Food baby new york
The Food Babies of Instagram
Mike Chau and kidsIllustration by João Fazenda
Mike and Alexandra Chau got married in 2012, when they were twenty-eight years old. Mike works in tech, Alex in finance. As they thought about expanding their family, they moved from Manhattan to Mike’s childhood neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens. An enthusiastic eater, Mike considered himself “one of those people who posted too many pictures of food” on Instagram. One night in 2013, he took a picture of a newborn baby, red and scowling, alongside an open takeout container of chicken and brown rice: the Chaus’ son, Matty, was sixty-seven hours old.
A meatball shot followed. Then red velvet cake. Then, as the days passed, sushi and pad Thai. Matty was not yet consuming solid food, but his newborn expressions—lolling tongue, grimace—seemed to convey a gastronomic opinion. When paired with a cider doughnut, he rolled his eyes, as if in disdain. His father discovered that a bitten cookie resembled a bib when held beneath his son’s chin. The food was a fun accessory to the baby—or was it the other way around? “I thought, Oh, this is interesting,” Mike said.
The star power of the Instagram feed that became @foodbabyny doubled in 2015, when the Chaus’ daughter, Sammy, was born. She made her social-media début with a box of pastries from the Doughnut Project. Mike liked visiting buzzy new restaurants on opening day, and, as the children grew, so did @foodbabyny’s repertoire. The kids posed with pizza, tofu, kimchi, kale, bagels, burgers, spring rolls, shakshuka, crêpes, noodles, ramen, falafel, waffles, bao, and pie. They were caught sleeping, laughing, thumbs-upping, pouting, and squalling, often while wearing entertaining outfits—a trucker cap that said “RIBS,” a T-shirt that said “NEW YORK OR NOWHERE.”
Mike name-checked businesses with a friendly hashtag (#foodbabylovesottostacos), which endeared him to restaurateurs. Foodies began asking him where to eat. He disliked the term “influencer,” but that’s what he became.
Inevitably, there was backlash: after Sammy was shown shredding an enormous leg of turkey at Disneyland, a commenter complained, “You’re literally giving SHIT to your kid.” Mike later said, “Just because the kids are next to the food doesn’t mean they’re eating all of it.”
By the time the Hester Street Fair asked Mike to curate the inaugural FoodBabyNY Food Fest, this past October, more than three hundred thousand Instagrammers were following the Chaus. On a cold, blustery day, hundreds of them showed up on the Lower East Side, to sample the food of some two dozen venders in white tents. Mike stood by a Chau-family tent, receiving visitors. The “baby” portion of @foodbabyny was temporarily unavailable: Alex had taken Matty, now five, to warm up in the car, and Sammy, three, had taken refuge behind a vender’s table, where she was snuggling in her grandfather’s lap.
Looking around at the offerings—Supermoon Bakehouse, Destination Dumplings, Mama’s Too!—Mike noted that he’d chosen restaurants that deserved “more exposure.
” He was holding yuca fries from Millie’s Cuban Café, but so many people were trying to talk to him that he didn’t have time to eat. Do all your posts involve your kids? (Most do, yes!) Where’s a good place around here for brunch? (Kiki’s!) Can we get a picture? (Absolutely!) After getting her selfie, Janice Wang, a young foodie from the Upper East Side, said, “I’m a bit of a food snob, and I want to know what’s out there.” Diana Nguyen and Cham Keat, who run the Instagram account @hypefoodies, had driven from Washington, D.C. Nguyen was holding an Ice & Vice cone piled with scoops of Pickled Cherry and FoodBaby, a special flavor (Concord-grape ice cream, raspberry coulis, doughnut soil, rainbow sprinkles). Of the Chaus, Nguyen said, “We really love watching them live their life with food.”
Kevin Hernandez, a guidance counsellor, introduced Mike to his wife, Ilana, who was pregnant. “We’re obsessed with you guys,” Hernandez told him. “We love that your kids eat whatever you give them.
”
“Did you see the video of us giving them grasshoppers?” Mike said.
“It was amazing,” Hernandez said. “They were eating them like they were chips.”
After a teen-age boy asked Mike for advice on breaking out of an Instagram rut—“I feel like everything is starting to look the same”—Sammy wandered out, wearing a leopard-print jacket and sparkly pink sneakers. The crowd swarmed, cell phones aloft. A woman said to her husband, “Oh, there’s the little girl!”
Will @foodbabyny lose its appeal as the children grow up? The question is irrelevant, for now. A couple of weeks after the festival, Alex gave birth to a daughter, Nicky—Chau baby No. 3. Within weeks, Nicky was rolling her eyes on Instagram, backdropping a Gooey Everything Bar from the Good Batch. ♦
Meet the First Customers at Every New York Restaurant Opening
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— The first in a series about extreme diners and standout regulars in NYC.
By Rachel Tepper Paley
“Try the black sesame kouign amann,” Mike Chau counsels, gesturing to a sugar-flecked display of golden French pastries. He offers the spelling for good measure. “That’s K-O-U-I-G-N, A-M-A-N-N.”
I’m sitting across from Chau — better known in online circles under the Instagram handle @foodbabyny— at a two-top in the back of Patisserie Chanson, a sleek on-trend dessert bar in Flatiron. Today is opening day; how does Chau already know what to order? Apparently our 3 p.m. meeting time wasn’t early enough. Just the slightest bit sheepishly, Chau informs me that he’d made a morning pitstop hours earlier. “It’s part of why people follow us,” he says. “They know we’re the people who go everywhere first.”
Mike Chau, aka @foodbabynyThe “us” in this equation is Chau and sometimes his wife Alex, but most always one of their two children, Matthew and Samantha, who at ages 3.5 and 16 months respectively put the “baby” in @foodbabyny.
Back in 2014, Chau began uploading pictures of his children alongside buzzy New York City food fads — anything from towering cylinders of violet ube soft serve to greasy pork belly ramen burgers—and early press attention quickly translated to follows. “One-hundred-and-fifty-one thousand,” Chau answers quickly when I ask the precise figure. Just two days later, that number ticks up to 152K.
Of course, @Foodbabyny’s appeal doesn’t require much analysis. Chau often positions his children — two imp-like creatures who yawn and smile and happily perform for the camera — such that a sugared apricot-and-almond croissant seemingly sprouts from his daughter’s head and syrup-draped pancakes levitate before his son’s incredulous eyes. Chau, who in person is genial and likable almost to a fault, chafes at the notion that his children are some sort of gimmick.
Warning: Sammy will steal your waffle chip and go for your cone if you get the amazing Ube at @softswervenyc # # #foodbabylovessoftswerve
A post shared by Food Baby (@foodbabyny) on
When they were born, “I became one of those people always taking pictures of my baby,” Chau says.
“I didn’t want to be doubly obnoxious, so I combined them.”
For the record, Chau and his wife are not “horrible monsters, feeding our children giant hamburgers” at every turn. The family tries to eat healthy during the week in preparation for weekend indulgence, and the kids, as it turns out, aren’t all that into sugar anyway. “Since it’s always around, they don’t go crazy for it,” Chau says. “They’ll have a giant ice cream in their face, but they’ll just walk away.”
Chau is somewhat unique amongst the flash-happy members of New York City’s Instagram set, who, iPhones in hand, hop from one rainbow bagel to the next. For one, “it’s a lot of young girls,” he says. And unlike many others in Instagram’s top tier —those who command six-figure followings — Chau maintains a full-time job, working as a computer programmer for a major bank. (He prefers not to say where.) Chau doesn’t accept money for endorsements, and he’s largely stopped making rounds on the Instagram circuit, a steady stream of restaurants, dessert shops, and bakeries that dole out freebies in efforts to drum up publicity.
“It’s hard here, because all the PR companies reach out to all the Instagrammers,” Chau tells me. “They all go to the same dinners. But is that restaurant really good, or did they all go there must because it’s free?” Not long after, a waiter swoops in with an offering: a narrow plate piled with macarons, pistachio-riddled caramels, and glossy hard-shelled chocolates piped with silky ganache. We’re not charged. Some freebies, it seems, are just part of the game.
So is obsessiveness. Chau segued into Instagram after being seduced by Yelp, which he joined in 2012. Chau quickly attained “Elite” Yelper status, a coveted standing that earns members access to private restaurant events and plenty edible handouts. Whole corners of the Internet are devoted to coaching hopefuls on how to secure the “Elite” designation; there is no one correct formula, but common wisdom is that if nominated, users with frequent and quality posts win the approval of the so-called “Elite Council.” To date, Chau has written 1,346 reviews on the platform, the most recent on March 23.
That translates to roughly 10 reviews a week.
“I always joke — but it’s not really a joke — that I have OCD,” says Chau. “When I get into something, I get really into something.”
“When Chau’s interest turned to food — enough time had passed since his overweight days — exploring New York City’s culinary scene in moderation wasn’t really up for discussion.”
As a child, Chau was “always overweight, obese,” weighing more at age 12 than he does now at 33. When the Atkins diet fad came to prominence, he glommed onto it, enjoying the rigor and structure of the program’s high-protein demands. He dropped 70 pounds in a single summer.
After that, Chau was fastidious in his diet, afraid that the weight might come back. He turned his focus toward less caloric obsessions. In college, it was hip-hop; Chau developed an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre by ordering scores of CDs off proto e-commerce website hiphopsite.com and snagging concert tickets at every opportunity.
Years later, it was movies, with Chau and his wife hitting up local theaters four to five times a week with the goal of seeing as many major film releases as possible. When Chau’s interest turned to food — enough time had passed since his overweight days — exploring New York City’s culinary scene in moderation wasn’t really up for discussion.
On a busy week, Chau might hit up a new restaurant or shop every day. He gets his intel from sites like Eater and Grub Street, as well as other Instagram accounts, and regards his own postings as dispatches from the front line. He knows people are watching. “I’ve had some businesses tell me how helpful [being featured on @foodbabyny] is,” Chau says. “It can make a difference, just putting things on people’s radar,” especially for smaller outfits that can’t afford a PR push.
But there’s also a distinct competitiveness to it all, something that clearly appeals to Chau. Hours after our meeting, I refresh Chau’s Yelp page. His review of Patisserie Chanson is up; It’s the bakery’s first write-up on the platform.
I can’t help but recall Chau’s words from earlier, when he’d described the ideal reaction he labors to elicit from followers.
“‘Damn, that baby beat us there.’”
Rachel Tepper Paley is a writer, editor, and sometimes illustrator based in New York City.
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" What is worth a thousand pictures? Even these:
Video of course. And so, guys from Austria came to us in NY for ten days, and made a video about his life. In just three minutes, they convey the whole drive of this crazy city much better than all my posts combined! Be sure to watch in full screen.
Those who have been reading my posts for a long time will surely notice a bunch of familiar places here, even if you have never been to New York.
And for the most connoisseurs, I propose to guess when this video was filmed (month and year), according to one content, without having to go and look for this information. Well, explain why you think so.
Thanks to sdze for the tip on this video - Yasha posted it in his LiveJournal profile, but I think this video deserves wider replication.
Are you going to New York and want to see for yourself many of the places featured in this video at a more humane pace? Here's my great "Meet New York" itinerary, which will show you less beaten (but no less beautiful) parts of the city than Times Square and Central Park.
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Photo: shutterstockNew York City is a vibrant, dynamic, and in some places completely crazy metropolis, full of contradictions and dissimilar facets. He has dozens of names and hundreds of guises. We will try to show you some of them today. Catch a selection of the best atmospheric shots of the Big Apple!
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