A Recipe for DIY Reality TV

For years, a cohort of private chefs has flocked to eastern Long Island to spend the summer months cooking lavish meals for wealthy clients living in not-so-quiet luxury. The primarily young and seemingly cool chefs began documenting their daily lives on TikTok — from 5 a.m. wake-up calls to shopping at overpriced grocery stores to working from lush private gardens — and in 2023, their videos finally met in one place thanks to content curator Pamela Wurst Vetrini.

Vetrini works as a social-media consultant and has been analyzing and sharing TikTok trends on the app for the past three years. She normally focuses on rounding up and explaining general TikTok patterns, but this past summer she couldn’t resist the siren call of fresh-tomato galettes, and thus her very own reality show — call it the Top Chef of TikTok — was born. “It is now the official start of my favorite TikTok holiday: my favorite TikTok television series, I’m a Private Chef in the Hamptons,” she says in her first video in the series, posted on June 21. “It’s a reality-competition television series that none of these contestants signed up for, and I am the sole judge.”

For ten weeks straight, Vetrini ranked the chefs in a Dance Moms–inspired pyramid based not only on the meals they prepared but also the quality of their videos and any drama they encountered during the week (less “Someone slept with someone’s boyfriend,” more “Someone got cooking oil on the pool deck”). Unlike in the real Top Chef, the Hamptons private chefs never actually get eliminated, but followers still tuned in every week to see how things stacked up. “These chefs are doing so much work,” Vetrini says over Zoom. “I just wanted to curate it and give it a story.”

Why did these chefs make good reality-TV fodder?
I did not anticipate it becoming a series. I was making a joke, and people were like, “Okay, we want more.” I had been observing Meredith from Wishbone Kitchen for a couple of seasons. She was my entry into private cheffing in the Hamptons. She does such a good job narrating a day in the life, and her clients allow her to shoot so much footage of their home — you get not only the cooking content but also the interior-design content, the aspirational content. They bring in friends; they have parties.

The second chef I noticed this summer was Rob. He had such a different angle than Meredith. His content was much more Gen Z, much more hip, much more edited and stylized. I was like, I really need to introduce people to Rob because he’s unique. And then I started typing “private chefs in the Hamptons” in the search bar, and I found all these gems. I found Seth, who literally had 200 followers on the first video I saw. And now I think he’s close to 20,000.

What do you think is so compelling about their content?
It hits all of those pleasures for the eyes. You get beautiful houses, so you have the Nancy Meyers Coastal Grandmother content. You have the aspirational food content. These chefs spend $600 on steak for one meal — who’s gonna be able to go out and buy that? And then you get gardening. So you have this cottagecore content where they have these beautiful gardens producing fruits and vegetables. It’s just the wealth porn of it, like watching Succession.

There are so many private chefs that, in later videos, you were like, “I have to knock some people off.” How do you decide who to feature?
My criteria was always that they had to be cooking for a private-chef client. They would have weekends where they would go home and go on vacation or cook for their friends, and that would not qualify. And I always gave preference to any type of drama. One time Seth’s car broke down, one time Rob spilled cooking oil on the pool deck and had to clean it up, or someone’s grill would go out at the client’s house. And I prioritized house content; I loved when they could give us a little glimpse of where they were cooking, what the space was like, and we could feel like we were there. But the chefs kept suggesting new chefs for me and then I would have to kick people off. But they assured me that they did not care. They just liked the exposure and were happy to be there.

Every reality-TV show has tropes and structures. What would you say are yours?
Well, there’s the hero. Meredith is the top dog. She is consistent and good every week. There’s a heartthrob: Rob. Then I added a lesbian heartthrob after that: Bri. Heartthrobs sell. Seth was absolutely my underdog. He started with the least number of followers, and people were cheering him on every week. Then chefs would team up. One of the chefs worked with her sister one week and then DyAnne and Juliana worked together for the same company.

What would you say are the most quintessential dishes these chefs cook?
They love heirloom tomatoes. They love grazing boards. Lobster Cobb salad is huge. Anything on the grill. And a lot of pizza — they have pizza ovens at these million-dollar homes in the Hamptons.

And they’re always going to that one grocery store.
Citarella is like their pantry. They seem to go five times a day. Citarella ended up sponsoring the chefs for an end-of-season party.

I saw that!
They did invite me, but I was like, “My kids are starting school. Y’all are young. You go wild.” They had a great party. They called me from it.

What do the chefs think of the series? 
We really stick to the direct messages. They were so forgiving of me if I criticized them, because they loved having the exposure. It brought them so many new followers and so much press. They all got interviews. When I had a guest judge who was an actual chef, I think some of them got a little hurt by some of her comments because they were a little more harsh and technique-focused.

We actually considered putting together a cookbook, and that’s still in talks, but the fame factor of all the chefs is so different. They vary so much from the top chef to the bottom chef. Meredith has her own cookbook she’s working on. But the concept is still out there. Even if I don’t edit it, I hope somebody jumps on that opportunity. They have told me that private cheffing is a very isolating experience. They don’t get to socialize at all, and this brought them together.

Do you think something like this is a legitimate competitor to reality TV?
Absolutely. I mean, that’s what I’ve been hoping for. Because our attention spans are shorter and shorter, the type of content we want is the three-minute TikTok videos. We want them to be authentic, homemade, and short, but we still crave the narrative, the drama, the curation, and the organizing of the content. All of the content exists, and we just need someone to curate it for us.

Will the show return next year?
I do think I’m gonna be doing it next season, and I’ll probably let go of some of the chefs who’ve already made it big and focus on the smaller chef creators. I just really want them to be celebrated, and their work to be out there, because they’re so talented.