentucky to learn how to cook, exactly. It’s revealing that he calls his content his “journal entries.” The videos he posts are more ASMR than instructional and don’t get bogged down in tedious step-by-steps. Click on one and you’ll see his pretty face, then his pretty farm-fresh ingredients, and … seconds later, a pretty little snack.

He is certainly not like many of the other guys grilling meat on the internet. He is delicate, thoughtful, not swaggering. “The amount of steak videos you see online is absurd,” he says. (He does sometimes collab with the record producer turned cookbook author Benny Blanco.) Abernathy specializes in what might be considered elevated wine-bar fare; there are lots of seasonal dips. The words he uses to describe his style are approachable, ingredient-focused, and simple. He makes persimmon crudo and root-vegetable gratin and celery-root steak. In one video, he says his comfort food is vegan tofu katsu.

In the process of making these organic light bites, he has become one of fashion’s favorite chefs — “the male Laila Gohar,” as one fan put it to me, only without the decadent theatrics. He feeds people who don’t eat much.

He’s no ordinary caterer, though. He has walked the runway for Helmut Lang, attended a Ralph Lauren show, and then curated a dinner for the cult magazine Highsnobiety, all in the same day. Brands want him as a guest at the table, not stuck in the kitchen. For much of last year, he was very visibly dating the painter Chloe Wise, known for, among other things, still lifes of food. They broke up amicably, he says, in November.

Type “pierce abernathy” into the TikTok search bar now and it will autopopulate suggestions like “pierce abernathy boyfriend,” “pierce abernathy girlfriend,” and “pierce abernathy hinge.” Peak Pierce horniness came last fall, when the pop star Troye Sivan posted a TikTok going on about his latest “celebrity crush.” “Call me delusional, but I’m making this video just in case I end up marrying this man,” he said. “I saw this Bon Appétit video of this really hot guy cooking. I’m like, Damn, who is that? ” Later, when pressed by Vanity Fair during one of its “Lie Detector Tests” about who that might be, Sivan, looking a bit flustered, admitted he had been talking about Abernathy.

As the story goes, Sivan sent him a DM during Paris Fashion Week and they met up after they realized they both knew Wise. “He was amazing. We had a great conversation,” Abernathy tells me in his kitchen, blushing a little. “I probably should’ve been a little more conscious,” he says of Sivan’s unrequited crush.

He knows his cuteness has helped him, but parasocial celebrity can be a bit much. (I’m told he’s been spotted dining out with Emily Ratajkowski recently.)“The internet is a very weird place,” he says ever so humbly, noting that he doesn’t respond to every DM in an attempt to preserve his “mental health.” Of course, it’s not like he doesn’t play into it a little. Just look at the shirtless videos he posts of himself harvesting clams in Montauk or mixing up a tomato salad.

In many ways, Abernathy is a post-pandemic DIY success story. He grew up in Louisville — his parents worked on the business side of newspapers — and studied film production at Boston University. He moved to New York after graduating in 2016 and got a job working at Vice and then BuzzFeed. It was during that “pivot to video” moment of digital media that he produced the Facebook-mom-beloved “Tasty” vids. They were a little bit pedestrian for his tastes. “I wouldn’t make any of that for anyone I cared about,” he says, remembering all the fried food and cheese pulls he had to post. “The amount of cream cheese! I’d never had a cheesecake before I got to BuzzFeed and then it was all cheesecakes.”

It gave him an idea. He decided he wanted to learn more about cooking, so he spent a few months working in the back of restaurants, including the since-closed Basque spot Huertas in the East Village, which let him come in after his day job to peel shrimp or chop veggies. When the pandemic hit, he moved back to Louisville, where he started making his own videos. He posted his first recipe online, a “homemade baba ganoush in 15 seconds,” in August 2020. Since then, it’s gotten 75,000 views; a post last fall about “squash season” racked up 1.5 million.

It wasn’t long before an agent noticed him on Instagram and started putting him up for modeling gigs. When he walked Gucci for the first time, “it was absolutely absurd,” he says. “Jared Leto was next to me. Macaulay Culkin was next to me. Billie Eilish was right there.” He later fronted one of their campaigns, shirtless in a pool. He’s also involved in a sustainability-focused food collective called Aerthship that his creative-director friend Tin Mai started in 2021. When Vogue wrote Aerthship up, its members were shot wearing the sustainable fashion brand Collina Strada. Highsnobiety dressed Abernathy in Acne and Louis Vuitton for a multipage feature on him, too, with the writer gushing, “He’s everywhere, and adored by everyone from my friend’s mom in Pasadena to the event planners of Paris Fashion Week parties.”

All this has led to his latest project, a Substack called Don’t Skip the Dip! (It launched this winter and has 7,000 subscribers, he says.) In it, I discovered that I should have marinated artichokes, “good vinegars,” and tinned fish in my pantry. Next, he is reprising his “Pierce Spring Tour” pop-up event series with Aerthship. All the profits will go toward community initiatives like an aquaponics farm in Williamsburg and a mutual-aid fund for Gaza.

It’s all part of Abernathy’s goal to, as he puts it, “steer culture in a positive way” through his food (and fame). “I want to convince Sally May in Iowa to eat broccoli for the first time,” he says. “Then I want Sally May to buy organic broccoli. And then I want her to go to the farmers’ market. And then, maybe, I want her to talk to the farmer.” Of course, as I point out to him, this hypothetical Sally May would probably much rather talk to Pierce Abernathy.

Finally, it’s time to eat. He serves me an earthenware plate of couscous with cucumbers and herbs from his “favorite farm” at the Union Square Greenmarket alongside the labneh dip. It is delicious, if also, as he said, “light.”

Brock Colyar , 2024-04-24 14:00:04

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