We Went To ‘Queer Eye’ Food Guy Antoni’s Restaurant And Fell Into An Existential Spiral
Can he cook? Can anyone? What is cooking?
Antoni Porowski keeps popping up on my Tinder — well, kind of.
While news would soon ‘break’ that the hot food guy from Queer Eye and his longterm boyfriend had broken up during my time in New York this October, I didn’t have the opportunity to swipe right on Porowski himself. Instead, I got an ad for The Village Den, his month-old fast-casual canteen restaurant in Chelsea.
I actually got quite a few opportunities, which makes sense: by data alone, I am pre-destined to swipe right. I am seemingly the key demographic for The Village Den: a queer male aged 18-30 staying in Chelsea, who has streamed Queer Eye, follows Porowski on Instagram, and been geo-tagged at many restaurants over time. But the data is missing one thing: I work at Junkee dot com, so we got beef.
Well, it’s more my colleague Patrick Lenton’s beef than it is mine. He was among the first to ask the question: can Queer Eye‘s Hot Food Guy Could Even Cook? And then, when you all clicked on it (and the likes of The New Yorker and The New York Times followed up with their own reaction pieces), Patrick went mad with power.
Soon, he made mock all-avocado recipes from Porowski’s impending cookbook, and later investigated whether Porowski knew Complex Art Theory when Antoni posted #spon content of himself in Haynes underwear, and referenced the classic contrapposto pose in the Instagram caption.
At this stage, it was a one-sided feud: then we found a (now deleted) video of Porowski calling Patrick a little bitch, and making fun of Junkee for having fewer followers than him. In our defence, as a website, we’re incapable of posting thirst-traps.
After the video was subsequently scrubbed from the internet, a de-facto détente came into place.
But then, The Village Den just kept popping up: not just on Tinder, but Instagram too. After long-abandoning a dedication to alternating selfies with food porn, Porowski pivoted. Every other Insta-grid post became a flat-lay of the Den’s smoothies and bright, vegetable-laden bowls. It looked nourishing; a respite from a few too many late-night diner visits. After a few days, I swiped right.
Things That Matter (Or Not, At All)
Queer Eye arrived in January, quickly becoming a cultural force. Porowski was the breakout star — as The New Yorker put it, he’s “dreamily beautiful, a grownup teen idol” dressed in The Strokes and A Little Life merch. The internet did what it does best: thirst.
Before then, Porowski was relatively unknown — a former actor and model who found his way onto the reboot by way of being neighbours with the original series’ food connoisseur, Ted Allen. It’s impressive that by October, he had a restaurant, taking over the lease of a by-numbers Chelsea diner and rebranding it as The Village Den, a health and buzzword-conscious canteen.
The board menu is dotted with symbols neatly aligning with 2018 dietary trends, and the oven-baked spinach frittata collects-them-all. It is plant-based, vegetarian, gluten-free and contains dairy, and can be eaten on a keto or whole 30 diet. It is also lukewarm when it arrives, a repeat problem that Eater detailed in its review.
Outside, a sign positions The Village Den conceptually as “on the corner of vegan and paleo”. Geographically, it’s opposite an AIDS Memorial and a multi-level Equinox gym, the chain that Broad City parodies perfectly with its own gym, Solstice. It’s a perfect location: an LGBTIQ tourist destination and pit-stop for a post-gym meal.
If it wasn’t evident by Porowski’s impressive roster of #spon content (some weeks, he’ll be shilling multiple brands at once with a relentless enthusiasm that’s spawned some stunning impersonations), The Village Den is proof that the Hot Food Guy is not just a pretty face: he’s a Shrewd Marketer, too. Which is genuinely great. Hats off: if we’ve learnt anything from the past few years of celebrity culture, our obsessions are often flash-in-the-pan. It’s almost inevitable that they milkshake duck (sometimes within hours); otherwise, we grow bored, or expect too much. Best to ride that wave.
Trends, too: The Village Den space is, to paraphrase The New Yorkers‘ headline, “exquisitely blank”, a carefully quirked combination of natural light, light timber, hanging plants, and a neighbourhood mural featuring anthropomorphic cold brews cruising Tinder while, a few streets over, a banana and apple make out. You wouldn’t know it was a celebrity-affiliated establishment unless you already knew: there are no signals other than on the smoothie menu, where a very delicious banana, lime and date option is called The Big Porowski.
While the mural’s many vegetables do feature on the menu, they’re less dressed up there: there’s an emphasis on Simple, Wholesome Cooking here, though occasionally it can be a little too quirk driven. Options are divided into four sections, each with four or five options: breakfast, salads, bowls and ‘TV dinners’ — though, as the board states, they’re “not the sad kind”.
Beyond the frittata, breakfast offers the likes of brekkie bowls, and almond and walnut pancakes with maple-roasted bananas, which the toddlers next to me enjoyed a lot. And no, The Village Den doesn’t shy away from avocado: it’s available as a $6 side, or served smashed with an equally smashed hard-boiled egg, radish and beetroot on ‘health bread’. It wasn’t the best avo toast I’ve ever had, but it was solid — the za’atar sprinkled on top might overpower, but it’s kept in line by the beetroot’s sweetness.
As the kitsch name implies, the TV Dinners are the home to the most interesting meals, including macadamia-crusted fish sticks (which I did not eat, because why would anyone order $21 fish sticks) and apple-glazed Turkey meatloaf balls with pineapple chutney and cauliflower rice. The flavours were all there with the latter — as were the textures, the shaved almonds on top adding a nice crunch against the fluffy rice — but the basics weren’t: the meatballs themselves were dry.
The TV dinners are a little choose-your-own adventure, as they each come with two sides, ranging from cider-braised cabbage to turmeric-roasted cauliflower, spaghetti squash to garlic-roasted broccolini.
Choose-your-own-adventure is a good way to frame The Village Den: see, the thing is, I don’t really want to write about the food that much. And beyond finding out that it’s not terrible (which it by no means is), you don’t really want to read about it either. You have already made your mind up about The Village Den — it either appeals to you on the basis of its health aesthetics and star-power, or it doesn’t.
From the location to its name, everything here has been carefully considered for its audience. When BuzzFeed went, they ordered the $6 avocado side and then were disappointed when it arrived as just avocado — but for Queer Eye stans, that’s part of the adventure. A quick glance at Instagram reveals that plenty visit for the flat-lay, or to say they’ve done it. Visit the Friends apartment block, go to the Seinfeld diner, visit Antoni’s restaurant: these are the dumb things we do when we visit New York. Or, if you’re me, tell your boss you’ll review a restaurant as some sort of messy intra-office joke.
The Village Den is emblematic of Porowski’s hold over us this year: it too, is artfully approachable, quirky but not weird, aspirational but not intimidating. The algorithm is right: Porowski embodies everything I am taught to want, a bookish, basic dreamboat. I should swipe right, which is exactly why I resist: there’s always something about being plated up a picture-perfect dish. You can’t help but gleefully demand more, scouring for flaws.
Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and is slowly unfollowing bland but hot men on Instagram. Follow him on Twitter.