The first time Brandon Skier (aka @sad_papi) posted a video on TikTok, it got a million views.He can’t even remember what the video was. It was 2020 and he’d just been let go from the best job he’d ever had, working the line at Auburn, an airy Melrose Avenue oasis with a tasting menu.
“It had just opened, and the team and the chef there were so incredibly cool,” Skier recalls. “We were trying to get two Michelin stars. And I think we would've gotten them…”
But a strange new virus called COVID-19 had taken hold of the city, the country, the world. After a few attempts at alternate revenue streams, Auburn shut down, and Skier lost his job.
Even though he was seriously credentialed — a culinary degree from the Art Institute of Hollywood, a decade cooking professionally at some of LA’s top kitchens (from the beginning, Skier used the late Jonathan Gold’s list of the city’s 101 Best Restaurants as an employment guide, working his way through heavy-hitters like Plan Check, Superba Food + Bread, and Redbird) — work was impossible to find.
“No one was hiring,” he says. “So I was just bored at home, scrolling TikTok to pass the time. The food videos back then were very corny. It was, like ‘mac and cheese, 30 different ways!’ And I thought, ‘I could do that, and I could do it a little bit more interesting.’ So I posted a video… and it got a million views. I was like, ‘Oh, cool.’”
So he posted a few more videos, dressed in his signature all-black-hat-plus-hoodie combo, covered in tattoos, soft-spoken but confident, delivering on highly specific viewer requests for recipe demos, and using the nickname “Sad Papi” (an inside joke between him and his friends) as his handle.
Quickly, other chefs and food influencers started following the Sad Papi account and recommended Skier upgrade his setup. “Those first few videos looked really janky,” he says. “I was filming on an iPhone 4 with a cracked screen, and the microphone was broken.”
So he took his unemployment check, bought a camera and a laptop (“I didn’t have a computer back then either”), downloaded some editing software and taught himself to use it. After that, he says, “it was a whole new world.” His follower count exploded, and big-name chefs like Josiah Citrin and Gordon Ramsay joined the ranks.
What separated Skier from the rest of the FoodTok masses was that his recipes weren’t designed to be easy, or commonplace, or gimmicky. No two-step roast chicken or deep-fried mac and cheese here. Sad Papi’s goal was to teach his followers how to cook up the kinds of labor-intensive dishes they’d normally only find in restaurants — leek confit, buckwheat lace tuile, ribeye sous vide. The strategy proved especially potent during the pandemic, when the very idea of eating a fancy dish at a restaurant felt like a nostalgic fever dream. But the audience has held — and grown — long past the pandemic itself.
“My original rationale was, all the restaurants are closed, but there are still special occasions for everyone every single day,” he says. “The recipes that I was posting were for celebrations. Dishes that took more effort, but weren’t meant to be made all the time. I think that's what gravitated people towards my videos — and still does today. Making food is a very good way to communicate that you care about someone. So as long as people want to cook at home and do something special for someone else, I think there's always going to be a place for it.”
Today, Skier boasts well over 2 million followers on TikTok and hundreds of thousands more on Instagram. This past spring he published his first cookbook, “Make It Fancy: Cooking at Home With Sad Papi,” which led to a larger-than-life billboard appearance in New York City. He set a new record for most signed copies sold in a single day at the popular LA cookbook store Now Serving. And he’s only getting started.
“My ideal path forward is to continue with social media, but also do a lot more in-person stuff, like dinner parties and supper clubs, pop-ups and restaurant collabs,” he says. “A couple of friends of mine are opening restaurants later this year, so we're going to do some menus together.”
I was just bored at home, scrolling TikTok to pass the time. The food videos back then were very corny. It was, like ‘mac and cheese, 30 different ways!’ And I thought, ‘I could do that, and I could do it a little bit more interesting.’ So I posted a video… and it got a million views. I was like, ‘Oh, cool.’”
But will he ever go back to working in restaurants? Skier pauses when I ask him, long enough that his cat, Toast, seizes upon the opportunity to make a Zoom cameo. After a few nose pets, he returns to the question at hand. “Originally I said no, because when COVID hit, I was making more on unemployment than I was making in Michelin star restaurants. And I was like, ‘Well, that sucks.’ I hadn’t even realized I could make money doing other food things.”
He pauses again. “But, I miss it. I think I actually thrive under pressure, the high-speed environment. It’s really fun having a bunch of orders come in at the same time. You just look around, and you're like, ‘Whoa, let's go!’ I enjoy it.”
So maybe the answer is to open a brick and mortar of his own one day, he says. “Maybe just a really soigne cafe. Really, really, really good drinks and brunch food. And then at night, bar snacks. Really, really good bar snacks. Nothing too expensive, but everything is just really fucking good.”
Toast exits stage left, and Skier’s eyes follow the cat off-screen. “I don’t know,” he says. “I think that’d be cool."
PHOTO CREDIT: Courtesy of Brandon Skier
