The most important cooking tip Hannah Hart wants her viewers to remember is this: “Always use a butter knife for everything.” Which may explain why she has so far focused on such culinary masterpieces as grilled cheese sandwiches (“I don’t actually have any cheese”), macaroni and cheese (“Do not drain over the stove”) and omelets (“ . . . until you’re cooking and you’re like ‘Wow **ckin’ omelets are hard, let’s make it scrambled.”) Hannah’s budding new YouTube sensation “My Drunk Kitchen” tackles these and other mental and physical challenges of cooking while drinking, and drinking while cooking.
The opportunity to interview Hannah came to me in a weird way, when Nina Rochland (see My Psycho Fan for the inside scoop) informed me that she had interviewed Ms. Hart and suggested that I do the same. I’d read about My Drunk Kitchen right here on Foodista, and found her YouTube clips to be hilarious, if not a bit disconcerting (reading the comments viewers submit shows that she has received more marriage proposals than Elizabeth Taylor, suggesting that a girl’s best asset may be her ability to get smashed in public while operating a webcam).
So when my computer starting ringing at the appointed hour and a video of the one and only Hannah Hart popped on my screen and started talking to me, I felt just a touch schizophrenic, like having Simon Cowell suddenly turn to the camera and start insulting me, or Martha Stewart look up from her perfectly-executed fondant-draped Royal Wedding party cupcakes and say, “Hi Janice!” I mean, a Skype conversation is weird enough as it is for us people over forty who are still spinning around trying to untangle the phone cord, much less a Skype conversation with a YouTube cooking hostess who habitually approaches the camera, appears confused and speaks in sentences she can't remember to finish.
So there she was, dressed in red and ruffles, looking relaxed in a room full of books, quaffing from a giant jar of something clear that could have been water, vodka or rubbing alcohol. And that’s when I learned my first lesson in My Sober Interview – always check to see if your recording equipment is working. Hannah Hart may be able to master video recording and rapid-fire editing while drunken or pretending to be so, but Janice Harper remains technically challenged and apparently can’t master recording a Skype interview while under the influence of Yerba Mate.
So you’ll just have to trust me on the witty banter and her one-liner zingers, but listen up, here’s the real scoop: she’s not only clever, she’s smart. Hannah has degrees from UC Berkeley in English Literature and Japanese Language Studies, speaks in whole sentences when interviewed, and uses polysyllabic words with ease. She’s fluent in Japanese (“I’m thinking of doing a show entirely in Japanese with English subtitles,” she confessed, to which I suggested she play the part of a drunken sushi chef – with butter knife – prepping a poisonous puffer fish with Samurai theatrics). And she works for a living. Really. She proofreads Japanese translations to be sure they have been translated accurately. And her boss loves her videos. But her parents?
“Hmmm . . .” she ponders, letting the comment linger. Asked if her parents are aware of the videos, she just chuckles. We leave it at that.
Does she actually cook? “I live in New York, on a young single transplant’s budget,” she says or something like that, given that the tape I was counting on catching all the clever words betrayed me like your typical technology always does in the end. In a subsequent email exchange, she explained, “I don’t ‘cook’ so much as ‘feed myself.’ Cooking for a crowd gives me anxiety, and eating out just isn’t in my budget.”
“Are you really that sloshed?” I ask, as if she’s never heard the question before. She shifts nervously, quaffs the jar of water/ethanol/magic potion and answers, “I’ll leave that for you to decide.” But she does note that she is always surprised when she wakes up in the morning and finds a mess in the kitchen with something like burned onions on the bottom of a frying pan and no memory of how it got there. “But I do always remember to soak the dishes before going to bed,” she adds responsibly.
I tell her about how much her show reminded me of my all time favorite cooking show, The Galloping Gourmet, back in the waning mid-century years when Graham Kerr entertained viewers with his apparent drunken acrobatics in the kitchen. But turns out he was sober all along, the drinking scenes edited in just to keep us on the edge of our seats – just how far would he go? And my bet is Hannah has a heavy dose of the theatrics in her own drunken display, the Bacchanal celebration as much a put on as a party with herself.
And just like the Galloping Gourmet (who, by the way, used real knives) Hannah’s videos are heavily edited, although her shows are entirely self produced with her webcam and edited with iVideo – which she says explains why all the labels in her videos are backwards. “I have a lot to learn.”
The whole concept came about a couple of months ago when she was chatting with a friend via webcam and starting camping it up while cooking something. The friend suggested she make a show out of it, she did, posted in on YouTube and next thing she knew, the marriage proposals started coming in, leading to her idea of a reality show called “My Drunk Marriage.” “Which is just called ‘Marriage,’” she observed.
Although she isn’t betting the bottle on her rising media empire to sustain her, taking the view that as long as she has a fan base she’ll go with it, have fun and see where it takes her – while continuing with her professional interests in “the real world” of work and career – she has already spun off a new YouTube show, “Advice From the Hart.”
“How often should a person pretend to be someone else?” A fan asks. She ponders the question over a big glass of red wine (with screw top dramatically popped off). “Umm . .. I don’t know. When in bars?”
Whether Hannah Hart is playing Hannah Hart or pretending to be someone else, we’ll leave that for you to decide. But whatever it is she is doing and however long it lasts, it’s camp kitchen comedy at its best.
Our interview ended, I shut off the two-timing tape recorder (thinking foolishly that I’d been the one in control of my own technology all that time) and bid her farewell. She popped into her kitchen, still dressed in red, turned on the webcam and started to bake . . . “Baking is so weird” she screams into the YouTube clip she posts later that day of her coming attractions . . . “We’re moving up, guys!” Can Hannah actually handle baking and the bottle at one and the same time? Will she turn to desperate measures? Tune in and judge for yourself at My Drunk Kitchen. Coming soon, to a stovetop near you.
(Meanwhile, I'm heading into the kitchen for My Sober Crock Pot, wherein I stare at the darn fool thing for ten minutes then ask, "Is it on yet?" . . .)
