Hannah Hart may have a YouTube show-turned-small media empire and brand new cookbook called My Drunk Kitchen, but over the course of a hour-long interview at Tom and Jerry’s bar in Soho, she wasn’t sipping anything. True to the ethos of her show, she may have looked like the biggest lush in the room, with two red-hot cocktails (because cocktail number one got spilled and the bartender made her another) and a ginger beer sitting in front of her. But she didn’t take a sip, and wasn’t particularly interested in the drink. She was too busy talking and joking.
She was stoked about the book, which she described as “self-help parody meets cookbook”: the joy on her face when she heard that My Drunk Kitchen was the #45 seller on Amazon was a sight to behold. Her recommendations for its best recipes were “whatever makes your heart feel light. I think they’re all edible. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re tested, I wouldn’t say they’re FDA approved.” But more than a cookbook, My Drunk Kitchen feels like a guide on How to Be an Adult and Figure Your Stuff Out, with lots of jokes and cute pictures. Food is a bit secondary, but always creative, à la the show it was based on. (There is one recipe you absolutely need to try, though: “Chocolate Chipz,” which is chips covered in melted chocolate. Do make that one.)
I had wanted to talk with the charming and warm 27-year-old Hart, a woman who can peel off quite a few jokes per second and a torrent of “you know what I means” in a single conversation, in a location where she could run into some fans. YouTube stardom is such a new classification of celebrity — it’s quantifiable online, yet it has a very specific sort of intimacy, as it’s a one-to-one experience between the video and the viewer. How does that translate into the outside world? Are you an anonymous regular Joe, or are people recognizing you and asking for selfies? The disarming thing about Hart in person is that her My Drunk Kitchen persona is not an act. She’s adorable, can pull off a snap-back baseball cap, and when she described a recent YouTube convention in Milan, she popped into a funny “Italiano” voice while discussing the awkwardness of an LBGT panel in a Catholic country.
by Elisabeth Donnelly, Flavorwire | Read more:
Image: My Drunk Kitchen
