Sohla El-Waylly From ‘Bon Appétit’ Finally Has Her Very Own Cooking Show
Binging With Babish has given Sohla her very own show!
Three months after Sohla El-Waylly exposed the serious pay inequity going on at Bon Appétit, the beloved chef has finally gotten her very own show.
Binging With Babish announced the iconic partnership on Instagram early this morning, and shared that the show would be titled ‘Stump Sohla’.
“I been bursting at the seams for more than a month now, but I can finally say that tomorrow an all-new new show premieres on the channel!,” Andrew Rea, the self-taught chef behind Binging With Babish, announced. “Welcome to the Babish Culinary Universe @sohlae, an incredibly talented chef and all-round amazing human being”.
Deadline reports that ‘Stump Sohla’ will be a 10-episode series that plans to regularly air every Saturday on the Binging with Babish channel — where Rea managed to amass a following of over seven million from his iconic pop-culture food recreations.
The premise of the show sees El-Waylly attempt to cook a dish with a random challenging aspect thrown in, which is decided by a spinning wheel. With options like “serve on fire”, “make it scary” and “astronaut food”, ‘Stump Sohla’ sounds like it’s a beautiful, chaotic cross between Wheel of Fortune and Cutthroat Kitchen.
Rea said that it was an “extraordinary honour” and “thrilling” for El-Waylly to be joining the BCU (Babish Culinary Universe). Equally excited, El-Waylly shared on Instagram that she was “scared, excited and joyful” for the new adventure.
Credit: Binging With Babish via Deadline
The announcement comes after months of uncertainty for the Bon Appétit YouTube channel after Sohla exposed the shocking pay inequity happening within the company.
In June, Sohla publicly shared that she was only earning a measly $50,000 USD annually to “assist mostly white editors with significantly less experience”. The professional chef with over 15 years of experience also added that she was not getting paid for her video appearances, while her white co-workers were.
The news sent shockwaves across the internet with many choosing to boycott Bon Appétit for their alleged mistreatment of their POC staff. Pausing all video content on the channel while Condé Nast — the parent company of Bon Appétit — tried to figure out their new strategy, a number of staff announced their decision to step back from Bon Appétit Test Kitchen videos.
After months of failed negotiations, prominent Test Kitchen personalities Priya Krishna, Rick Martinez, and Sohla El-Waylly shared that they would no longer be in any future videos.
In solidarity, Molly Baz and Gaby Melian also made the decision to stop appearing in videos. Plus, magazine staff Ryan Walker-Hartshorn and Jesse Sparks, the only two Black employees at Bon Appétit, also shared that they would be leaving the publication at the same time due to being overworked, underpaid, and overlooked in their roles as editorial assistants.
Despite a Condé Nast representative claiming that new video programming with “new and returning talent” would be announced in “the coming weeks” on August 7, no new videos have been shared to the Bon Appétit channel in almost four months.
Stump Sohla premieres on the Binging With Babish channel tomorrow.