Since 2016, Andrew Rea has been teaching folks how to cook via his YouTube show Binging with Babish.
In just a few short years, he's grown the channel to an impressive eight million subscribers and
netted cookbook and kitchenware deals along the way. This is the untold truth of Andrew Rea.
Internet sensation chef Andrew Rea is proud that he grew up in Rochester, New York,
and although he's moved downstate to New York City, Rochester remains very much in his heart.
In interviews and in his instructional videos, Rea gives generous shout-outs to his hometown.
As a native of Rochester, he feels contractually obliged to cheer on the home team, the Buffalo
Bills. And one of many visits home left him so, quote, "tumescent with hometown pride"
that he devoted an entire episode to rustling up Rochester's official dish, the Garbage Plate.
A more permanent testament to his Rochester love is what he referred to in a Wired Q&A as his
hometown pride tattoo. Located on his right inner forearm, the stylized EKC represents the original
logo of the homegrown Eastman Kodak Company. Aside from paying homage to his roots, Rea claims the
tattoo serves as a constant reminder to never get stuck in his ways, but to keep looking forward.
Rea insists that he's not a chef, but rather an enthusiastic home cook. According to Wired,
the sum total of his restaurant experience consists of gigs as a crepe-maker at Simply
Crepes in Rochester and a dessert plater at a Brooklyn restaurant called The Chocolate Room.
According to Forbes, Rea credits his mother for his love of cooking. As a kid, she taught
him how to make comforting essentials ranging from hearty stews to chocolate chip cookies.
Tragically, Andrew was only 11 when his mother passed away.
Cooking became and continues to be a connection with his mother and a way to honor her memory.
Still, Rea emphasizes that he's no expert despite learning countless tricks and
techniques since he began cooking on Binging with Babish. He prefers to describe himself as:
"Your local goofball screwing things up and burning things now and then."
He's said that owning culinary errors makes cooking more accessible to those
who tune into his videos and are reassured that they don't have to
be Martha Stewart-perfect to set foot in a kitchen.
" I am a home cook and I want people to see what I do and think 'well if this doofus can do it,
surely I can do it."
How much of a Frasier fan is Andrew Rea? In 2016 when he uploaded his first Binging
with Babish videos to YouTube, the signature opener was a clip from the Frasier theme song,
"Tossed Salad and Scrambled Eggs." He reluctantly relinquished the tune when
he decided to monetize his YouTube channel, but never dialed down the love for the 1990s sitcom.
"I can tell you that I have seen any given episode of Frasier at least nine times.
And I'm not exaggerating, I've counted."
Rae has paid more explicit homage to the series in two episodes of Binging with Babish.
One was devoted to Eggs Florentine with English muffins made from scratch. The other was a Frasier
Special dedicated to the memory of actor John Mahoney who played Frasier's father,
Marty. The homage featured Rea preparing Cornish game hen with pomegranate honey sauce
along with Marty's favorite barbecue flavored pudding chips. As Rea confessed on Twitter:
"I sometimes fool around about Frasier — the fact is, it's been an important fixture in my life."
Long before viewers laid eyes on Andrew Rea, he's had tattoos and they've made him
instantly recognizable, as have his beard, bald pate, and black-framed glasses, which
all feature on the Binging with Babish logo. In his early videos, the only visible parts of
Rea were his torso, arms, and hands. Rea's first tattoo was a chef's knife and whisk
on his inner left forearm. The tattoo is a badge of pride for Rea as:
"A reminder to be true to yourself."
Other significant symbols have followed, including a lens focal length diagram and a mark on his
bicep reading "Katrina Code," a survival cry that was spray painted on houses in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina because New Orleans is Rea's favorite city. There also a moon, a chicken,
and a frame forward symbol as an ode to his days working in film editing. And there's a giant
cilantro tattoo on his upper left arm. According to Harper's Bazaar, it's an herb he actively
avoids because he hates cilantro so much, which is why the tattoo grows straight out of his armpit.
It's no coincidence that Binging with Babish revolves around recipes cited in iconic films and
TV series. Andrew Rea attended Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, where he majored in film
studies and production. After graduating in 2009, he interned and worked part-time
for various post-production companies before landing a job in 2010 creating 3D visual effects.
He was still working full-time when he made his first Babish video in February 2016.
Rea told Inverse that he was at a low point in his life,
feeling depressed and unfulfilled. With the idea of spreading his wings as a freelancer,
he invested $6,000 in a digital camera, lights, and software and tested the equipment by making
a tutorial for a gourmet turkey burger featured on an episode of the hit sitcom Parks and Recreation.
Rea uploaded his video to Reddit with the name Binging with Babish. Babish, a minor character
from The West Wing, received comments from some 2,000 viewers that were so positive,
Rea followed up with subsequent videos, spending more time on the filming and editing processes.
"I only intended to make the one.
People liked it. I made another one. People liked that. I made another one and here we are now."
Inverse notes that the videos felt spontaneous and experimental,
but they were well-produced. As a fan commented on his Parks and Rec video:
"This is the beginning of an era."
In 1998, the hit series Friends aired a Thanksgiving episode in which Monica
gifts Ross a sandwich made of Thanksgiving leftovers. The key to the sandwich's success
was Monica secretly placing an extra slice of gravy soaked bread in the sandwich's middle.
Just as Monica's recipe was a hit, Rea's recreation of it on a Binging
with Babish episode went viral, with BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly,
GrubStreet, and The Washington Post touting Rea as a rising star of the new media elite.
Uproxx notes the genius of Binging with Babish's concept stating that when Rea
entered the YouTube-iverse as a next-to-nobody, his content was linked to popular shows with fan
bases ripe for tapping into. Rea agrees, pointing out that the "Moist Maker" Friends episode scored
him over two million views and tens of thousands of new subscribers. And thanks to funds from
Patreon donors amounting to upwards of $10,000 a month, Rea was able to quit his day job and devote
himself full-time to producing weekly episodes of Binging with Babish. All thanks to a sandwich.
Andrew Rea has confessed that the happiest day of his life was when he met his hero,
Jon Favreau the ridiculously prolific actor-director-producer-screenwriter-chef.
In the culinary universe alone, Favreau earned acclaim for his 2014 film, Chef,
which spawned his equally acclaimed Netflix cooking series, The Chef Show.
The filmmaker had discovered Binging with Babish after his kids forced him to watch it.
As Rea tells Forbes, after trading tweets, he sent Favreau a letter
asking him if he wanted to have a beer or make an appearance on Binging with Babish.
Weeks later, Rea was flying out to LA to be on Favreau's The Chef Show, and soon thereafter
Favreau appeared on Babish. When Rea later published his Binging with Babish cookbook,
Favreau brought him to tears with a beautifully written foreword.
In a GQ feature, Andrew Rea notes that his self-declared essentials, which range from
serious underwear to quality bourbon, include an arsenal of meds. There's Lactaid for his
lactose intolerance, antidepressants for his depression, and Flonase for allergies.
There's also an Epipen he keeps with him due to a potentially fatal allergy.
While filming two separate episodes of his show, Rea found himself turning red
and struggling to breathe, and doctors failed to discover the culprit behind these reactions.
According to Wired, since the only thing Rea had eaten prior to these episodes was a banana,
he assumes they were the cause and now avoids them like the plague.
Despite his banana-phobia, Rea boldly tackles banana-centric recipes on his shows.
In one episode of Binging with Babish he whipped up a banana
pudding pizza with his friend/business partner Sawyer acting as taste tester.
Andrew Rea has been fairly discreet about his love life. Shortly after launching Babish,
he confessed in a 2016 Reddit Q&A to having married his high school sweetheart in 2014
after they'd been together for 10 years. Four years later,
he mentioned that he'd gone through a divorce in 2017.
In a 2020 GQ interview, Rea alluded to his marriage when he copped to having had a
country barn wedding, prior to which he went into anaphylactic shock. This was probably induced by
having eaten bananas earlier in the day, but in retrospect, Rea wryly suggests it was an omen.
But becoming, as he calls it, "attached" to editor/producer Jessica Opon in 2019,
has made Rea a happy man. In October 2020, he commemorated their first year anniversary
on Instagram by giving a shout out to his best friend, confidant, and love of his life.
Proof of how high Andrew Rea's star has risen since the debut of Binging with Babish in 2016
is that he's now master of his own culinary universe. In 2017,
Rea launched Basics with Babish, a series that teaches basic cooking techniques to beginners.
Two years later, Being with Babish offered Rea the chance to expand his horizons
as he traveled around the country, cooking and connecting with fans.
But in 2020, everything changed due to COVID-19, forcing people to stay at home,
watch YouTube videos, and cook, often one comforting pandemic pastime
feeding the other. The Los Angeles Times reports that since mid-March, the average daily views of
YouTube videos whose titles include the phrase "cook with me" soared by over 100 percent.
Rea was already in an expansive frame of mind. He'd moved from his SoHo apartment into a
six-floor Brooklyn townhouse with a two-kitchen studio. Then in September, he introduced his
eight million subscribers to Stump Solha, a new series starring Sohla El-Waylly, the YouTube
sensation who had famously left Bon Appétit due to alleged race-based pay discrepancies.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Rea's Binging with Babish empire building is poised to become:
"A major publisher of cooking and lifestyle content."
The Babish Culinary Universe is about more than just videos, and to prove it,
at the end of 2020, Andrew Rea launched his own line of cookware produced by Gibson USA.
The Babish-branded collection isn't Gibson's first co-effort with a celebrity, carrying lines
created by Martha Stewart and Chrissy Teigen. But Homeworld Business points out that it does mark
the first collaboration between the company and an online influencer, providing Gibson access to
younger consumers that follow self-taught creators such as Rea. Even before the products go on sale,
Rea has been showcasing them in his videos, creating culinary buzz for the unique,
Rea-designed equipment, an example of which is a pan whose tapered edges make it easier
to whisk over a flame. Rea told Homeworld Business, Gibson's developers went all out
in helping him actualize, quote, "every hair-brained idea" that crossed his mind.
For his part, Rea has done tests in the kitchen with every pot, pan, and knife
to guarantee they live up to his standards, while still promoting fun in the kitchen.
No culinary universe is ever quite complete without a restaurant, or in the case of
Brooklyn-based Andrew Rea, a brew pub. In a 2019 interview with Forbes, Rea floated the idea of
opening up a brew pub tentatively named "The Babery." Aside from coming in for Babish-prepared
drinks and nibbles, customers would be able to check out Rea in full-on Babish mode,
filming in the brew pub's studio bar. In an interview with Fast Forward Weekly,
Rea admits his dream in creating a brewpub-studio-space is to provide
the kind of lively interaction offered during the early days of Disney-MGM Studios, when visitors to
the Orlando film and TV studio could eat and drink on the working lot, mingling with stars and crew.
Rea's utopian vision is that anybody who wants to can come and host cooking classes,
demonstrations, and tastings as well as culinary and cultural events. But it's not due to open
anytime in the near future. As Rea confessed during a March 2020 interview with Wired
that due to the pandemic, plans to open the pub in 2020 have been pushed back to 2021.
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