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Three summers ago, Meredith Hayden, founder of Wishbone Kitchen, was working 17-hour shifts as a private chef for designer Joseph Altuzarra and his family at their Hamptons estate. She documented each grueling day online: 6 A.M. wake-ups, massive grocery hauls, prepping three elaborate multi-course meals a day, picking fresh produce from the backyard, cooking, plating each dish with the artistry of a seasoned chef, and cleaning up the kitchen at 10:30 P.M., before going to bed and getting up to do it all again for the Altuzarras—and for us, her audience of 2.3 million on TikTok and 1.3 million on Instagram.
Hundreds of recorded meals, a handful of celebrity guest appearances, and numerous social media brand deals (from everything between Walmart to Dior) later, Hayden, now 29, recently bought her own house in the Hamptons, where she plans to live there full-time with her Bernese Mountain dog (while keeping an apartment in New York City). In the short time span since Hayden’s career as a chef exploded—as she was going from working in a Hamptons house to buying her own—she also managed to write her first cookbook, The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook, out May 6.
Hayden started her social media account, Wishbone Kitchen (a name inspired by the roast chicken her mom made weekly and the wishbone they’d traditionally pull apart together) in 2020, after completing her studies at the Institute of Culinary Education and working as a line cook at New York City’s Charlie Bird for five months in 2019. She used her next job as an independent freelance private chef to create content for TikTok that generated as many as 28 million views per video—and a loyal following that has sold out every stop on her nationwide book tour.
Watching Hayden’s videos feels like FaceTiming with a friend. She posted a series on TikTok called “Girls who Grill,” complaining that “men get the fun stuff” to cook because they don’t want women to have the joy of cooking outside in the sunshine. “It’s like, ‘Okay, Joe, you don’t know how to cook 360 days out of the year. What makes you think you can cook on the 4th of July?’” she asked. She will suggest an alternative you can use to roast a chicken if you don’t own a proper roasting rack (“cuz why would you?”), and FaceTime a friend in the middle of making a recipe to see if it looks like she’s doing it right.
Hayden also creates long-form videos in her YouTube series, “Dinner with Friends” that redefined what can constitute a dinner party: “Having dinner with someone else, one other person, is a dinner party,” she has said. “Having dinner by yourself but watching your favorite show is a dinner party. It’s a mindset. It’s not limited to a certain headcount.”
This past February, Hayden decided to speak out on TikTok after Bon Appétit launched their own YouTube series, also called Dinner with Friends, a year later, and using her pale pink and red color scheme for their logo. Bon Appétit’s Instagram post announcing the series told followers to get on “the group chat,” which is also the name of Hayden’s Substack platform. “The coincidences are just too many,” she said at the time.
Hayden’s followers regularly claim her as “our Ina”—they make similar dishes, Hayden refers to her Hamptons house as “the barn” like Ina Garten, and she shares a sunny charming demeanor. Others have called her “our Martha”—after all, both she and Martha Stewart are blonde New Jersey natives, who create recipes and offer hosting and interior decorating tips. But while Garten and Stewart largely aimed their content at moms, Hayden’s videos are for a younger set, those fresh out of college setting up their first home. Her viewers aren’t hosting formal dinner parties for 20, nor do they have a limitless budget or every cooking utensil in existence. Like Hayden, they are messy, imperfect, and sometimes their recipes don’t turn out. And it’s through this relatable, friend vibe she’s cultivated that she’s redefining the “domestic goddess” for a new generation.
Below, Hayden shares her thoughts on her start as a private chef, her cookbook, and the culinary content that has accumulated 83 million likes and counting.
What inspired you to start creating food content?
The Bon Appétit Test Kitchen was the blueprint for me. I thought I needed to get a job with a big media company in order for my recipes to reach people. This was before TikTok, and before the Instagram algorithm would introduce you to new people. After many years of failed attempts at getting a job for any food media company (you name it, I’ve applied for a job there), I started taking an interest in food bloggers. I saw these women were able to share their recipes with the world without needing that stamp of approval. I thought that was really inspiring. I eventually started to see that there was an amazing opportunity to have your work put in front of so many eyeballs for free. People pay millions of dollars in advertising to get a video in front of people like that. I just decided I was going to figure out this whole TikTok thing.
Were the Altuzarras supportive of you using their home for your social media platform?
Yeah. It was very serendipitous. I remember sitting at their kitchen table eating dinner with them. After I’d been working for a few months I said, “I’m thinking about starting an Instagram page for my food content,” and they were so supportive and encouraging. The next weekend, they were like, “Oh, did you get your pictures? Did you take the videos?” before digging into the food. And Joseph got a ring light out and was like, “Let me see if I can get the lighting good for you.” Eventually I ended up mentoring my client on how to use TikTok for his business, so it was really a full circle kind of relationship.
While working as a private chef, how did you find the time to film, edit, and build your online presence?
I just made the time. I think any creative person who has something that they’re super passionate about will sacrifice everything the second they have an inch of opportunity. I have not had much of a social life since this whole thing started. It’s become a lot easier for me to have more work-life balance nowadays because I’ve been able to hire a team, but back in the thick of it, I was working seven days a week for three or four years and pulling almost all-nighters. After a 17-hour shift, I’d get into bed and edit a video, so I could post it the next morning. I’d be up until 12 A.M. or 1 A.M.
How did TikTok fuel your success?
If I had joined the TikTok app today and tried to replicate what had happened to me back in 2022, I don’t really think it would work. There was still some white space in the food TikTok world. I had been posting for a year and had a couple hundred followers on TikTok at the start of 2022. By the end of 2022, I had 1.2 million on TikTok and half a million on Instagram because one blog of mine went viral. And it just kept building.
A lot of food content from female creators is tied to husbands or children. Your content stands out since you’re often cooking for friends or yourself. Did you see this as a space you could fill?
Not intentionally. It wasn’t a conscious thing that I thought I was doing, or this brave act of feminism. I was just getting so sick of women in the kitchen being related to a duty she fulfills for her family or husband, whereas men in the kitchen get the respect in the professional space. Many of the chefs that I’ve grown up with and adored have been home chefs like my mom. It wasn’t like I was trying to start a revolution. It was just the reality of my situation: I’m a single girl in my twenties.
A few months after the Bon Appétit “Dinner with Friends” controversy, how do you feel about things now?
I have not thought about that since the first week I posted it. I spent some time feeling disappointed, but at the end of the day, I’m not going to let it bog me down. I am just focused on my projects and making Wishbone Kitchen the best it can be. I’ve had a lot of people say that like, “Oh, you’re so brave,” or “I’m so proud of you for posting that.” I don’t know if it’s the little sister energy in me, but there was no way I wasn’t going to say anything, but I’m also somebody who moves on very quickly. I’m not a grudge holder.
How did it feel to see your followers’ response in Bon Appétit’s Instagram comments?
What’s funny, and what some people don’t realize, is a lot of those people in the comment section don’t even follow me. I think a lot of people just resonated with the feeling of inequity. It’s a classic David and Goliath story.
Something unique about your content is that we see a lot of mistakes and fails along the way—I was just watching the episode where you accidentally blend the whole lime while making margaritas.
Oh my gosh. That was so defeating.
Why did you decide to keep these imperfect moments in your content?
I’ve never been somebody who claims to be making recipes that are the best, easiest, or fastest, or that you should watch my videos because I’m a professional and smarter than you. So, I’ve never felt a pressure to maintain appearances. That’s probably the subconscious reason, but the real reason is I didn’t have time to do re-shoots. If I’m spending a whole day shooting a recipe, and it comes out wrong, I can’t afford to just throw that footage in the garbage. I am the talent, producer, director, business manager, sales team, and tech support. I have all these different hats, so there’s only so much time I can allot to capturing content. Even if I’m a classically trained chef, I’ll still mess up a cake because I forgot to double-check the measurements.
Do you have any places on your culinary bucket list?
I want to go skiing in Japan for my 30th birthday. Tearing my ACL this past January has put my dream potentially in jeopardy, but the top of my bucket list is having an udon soup on a mountaintop in Japan.
Turning to your cookbook, do you have any favorite recipes?
I was really pleased with how my Bolognese recipe came out. It uses short rib instead of ground beef, and it’s delicious. And my lobster roll recipe is my personal favorite lobster roll.
Ina Garten once said she would have a non-chef friend make her recipes before they were published to see what issues a layman might have with her directions. Did you have anything particular or special about recipe testing for your book?
I had the same exact thought process when I was testing the recipes for my book. I was working with a writer, who offered recipe testing as part of her scope, but I’m thinking, She’s a professional recipe tester. So halfway through writing the book, I started sending the recipes over to my friends who are amateur home cooks and asked them, “Can you tell me if there are any sentences in this recipe that you’re like, I have no idea what that means?”—like the classic Schitt’s Creek “fold in the cheese” scene. I wanted to avoid that.
The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook by Meredith Hayden
$32.55 at bookshop.org
Fashion and interiors have become a bigger part of your content with the new house. Do you see Wishbone Kitchen moving in the direction of Martha Stewart’s lifestyle brand?
A lot of [my lifestyle and home content] is a product of dedicating more time to creating recipes for the book and not having the bandwidth to create as much food content in the interim. Also, I’m just feeling more comfortable with my audience and showing more of my personality and interests on my platform. I’ve binged a ton of old Martha Stewart Living episodes, and I really love how she’s able to incorporate those lifestyle elements into her content. I don’t have any master plans in terms of a pivot in that direction. It’s just what’s speaking to me in the moment.
With the precarity of TikTok, are you feeling confident or comfortable with the other platforms you have?
My dream has always been to be a cookbook writer. Technology comes and goes, but I think storytelling will always be a concrete part of the industry, while the avenues in which we tell those stories change. Being open to change and embracing new forms of communication is so important, because who knows what the media consumption pattern will be in five years. I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows, but if I was able to build a catering company at age 23 in the middle of a global pandemic, I’m pretty sure I can figure it out if TikTok goes away.
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