In the mid-2010s, internet video production company, BuzzFeed thrived on their recent success with recipe and cooking videos. As these videos became popular, they created a food division called Tasty, dominating YouTube and Facebook with their recipe video loops, viral recipes, and how-to-cook videos.
Tasty later uploaded behind-the-scenes content to the viral recipes featuring the chefs who developed them. The Internet fell in love with them thanks to their personalities such as Rie McClenny, Alix Traeger, Alexis deBoschnek, Kiano Moju, and the youngest chef of all, Alvin Zhou.
Unlike the other cooks, Alvin showed tremendous talent before, during, and after his time at Tasty with food cinematography and styling. His culinary curiosity also grew in his YouTube series, A Day in the Life of A Chef. This time, we’ll see how Alvin’s culinary film process evolved.
From Hungry Beginnings at Tasty
In 2015, Alvin Zhou was a Columbian University junior studying research operations engineering and worked part-time at the now-closed City Bakery. Living in New York for his third year, baking chocolate chip cookies was his first dessert recipe and one of the ways he made friends when he moved away from his home in California.
Alvin made desserts from sweet ingredients he snuck out of the university cafeteria in coffee cups. He developed his photo-shooting on his food with his phone and posted the photos on Facebook to show his creations.
Then, a dorm mate who saw these photos offered him a photography camera they weren’t using to help Alvin improve the photo’s quality and focus. He used it to practice recording food, later catching the attention of a yogurt chain called 16 Handles.
The chain found Alvin’s video composition alluring and requested he film their yogurt flavors blending. His ad aired on a screen display in 16 Handles stores that would capture the attention of former BuzzFeed’s Life editor, Emily Fleischaker. She asked the owner about the yogurt ads, later asking Alvin Zhou to join their food division, Tasty.
Magic Chocolate Ball Alvin
As Tasty’s youngest producer, Alvin’s presence wouldn’t be known on YouTube until October 5th, 2017 in the Magic Chocolate Ball: Behind Tasty video. We see him sliding his hand slowly as he shows the ingredients at the bottom center of the studio counter he’s working on. If you watch the Tasty video, they speed up the hand movement and hold frames on the ingredient for the viewer to see what it looks like.
Alvin is mindful of his precision with the space above his hand. The boundary above him is the text space for Tasty editors, double-checking his hand doesn’t overlap where the font should be. Alvin is keen on the camera’s focus to capture the ingredient to its fullest before moving to the next one.
He also mentions lighting gives the food contrast to look appetizing and appealing. Watching Alvin not patch up his mistake after he broke the first chocolate ball and did another test with different chocolate for better results shows his perfectionist and professional side. Including the bite shot, he moved the camera on his right to his left to create a left-handed scoop.
According to Alvin on Tasty’s 5th anniversary, this Magic Chocolate Ball was recreated in 2015. While I couldn’t find a post of it existing from that year, I found Alvin’s work on BuzzFeed’s Food page. In total, there were 52 recipes he helped film and cook in a year. Alvin’s first post dates back to November 10th, 2015 on the Deep Dish Cookie with his colleague Melissa Jameson.
That’s incredible for someone at the age of 20!
Alvin Zhou Filming During COVID-19
Five months after the COVID-19 Pandemic, many of Tasty’s producers including Alvin were stuck at home making content. Soon, he uploaded a solo video of him making his famous 48-hour chocolate chip cookies, last seen on Tasty’s Time to Cook series.
When I first watched this video, I didn’t expect to hear a City Girl track or watch a silent Alvin Zhou cook in his apartment. Tasty’s audience grew to know him as this bright young man who could tackle almost any cooking challenge even a giant bowl of ramen. Yet, you sense comfort from this silence.
Instead of using a photo light, he uses his casement window in the kitchen for natural lighting during the day, and his range hood light at night. The video is surrounded by a widescreen filter separating it in the subtitles. He describes to the viewer what’s happening on screen rather than speaking it.
The atmosphere felt more inviting than Alvin’s Tasty videos using ASMR (audio sensory meridan response). He would upload two videos after making honey butter fried chicken and garlic butter steak. To Alvin, it led him to search for his style of filmmaking.
In the same year, he would join two of his Tasty producers, Rie McClenny and Inga Lam, and one of BuzzFeed’s original producers, Andrew Ilnyckyj for their new food channel, About To Eat or ATE for short.
Alvin began working on a food documentary series called A Day in the Life of a Chef. He soon developed a style of his own that is similar to Netflix’s Chef’s Table. Instead of recording at multiple locations for chefs to show off their favorite recipes, Alvin films a chef’s process and their culinary team in a single day. I find it adorable that when chefs want to feed him, he’s always surprised they are giving him a taste of their food.
Alvin Flies Solo (Sort of)
On September 16th, 2022, Alvin Zhou officially left Tasty, passing his show, Making It Big, to its new host, Tway Ngyuen. And soon after, About to Eat stopped channel operations last year. Alvin is now focused on his filmmaking career as a food enthusiast, curious cook, and documentarian to provide viewers with travel, taking A Day in the Life of a Chef to new heights.
Along with joining Babish Culinary Universe with Andrew Rea for his three series, Anything, Anime, and Arcade with Alvin to explore what recipes he can recreate. If you like to see his Day in the Life of A Chef series, it has a new home on Alvin Zhou Films.
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