DuJour Navigation

What’s Cooking: A Delicious New TV Series

Restaurateur Michael Chernow’s new show brings social media to the small screen

“I love taking pictures of food,” says Michael Chernow, the man behind restaurants including The Meatball Shop and Seamore’s. “Whenever an awesome dish comes onto the table, I immediately pull out my phone.” Chernow is only one of millions of foodstagrammers who have grown accustomed to the snap, crop, filter phenomenon. Today, the hashtag #foodporn alone has garnered nearly 75 million Instagram posts.

Enter Food Porn, a new FYI Network series that highlights the crossover between social media and voracious, food-obsessed photographers. The program follows Chernow and his team as they scour the depths of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for the most popular posts that use the hashtag. The chosen ones then make their small screen debut when Chernow visits the restaurant, meets with the chef who made the socialized dish and learns to whip it up himself. In short, it’s “lots of cities, lots of incredibly delicious, sexy food, and lots of me talking it up with guests all over the country,” he says. And you can bet the drool-worthy dishes are worth their four- and five-digit likes. While Chernow wouldn’t spill the beans on too many new contenders, he did hint at a decadent pulled pork mac and cheese, cioppino from San Francisco, and fulfilling one of his lifelong dreams involving pizza.

Restaurateur and host of "Food Porn" Michael Chernow

Michael Chernow, restaurateur and host of “Food Porn”

When Chernow opened The Meatball Shop with Daniel Holzman back in 2010, Instagram had just launched. With diners feverishly snapping pictures, sharing it and generating content for the restaurant, Chernow saw the power of social media on food at its earliest stages. “When I designed Seamore’s, the surfaces—the pink bar, the whitewashed wooden table—were all designed with social media in mind,” he says of his recently opened NYC seafood restaurant. “When you take a picture of a plate of food, it always has a beautiful backdrop.”

As the series proves, there’s no doubt social media is not only changing the way we eat, but the way chefs cook. “You’d be surprised the amount of chefs I met on the road while filming who have said, ‘We used to have to prepare a couple of days for a photo shoot. Now every single plate of food that comes out of our kitchen is essentially walking into a photo shoot, so the food has to look really good,’” he notes. “For years, chefs have been busting their butts to create beautiful food that people enjoy indulging in, and for the first time ever, they’re getting some accolades for it.”

And that’s not changing in the near future. “People want to savor and treasure those moments and share them with friends and family in real-time,” says Chernow, whose Instagram favorites include @Infatuation, @TheNewPotato, @FoodieMagician and @ChrissyTeigen, among many others. “Photography has become a new form of communication.” In other words, prepare to get double-tap happy.

STORIES DUJOUR