Chef Laurent Dagenais Is Hungry For More Than TikTok Fame

Canadian chef and viral social media star Laurent Dagenais started from the bottom and now he’s here. In this case, when I say “from the bottom,” I mean that he dropped out of college and worked in a skate shop before his parents basically forced him into culinary school by demanding he start paying rent; and by “here,” I mean that he now has about two million followers apiece on TikTok and Instagram, and recently made Monte Cristo sandwiches on The Today Show. In between, there was almost a decade of fine dining experience, a pandemic, a pivot to social media cooking tutorials, and a gravlax recipe video that incited controversy around the world (and made him famous literally overnight.) Today, Dagenais is a beloved chef known for wearing very cool clothes—he frequently sports Dime, Nike, and a variety of excellent hats. He manages to look sharp while opening Champagne bottles with a saber, hitting joints with celebs, and cooking super enticing food. Recent video highlights include everything from Philly cheesesteaks with Benny Blanco and Eric André and fried lobster with Joshua Weissman to duck banh mi with Owen Han. (Fans can also look forward to an upcoming release with Matty Matheson.)

But for Dagenais, the real dream always involved writing a cookbook, and, lo and behold, the English edition of his maiden voyage was just released last month. Always Hungry! is a crisp, colorful tour of the dishes that have inspired some of Dagenais’ most viral recipes. It’s got maple parsnip soup and green papaya salad. There’s also a spicy pork meatball banh mi, a Mexican torta, the Monte Cristo of morning-show fame, some lobster mushroom risotto, and his personal favorite, rabbit with mustard sauce. Oh, and the famous salmon gravlax is here, too.

We talked to Dagenais about how he achieved such a massive online following, dealing with imposter syndrome while writing his book, what he’s cooking now, and how his “salmon gravlax” video inspired an international debate.

VICE: Hi, Laurent! In your videos, your outfits are always a big part of setting the vibe. Before we dig in, do you have anything on right now that people should know about?

Laurent Dagenais: That’s a good question. For the videos, it’s nice to dress up for the occasion. I’m working on launching my own merch line for the end of the year, and it’s going to be called “Toujours faim,” which is like the French version of the book Always Hungry! A couple caps, a couple aprons, some cookware. Right now, I’m just wearing a good old apron, because I just finished a video. 

Nice. What are you cooking today?

I’m doing this sponsored video for Cuisinart, and it’s a Chicago-style pizza. Deep dish. I’ve never even tried one, but I just pulled it out of the oven and it’s looking very, very nice. 

I actually live in Chicago, so I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Oh, shit! You can give me a very honest review. I think I honored the city.

I’m sure it’s great. So, obviously, you have a huge TikTok and Instagram following. Can you say a bit about how you got started as a chef on social media, and how you reached the level that you’re at now?

I was never really a big fan of school, so I dropped out of college. I worked in a local skate stop for a bit back home, but my parents were like, “Well, you have to start paying rent if you don’t go to school anymore,” so I thought, Alright, I’ll find something else. I had two friends working as chefs, who told me to check out culinary school and see if I liked it. I did, and that’s where the passion for cooking picked up for me. From there, I started working in little French bistros, and I moved up to better and better restaurants. I ended up being in fine dining for almost eight years, and that’s when I switched to doing a bit of front-of-house, after a serious wrist injury from snowboarding. COVID came, and I started doing the videos to stay sane. They were just little Instagram stories, nothing crazy. But people were very into it, so my girlfriend started filming them. After the third video, we went viral. It was the salmon gravlax. We went from ten followers to like 100,000 followers overnight. We were just like, “OK, we’ve got something. We should probably start posting more of those videos.” We had a pretty fast rise to get to a million, but I think it was very organic—we always just did our thing, without worrying about it too much. Next thing you know, we have over four million followers on all platforms. 

I watched the gravlax videos this morning. What do you think it is about those videos that people connected to? 

Oh, I don’t think—I know exactly what happened [laughs]. There are a couple things I learned the hard way. Like, you don’t have to say “salmon” before “gravlax,” because the “lax” in “gravlax” actually means salmon, so people made sure to mention that in the comments. The other thing is that I started this big war in the comments between all the Scandinavian countries. The Norwegians were saying that [dish] was from Norway; then you got the Swedish involved, the Finnish involved, the Danish involved. The Russians got involved. Everyone’s, like, going nuts in the comments. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of a bunch of action in the comments to make a video viral, so I feel like it was more about the controversy of the recipe than the actual recipe [laughs].

That's very funny. Can you tell us about what kinds of recipes people will find in this cookbook?

Absolutely. The way we did this book is that we took 20 recipes that already existed on my platforms—the most viral ones and the ones I liked the most—and then we added 50 new ones. We have condiments, salads, soups, some meat, seafood, fish, dessert, cocktails. A bit of everything that I eat and make in my real life. Nothing too pretentious, nothing too complicated; no crazy, hard-to-find ingredients, except for maybe the ramps. I feel like everything is pretty approachable and accessible for everyone to make.

You mention that the rabbit with mustard sauce is your favorite dish of all time. Are there any close seconds in here that you’re especially excited for people to try? 

Besides the rabbit… the octopus is also very dear to my heart. That’s something I made for a video in Greece.

I love how much cultural variety is in this book. You have pozole and tortas, and you also have banh mi, a Monte Cristo, and a Negroni. There’s risotto, too. What ties it all together for you?

Just all the traveling I’ve been doing lately. It’s really the image of what you can see online—people who follow me know I did a tacos video, I did some lasagna. I [like to do] Saudi, French, Mexican, Canadian, Asian. I really do a bit of everything. Traveling was a big part of why I have interest in those cultures, from going to a taco store in Mexico to meeting some crazy people in Bangkok.

In the book, you talk about dealing with imposter syndrome, and how you never felt like you’d be sitting there writing a cookbook. Now that Always Hungry! is out, how do you feel?

It’s definitely toned down a little bit since I wrote the book. For me, it was a struggle from the beginning, before I had the approval of my fellow French chefs. Coming from a real fine dining background, I feel like for most chefs, you have to be working crazy hours in a restaurant to be an actual chef. A lot of people are not fans of celebrity chefs in general, or home cooks. I guess I was one of those when I was working in restaurants—I was seeing celebrity chefs and home cooks and I would judge, thinking, You’re not the real deal. Do a 14-hour shift in the kitchen. But some very good chefs I was looking up to for my whole life gave me that approval and those props, and that’s when I realized, Unleash the beast. Now, nothing’s holding me back—I can go. I know I should not even care about that, but sometimes you do care about what people think. Now, all the chefs I really look up to are down with what I do. The imposter syndrome is not really a thing anymore for me. 

You’ve done a couple collab videos with some big chefs that you’re friends with. Are there any chefs that you really hope to do a video with one day?

I kind of did last week. I was in Toronto, and Matty Matheson and I did a video in his studio, which should be coming out in a couple of weeks. Matty Matheson’s been a big inspiration since his early days at VICE. I was watching his shows a long, long time ago, and was like, Whoa, that’s the sickest job in the world! You get to just cook and travel and meet cool people? Next thing you know, we got to meet up for a video together and do dinner at one of his restaurants. That was very, very cool.

So, the title of the book is Always Hungry! What are you hungry for right now?

Well, I’m still looking at a pizza while talking to you, so I’m definitely going to dig in there and have my first bite of Chicago deep-dish pizza. I could probably eat pizza three times a day.

Check out Always Hungry! on Amazon here.

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