Olivia Tiedemann gets flipped off everywhere she goes. It happens at parties, in grocery stores, even when she’s walking down the street. But it’s no sign of disrespect. The one-finger salute is her biggest calling card — a profane habit that’s built her a social media fandom 5 million followers deep.
“One time, I was walking late at night and somebody honked at me and gave me the finger. I was like ‘Yep!’ and kept walking,” Tiedemann, 29, says. “It’s how we say hello to each other at this point.”
It’s been three years since Tiedemann first posted a chaotic vlog of herself cooking dinner at her job as a private chef in the Hamptons, East Coast playground for the rich and famous. The video traded the genre’s typical easy-breezy style for a mashup of clips where flames rose, expletives flew, and Tiedemann flipped the bird toward the camera at every opportunity. This fuck-you energy turned Tiedemann into an overnight star, netting her first million followers one month to the day after she posted that viral video. Since then, she’s worked with some of her biggest idols in the culinary world, cooking alongside everyone from Jean-Georges Vongerichten to Masaharu Morimoto, Giada De Laurentiis, and Gordon Ramsay. Now, the Sept. 15 release of her debut cookbook, Eat (Like) the Rich, marks a milestone moment in Tiedemann’s career, the first time she’s tried to translate her viral success into a tangible offering of her expertise — and a demonstration of her personal growth.
“When I first started making videos, I was upset at the time,” Tiedemann says. “I was going through this whole new world that was my job. I’ve matured a little bit, but I try to keep the fire. You can’t just be an angsty little shit all the time.”
TIEDEMANN AND I ARE on a food crawl through Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the neighborhood where she grew up. Though she hasn’t been back in years, at our first stop, the Palestinian restaurant Tanoreen, we’re greeted immediately by the owner, who kisses Tiedemann on the cheek before announcing, “I ordered ahead for you.”
The second-eldest of four siblings, Tiedemann grew up a block away from the restaurant, raised by her construction-worker father and chef mother. The brash attitude that’s attracted fans on social media didn’t win her points at home. She had an often contentious relationship with her mom that nearly got in the way of her dream career. “I started to become interested in cooking and I was really resistant to it,” she admits. “It felt embarrassing, almost, to tell my mother ‘I want to be a chef, too.’”
Tiedemann went through several phases before her private-chef days, most of which came with an abrupt ending. When she was 15, she helped sell (illegal) weed lollipops from roving trucks in Union Square, a job made possible by a fake ID she procured on St. Marks. There was a stint at the fast-fashion store Brandy Melville, where she learned about business and drugs that “start with C” before she walked out the door one day and never returned. In high school, she skipped so many classes her senior year that she never got a diploma. Instead of going to college, she backpacked abroad for months.
It was her first restaurant job that convinced her to enroll in culinary school. And by 24, Tiedemann was head chef of an Italian restaurant on Staten Island. But when the menu shifted from upscale to more standard fare, Tiedemann started to lose interest. “I don’t want to fucking make penne vodka. I don’t,” she says. “There’s no amount of money that would have me sitting in a place doing that.” On her worst day, she blew up at a line cook after she asked for chicken stock and he returned with a bucket of Dijon mustard. Days later, she quit cooking entirely, or so she thought.
Tiedemann was working as a production assistant on films in upstate New York when she got a call from a staffing agency looking for a private chef for a Hamptons household. The job “was everything I ever wanted as a chef,” she says. That it led to social media stardom was an unexpected bonus. “Who would have thought that there could be a whole world right on the other side of it?”
Tiedemann calls her new book “a private chef’s list of commandments.” Marcus Nillson
HAMPTONS FOOD CONTENT IS an entire genre online, one that typically relies on a razor-thin balance of excess and relatability. Private chefs in the vacation enclave have to fit the One Percenter aesthetic while also reminding their followers that they’re staff in this equation — which usually results in videos where they act as ever-smiling experts who can grill and sous vide and plate surprise dinners for 20 without breaking a sweat. Tiedemann’s first videos flew in the face of these rules. She mixed curses and clashing pans with unserious captions, like saying a platter of perfectly medium-rare steak had “big dick energy,” or starting videos with “Good morning, motherfuckers.”
When Tiedemann first filmed herself cooking, it was to keep busy while the family she was working for was out of town. She never actually intended to share the videos anywhere. But after her first edit made her laugh (“I was like, ‘This fucks!’”), she posted it on TikTok. She gained followers so quickly that when the family returned two weeks later, she couldn’t hide what she’d been up to. “I was like, ‘Hey, guys, just wanted to let you know I’ve been giving everybody the finger through my phone from your kitchen. A lot of people are watching them now. Are we cool with this?’” Luckily, the family found them funny. But then, making funny videos became a job, too. “It’s so weird how instantly the pressure turned on,” Tiedemann says. “And it’s never turned off.”
Tiedemann is an enthusiastic gourmand, and her instinct for service is on full display as we talk. She spoons sliced beets and hummus onto my plate, pushing tabouleh to the side to make room for a mound of za’atar and sumac crisps. Every time a waiter comes by, she gushes over the food, waiting until they leave to eat more in an effort to clear her plate. “Fuck,” she whispers, adjusting the silver chef’s knife necklace dangling from her neck. “It’s hard to eat and chat.” Just when we’ve finished a plate of dip, a waiter sets down a massive bowl of shredded chicken, rice, and almonds covered in yogurt sauce and a tower of fried eggplant rounds on top of basil salad. Tiedemann and I lock eyes in a solemn understanding. There will be no food crawl.
‘EAT (LIKE) THE RICH’ IS a user-friendly guide that blends some of Tiedemann’s best-known recipes (challah French toast) with cooking advice (no! plastic! ever!). Like her, it’s full of personality, including recipes for “fuck desserts” and “salads that don’t suck.” She calls the book a “private chef’s list of commandments.”
Meanwhile, she’s continuing to grow her online accounts and working through a contentious contract with a content-production company. She recently moved her life from New York to Austin in a peak of rage (“I was so fed up with New York at that point, like the hell of it all”) but still commutes to the Hamptons in the summer to work as a private chef. While there’s been a lot of change in a short time, ultimately, she says the cookbook feels like proof her path to the food world, however twisty, was the right one to follow.
“This is the work of my life,” she says. “Everything that led up to this, all the years that I spent in a kitchen somewhere, having a terrible time. It’s cool to be able to put that together into this perfect little package that I [can] give to somebody else.”
There’s one anecdote in the cookbook’s foreword that Tiedemann wrestled with sharing. There, she reveals that she didn’t quit her head chef job because she thought she could find something better. She quit because she thought she was going to kill herself. “I wanted to not exist. It’s such a common story that you don’t see, because it’s back there,” she says, emphatically pointing toward the kitchen next to us. “[Your] whole life exists in this box. Those months [after I quit] were just reopening the world. It primed me to grow.”
Much of Tiedemann’s style as a chef relies on the idea that sometimes, dropping everything and starting again can lead to the best outcomes. But as she moves past her initial virality and toward a culinary career with legs, she seems to be realizing that the most badass thing she can do now is focus on following through. Social media fame has opened doors that could let Tiedemann abandon the day-to-day work of a chef — the burned fingers and picky eaters and endless plates of penne alla vodka — for a life of content creation. Still, cooking is the first and only thing that’s given Tiedemann purpose, so the better option seems to be throwing up a middle finger and getting back to work.
“I want to be a chef forever. Losing touch with that would be like losing touch with myself. So I never want to stop doing that,” Tiedemann says. “And if I ever do, I’m probably morphing into some little shit and somebody better stop me. Because cooking is what I like most in the world.”
