(Bloomberg Businessweek) —
It was the fall of 2023, and James Lowe, the London-based chef who’d made Lyle’s one of the UK’s best restaurants, realized he needed help. Despite 20 years of cooking experience, including stints in elite kitchens such as the Fat Duck and the River Cafe, the 45-year-old had never butchered a bluefin tuna. The UK had just awarded local licenses to catch the fish, though, so Lowe had ordered a 180-kilogram specimen from a favorite supplier in Cornwall.
Carving up the pricey fish—especially a daunting behemoth of 400 pounds—is no small endeavor. “Almost none of my chefs had prepped it before, and every piece has a different name,” Lowe says. Not even the knives they used regularly were meant for the task.
Lowe turned to YouTube. First he and his team watched hours of Japanese fish experts in action, some with knives the size of a sword. “We searched keywords like ‘butchery’ and ‘markets in Japan’ and ‘Taiwan,’” he says, “to weed out amateurs and see people who were doing this every single day.” It took well over an hour to carve the fish into main pieces, Lowe says: “It would now take about 10 minutes with the right tools and experience.”
Lowe wasn’t done with his YouTube research. “We dropped in sushi restaurant names to see what unexpected things they were doing,” he recalls. He and his crew then experimented, and one of the results at the now-closed Lyle’s—a tartare served with melted tuna fat toasts—made my list of that year’s best dishes. YouTube, Lowe says, is “an incredible tool for getting information quickly.”
In the past a chef like Lowe would have pored over cookbooks with pictures and diagrams, or called in an expert for a demo or to do the job themself. But photos can take you only so far, risking expensive mistakes, and you don’t learn if someone does it for you. Just as athletes watch training videos to improve performance, chefs can now access a vast library on YouTube to hone their craft.
Food videos are, of course, nothing new. You might consider Julia Child an early culinary content creator (I do) with her series The French Chef, which made its public television debut in 1963. After the Food Network premiered 30 years later, home cooks picked up countless tips from the likes of Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay. Today almost every social media platform has a wealth of instruction geared toward home cooks (especially if their goal is to get dinner on the table in five minutes using even fewer ingredients).
YouTube in particular has been a gold mine for cooks: Monthly uploads of food and drink videos have shot up from 171,000 in January 2024 to 315,000 in June 2025, according to analytics firm Tubular Labs Inc. And in a 2023 post on its Culture & Trends channel, YouTube attributed 80 billion views in the first 11 months of the year to videos from street food heavyweights such as Roy Choi of Los Angeles-based Kogi BBQ. YouTube has become an increasingly useful resource for professional chefs who know what to look for. In recent years, it’s also helped skilled amateurs earn culinary reputations and even open their own restaurants.
“It has even created new ways to experience cooking that were previously unimaginable, like the popularity of ASMR or the simple, vicarious satisfaction of watching a process from start to finish,” says Roya Zeitoune, YouTube’s culture and trends manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. “There are infinite ways that cooking comes to life on YouTube.”
In London, Max Lewis worked in software before discovering New Haven, Connecticut-style pizza on YouTube during the pandemic. Now he’s slinging pies at his year-old Lenny’s Apizza in Finsbury Park. Another newly minted UK pizzaiolo, David Ratcliffe, owner of Detroit-style Ria’s in Notting Hill, also credits YouTube with giving British wannabe pie makers exposure to—and tutorials on how to make—regional American pizza styles that are easier to produce than the once-ubiquitous Neapolitan pies.
And it gets wonkier from there. Jonathan Tam, chef-owner of the Michelin-starred Jatak in Copenhagen, was searching for Japanese cooking techniques while he worked at the legendary Noma back in 2008—and discovered Seiji Yamamoto, the chef behind Nihonryori RyuGin in Tokyo. “He was studying eel with an X-ray scan to see how to cut through it, and showing his duck prep,” Tam says. “He would quickly freeze the crown with a nitrogen gun in between searing.” No easy moves for an amateur to tackle, but catnip for pros.
“Chefs didn’t used to share their recipes,” says Wylie Dufresne, who earned fame for his modernist Manhattan restaurant, wd~50, in the early 2000s. Now people give away their knowledge freely. It’s an exciting moment for everyone, he says, “even those of us who have been in the food business for a really long time.” YouTube helped him develop a new craft: skills for Stretch Pizza, his inspired pie spot in New York’s Flatiron District.
In fact, YouTube university has begun to supplant the education traditionally earned by working in elite kitchens. “When I was coming up—I graduated cooking school in 2007—it was about working for chefs in the most intense kitchens,” says Frank Pinello, whose Best Pizza is a Brooklyn powerhouse. “It was all about working with Thomas Keller. That’s how you got started.” (As it happens, Keller, chef-owner of the Bay Area’s legendary the French Laundry, says that when he was a young cook in the 1980s in New York, he got inspiration by walking over to the city’s finest French restaurant—Lutece—and scanning the menu in the window. In 2005, a year after Lutece closed its doors, YouTube uploaded its first video.)
Now Pinello, a YouTube star in his own right, sees that education streaming from a screen. A few years ago, he encountered Norma Knepp, who operates a tiny stand at Root’s Country Market & Auction in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. “It didn’t seem like a place you would go out of your way for pizza, but she was killing it. She said she learned by watching YouTube.”
Rasheed Philips, known on social media as the Gentleman Smoker, runs the roving Philips Barbeque in Lawrenceville, Georgia. He honed his singular Caribbean-accented live-fire style by watching pitmaster Malcom Reed and old episodes of Man Fire Food on repeat. “I’m a visual learner,” he says. Philips also credits YouTube with helping chefs bypass the traditional paths and start earlier. “There’s a massive shift towards younger cooks because of YouTube,” he says. Philips cites the Texas-based junior barbecue competitor Rae Barker, known on social media as Lil’ Gringa. “She got there watching videos,” he says. He also name-checks Evan Wiederspohn, who was competing on the barbecue circuit at age 14, using techniques he learned online. Now, says Philips, “he’s 19 and about to open his own food trailer.”
But even YouTube may soon be eclipsed. “TikTok. That’s what my younger chefs use,” says Jatak’s Tam. “A 10-second clip of something being piped or an interesting cake.” Indeed, with its easy-to-absorb, hypershort format and algorithm that feeds users exactly what they want—whether it’s a shortcut to Alain Passard’s famed hot-cold soft-boiled eggs or a lesson on the latest Cedric Grolet pastry—its reach is only expanding.
“TikTok brings something to their attention,” Tam adds. “Maybe it leads to deeper research. Or maybe that’s all the information they want.”
To contact the author of this story:
Kate Krader in London at kkrader@bloomberg.net
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