Internet Fandom and the Rise of the Worker at Bon Appétit

Bon Appétit attracted a massive fandom on YouTube. This month, as staff disclosed BA's unequal pay and racism, many of these fans threw their support behind restructuring the Condé Nast title.

When Condé Nast moved into 1 World Trade Center in November 2014, the media company leased 21 floors of the 94-story tower — one million square feet of office space, rented for $50 a square foot. The 25-year lease Condé initially signed, cementing its place as the anchor tenant in the building, would have cost $2 billion all told. But in 2018 — after losing $120 million the prior year and putting three titles up for sale — the publisher reduced its footprint in the building by a third, leaving prestige magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker in the uncomfortable position of actually having to share floors with other Condé staff.

If the new address ended up being a liability for the company, for Bon Appétit, the move to 1 World Trade Center presented a unique opportunity: It was a chance to remake the publication for a contemporary audience. The building afforded the food magazine’s staff with sunny office spaces and, most importantly, an expansive new test kitchen. Set on the 35th floor, the large open space features eight gas-burning Wolf ranges, a bank of fridges and freezers and a walk-in, as well as a panoramic view of lower Manhattan and exceptional natural light. It was a far cry from the harsh, fluorescent glare of the kitchen in Condé Nast’s old headquarters, which looked out on Times Square and required so much extra lighting that it made filming a hassle.

In 2014, as Condé settled into the new building, the media industry was about to throw itself headlong into the ill-fated pivot to video. Newsrooms cut staff across both print and digital editorial teams in order to chase impressions and ad revenue on Facebook, which at the time was favoring video content on its news feeds. Condé was struggling to keep revenue up as subscriptions dropped across its titles, print ad sales declined, and monetization schemes for web content failed to make up the slack.

There, in the warm light of the 35th floor, Bon Appétit built the food-video empire that’s now broadly referred to as the Test Kitchen, which was, until recently, almost universally praised by critics as a near-perfect pivot to video. Instead of laying off editorial staff and hiring a separate crew of producers, video editors, and talent, the people behind the magazine stepped in front of the camera, and BA relied on Condé Nast’s in-house studio for production. The strategy worked better than anyone might have thought, turning into a booming YouTube channel. “Business-wise, if not for our video success there might no longer be a Bon Appétit,” Adam Rapoport, the magazine’s former editor-in-chief, told Study Hall late last year.

Like many fans, Mercedes la Rosa, a graphic designer from Montreal, said that part of what drew her to the videos was the impression of workplace diversity in the Test Kitchen. “I have creative professional work envy because of the environment they’re able to create,” she told me last December, noting that, as an Asian woman, she particularly identified with Christina Chaey and Priya Krishna, who are Korean-American and Indian-American, respectively.

Behind the workplace utopia of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen videos, however, the office dynamic was profoundly divided. The channel’s predominately white stars, who became celebrities in their own right, were far outearning the BIPOC staff members who were often seen doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the kitchen. The pay gap was literally structural, originating from a quirk in the Condé Nast bureaucracy: BA staffers with their own shows, like “It’s Alive” host Brad Leone and Claire Saffitz of “Gourmet Makes,” have lucrative talent contracts with Condé Nast Entertainment (CNE), Condé Nast’s central production arm, while the salaries of others like assistant editor Sohla El-Waylly come out of the magazine’s own budget. Although El-Waylly frequently appears in BA videos, she received no additional compensation for these video appearances, despite these duties falling outside the scope of her original job description.

El-Waylly, who is 35 and has extensive cooking experience, including running her own restaurant, asked for $65,000 when she was hired by BA nearly a year ago. She was only offered $50,000, which was bumped up to $60,000 in May. In an Instagram post, she described being “pushed in front of video as a display of diversity,“ but her repeated requests for a CNE contract were turned down or delayed by management. She told BuzzFeed about her frustration over the treatment of herself and other brown staff, saying that “we don’t have the same voice or pay.”

On June 8, staff complaints became part of a full-blown public scandal after freelance food journalist Tammie Teclemariam (who has written for Epicurious, which Condé grouped under BA in 2014) tweeted a 2004 picture of Rapoport in a brownface Puerto Rican Halloween costume. “I do not know why Adam Rapoport simply doesn’t write about Puerto Rican food for @bonappetit himself!!!” she wrote. (The tweet references a complaint made by Puerto Rican food writer Illyanna Maisonet, who had tweeted screenshots of a patronizing conversation she had recently with Rapoport about a rejected pitch on Afro-Boricuas making a type of rice fritter.) The photo was posted in 2013 by Simone Shubuck, who is married to Rapoport, with the caption ““#TBT me and my papi @rapo4 #boricua.” Rapoport resigned later the same day.

While Condé Nast has denied reports of racial pay disparities, it is now searching for a new EIC “who can reshape culture and prioritize diversity” at Bon Appétit according to a job listing. Staffers, too, are demanding that BIPOC at Bon Appétit have titles and earn salaries that reflect their work and that they are all paid for video appearances.

Last year, a video titled “I would die for Claire from the Bon Appetit test kitchen” went viral, and the name itself became both a meme and a hashtag: #IWDFCFTBATK. Now it’s clear that BA fans are ready to go to war for Sohla, Priya, and other staffers of color, too. In making the staff its stars, Bon Appétit may have saved the magazine — but in the process, they put an expiration date on the myth the video channel was selling of BA as a diverse, equitable workplace. It also lent the lie to Rapoport’s central importance to the brand’s image: By 2020, the magazine was succeeding in spite of, not because of, his leadership.

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When Rapoport took over Bon Appétit in 2010, just a year after Condé axed the storied food magazine Gourmet, he took a very simple approach to setting the magazine’s tone: “I always try to hire people who I’d want to hang out with all day,” he told Study Hall, and he encouraged those personalities to permeate the publication. BA’s hires during Rapoport time helming magazine show that this strategy favored predominantly the same white, private-university graduate demographic that Condé Nast is legendary for. Rapoport described his approach to video as an extension of his hiring strategy. “My notion was, if we all enjoy hanging out with each other…then the viewer would enjoy hanging out with us too,” he said.

That was not the approach originally preferred by Condé Nast Entertainment, which, in addition to developing TV and film properties, handles video projects across the company’s dozen-plus titles. CNE was already experimenting with web video in the years before the pivot, often engineered for the tablet editions of the magazines. But as Condé began to chase video ad dollars in earnest in 2014, there was “a palpable sense of frustration” from the magazines, as Joe Pompeo reported at the time for Capital New York. “It all boils down to content control, with frustrated editors facing off against a business operation that’s been assigned with scaling up a lucrative new revenue stream,” he wrote.

Despite the money being thrown at video, CNE’s top-down process resulted in over-produced, characterless clips that nobody wanted to watch. The Bon Appétit YouTube page, for example, published a 2014 video series on making coffee that has precisely zero charm and never got more than 25,000 views per entry.

That started to change in 2016, when screen tests were being shot of all of the staff to see who had a particular knack for being on camera. After seeing Leone’s tape, BA’s then-creative director Alex Grossman had the idea to film and edit together a video on his fermentation experiments in the kitchen. The elements of the show that took Brad Leone from stocking the BA walk-in to YouTube personality are all there in the first episode of “It’s Alive”: the visual gags, the South Jersey pronunciation of “wudder,” the brief moments of existential despair. Leone’s Everyman shtick isn’t quite as practiced — he’s slightly more chaotic, slightly less relatable. CNE let the nearly ten-minute-long clip linger on a hard drive for eight months before the cameraman who shot it convinced someone at Condé to put it online. Thus, the Test Kitchen was born.

The Bon Appétit Test Kitchen cinematic universe has expanded to a baker’s dozen of regulars in the years since, with Claire Saffitz, Molly Baz, Chris Morocco, Andy Baraghani, Carla Lalli Music, Sohla El-Waylly, Priya Krishna, and others joining Leone as the stars of the cooking-centric shows. The magazine’s YouTube channel now has over six million subscribers (it lost about 30,000 of them in the days after Rapoport’s brownface photo circulated), and new episodes regularly break the top ten on the platform’s trending video page. There is a very active fandom that comprises two subreddits, meme accounts, and TikTok parodies.

Bon Appétit captured the zeitgeist in a way similar to the success of prestige television. There are other, larger food channels on YouTube, like BuzzFeed’s Tasty, which has millions more subscribers than Bon Appétit. But like a gritty cable drama, the BA Test Kitchen has a fanbase that is wildly more engaged — if not obsessed — than those who casually view other online cooking videos. Some Tasty videos may get tens of millions of views, but the hosts have not achieved the same degree of popularity. With the Test Kitchen videos, there’s something personal for many fans that goes beyond a relationship with a publication or print byline. Nearly all of the videos follow the same naming rubric, putting viewers on a first-name basis with hosts: Brad makes kombucha; Andy learns to cook Palestinian food; Solha makes lamb-and-scallions dumplings.

The commitment from fans that drove BA’s success quickly turned to criticism of Rapoport when the photo and news about pay disparities broke. A glossy magazine that makes a serious misstep might get dozens of letters to the editor in complaint, but a YouTube fandom raises a whole different level of havoc online when they’re unhappy, and a mass subscriber exodus would threaten the brand’s success. That’s a distinct possibility for Mercedes la Rosa, the BA fan from Montreal. “I’ve sustained the knee-jerk reaction of withholding support of Condé Nast for now,” she said. Learning what’s been going on behind the scenes has been triggering, she said, considering her own experiences working in media as a woman of color.

Some Test Kitchen fans are pushing for change both at Bon Appétit and across Condé Nast. In addition to memes about the personal lives of the channel’s stars, the Bon Appétit subreddits now feature posts linking to a purported Condé salary transparency spreadsheet and fair-pay slogans, including a photo of a BA tote bag repainted to read DON’T WORRY, FAIR PAY. Over on the Bon Appétit YouTube channel, “Fuck you, BA” is becoming a near-constant refrain from commenters.

There was outrage from fans over freelancer pay, too, after Hawa Hassan, who owns the Somali condiment company Basbaas Sauce, said that she was paid just $400 a pop for a recent string of videos she recorded for Bon Appétit (less than Study Hall paid for this story).

In her Instagram post, El-Waylly demanded not only that Rapoport resign, “but also to see BIPOC given fair titles, fair salaries, and compensation for video appearances.” Many fans on the BA subreddit appear to be waiting for a green light from El-Waylly and other BIPOC staff that these demands have been met before coming back to the YouTube channel — as viewers, as subscribers, and as people who are actively engaging with Bon Appétit content. The second-most-upvoted post on one BA subreddit from last week calls for the fanbase to “not cancel BA” as long the magazine addresses pay disparities, and that “Sohla and others are working tirelessly to make BA a better workplace for all… We need to continue to support the new BA so that all of this emotional labor that the team has been through isn’t for naught.” One commenter added: “I don’t want BA to go away, I want them to be better.”

While El-Waylly has now been offered a CNE contract, it’s unclear as of yet whether these issues are being addressed across the board.

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Even before the current upheaval, there was arguably no legacy publication with a more fractured audience than Bon Appétit’s. Longtime Boomer subscribers make up one large constituency, and meme-making millennial and Gen Z Test Kitchen fans form another. Data from Comscore show a stark generational divide between Bon Appétit’s audiences across different platforms, with 64 percent of those who follow BA on social media between the ages of 18 and 34, while just 21 percent of its print readership falling within that age range. While video has been a lifesaver for the magazine, there’s still the need to convert YouTube subscribers to higher-value print subscribers. This is a challenge if the one of the first things your Gen Z audience has heard about the magazine is that it serially underpays staffers of color.

Food media writ large has also changed in ways that BA has not. The publication has lagged behind competitors like Eater and the food sections at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle that are taking social issues far more seriously, including addressing questions about ownership and appropriation of ingredients and techniques in their recipes. When Rapoport took over the magazine a decade ago, former Gourmet editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl said, in discussing Bon Appétit’s potential new direction with The New York Times, “There are so many serious food issues today — sustainability, politics, the environment, health, social justice — and a bigger appetite than ever for information about them.” Rapoport, however, told reporter Julia Moskin at the time that he didn’t consider education “the magazine’s primary role.”

Instead of publishing anything approaching politics (or even grappling internally with the implications of white cooks developing recipes incorporating ingredients like gochujang or describing French Polynesian food as “ho-hum”), Bon Appétit has instead put the focus even more on its personalities, infusing the magazine with the same voice that the editorial staff bring to the videos. Senior food editor Molly Baz uses shortened neologisms on YouTube — “profesh” for “professional,” “broco bolo” for broccoli Bolognese — and copy editors keep these phrases in her writing for the magazine. Senior staff writer Alex Beggs has a weekly newsletter in which she details idiosyncratic highlights from the BA office in a similarly off-the-cuff, charming tone. Rapoport referred to this as making sure “that the brand’s DNA surfaces clearly on each platform.” For Bon Appétit, he told Study Hall, “we are opinionated and voicey, fun and at times funny, and we try to be approachable.”

This strategy — broadcasting the mood of a diverse, idiosyncratic, supportive workplace while ignoring or actively maintaining structures within it that disadvantaged workers of color — worked for a while. Bon Appétit hit a record number of print subscribers last year, and since the coronavirus pandemic has put an increased focus on home cooking, the YouTube channel has hit all-time highs for views. The current group of editors and test kitchen chefs helped make the videos a runaway success, but Rapoport told me in our interview last year that he believed he could replicate the channel’s success with new faces. “We have had success with integrating more people on staff into our videos,” he said, and did not seem concerned that the magic lies with this specific group of people alone. For him, the BA videos owed their success to the magazine’s brand.

Now, with Rapoport gone, it seems that the opposite is true. The YouTube fans who saved Bon Appétit are more loyal to Sohla El-Waylly than the employer who underpaid her. Workers of color at the magazine laid bare a pattern of pay disparities and abuse, and they also showed that individual brands, not the magazine’s, will be more important than ever in the future. They also demonstrated how internet-famous staffers can leverage their brands to secure commitments to pay equity for all of their colleagues, not just those with fanbases.

It’s been two weeks since Teclemariam tweeted the photo of Rapoport, and the fallout is not over. BA veteran Matt Duckor, who was most recently the vice president at CNE in charge of lifestyle video for Condé and a BA veteran, also resigned after a number of racist and homophobic tweets were resurfaced. Teclemariam and others have pushed for BA drinks editor Alex Delany to be fired as well for his own racist posts, including a 2010 image he put on his Tumblr of a Confederate flag cake he decorated. There are rumors that even Anna Wintour, who has been the artistic director for all of Condé since 2014, would leave the company.

Bon Appétit is too valuable for Condé Nast not to try to fix. But whether they put a Band-Aid on the problem by publishing vague press releases and commissioning toothless diversity reports or attempt a deep restructuring will determine the future of the media company. Condé Nast has long been invested in maintaining the cult of the celebrity editor and exploiting the work of underpaid, lower-rung employees. Selling elitism has been its business model. But when those lower-rung employees hold more sway online than the magazine titles do, that model doesn’t work anymore. The Rapoport era is over; for the staff, it’s just the beginning.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story described Christina Chaey as Asian and Priya Krishna as South Asian. These descriptions have been substituted for more specific characterizations of their backgrounds: Christina Chaey is Korean-American and Priya Krishna is Indian-American.

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