“Nothing in the show has ever been faked”: How a former Swiss Chalet fry cook became YouTube’s endearingly frazzled Anti-Chef

More than a half a million subscribers tune in to watch Jamie Tracey—the self-proclaimed Anti-Chef—emotionally disintegrate while attempting to cook elaborate recipes that are wildly beyond his skill level.

Tracey started his YouTube channel in 2017, shortly before leaving Toronto. Now, after nearly a decade abroad—bouncing between Belgium, London and New York—he’s finally back home. We caught up with the content creator to talk about algorithmic suffering, getting rejected from Sundance, where he’s eating now that he’s back in Toronto and the unlikely pipeline from Swiss Chalet fry cook to one of YouTube’s most endearingly frazzled chefs.

Back when you started your channel, you didn’t know what you were doing in the kitchen. Had you been avoiding learning how to cook? I think it was more that I was oblivious to cooking. My mom did cook—mostly ’90s-era Canadian Living recipes: pork chops with cream of mushroom soup poured over them, burger spaghetti, that kind of thing. But my brother and I just wanted macaroni and cheese, so whenever she experimented, we gave her negative reviews. I did have some cooking experience, though. I worked at Swiss Chalet in high school. I started as a dishwasher and worked my way up to fry cook, and by the end I was opening the restaurant and loading the rotisserie chickens. But I didn’t really become interested in food until my mid-20s, when I met my wife, Kristy. She’s super passionate about food, and that completely changed my world. Before that, I wasn’t really venturing beyond the Danforth, where I lived, or Loblaws.

So how did a guy working at Swiss Chalet become the Anti-Chef? I went to Toronto Film School because I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was making little videos on a Handycam when I was 16 or 17—I thought I was going to be the next big director. After film school, I worked in the Toronto film industry while making my own stuff on the side. At one point, I spent way more money than I had making a feature-length movie about Bigfoot with my friends in the forests around Milton and Guelph. My dream was to make it to Sundance. I wanted it to be the next Blair Witch Project. Instead, every festival rejected it. So I quietly uploaded the movie to YouTube around 2011. At first, nobody watched it. Then suddenly it had a couple thousand views. By the end of the year, it had around a million. That was the spark: I realized that YouTube could be a way to keep making things without waiting for permission.

What brought about the shift from homemade Bigfoot movies to humiliating yourself in the kitchen? Kristy would always say, “It’s really funny when you cook.” So I started filming myself trying to make recipes in this tiny galley kitchen that had no business being on camera. The first 15 or 20 videos were basically me trying to impress Kristy with Yotam Ottolenghi and Ina Garten recipes while completely drowning on camera.

Was chaos always the point? Or did the “watch Jamie emotionally unravel over a sauce” aspect happen accidentally? Totally accidentally. Nothing in the show has ever been faked. If I’m having an existential crisis because a cake collapsed or a sauce split, that’s genuinely happening in real time. Most online food content is so polished and curated and perfect—Anti-Chef is basically the opposite of that.

What makes a good Anti-Chef episode? There’s definitely a secret sauce to it. The biggest thing is authenticity. My audience can tell immediately whether I’m genuinely excited about something. The recipe also has to hit this sweet spot where people either want to make the dish themselves or want to watch me struggle through it—ideally, both.

Have there been videos you thought would crush that completely flopped? Absolutely. I found this insane microwave cookbook from the ’80s at Value Village and thought it was the funniest, most original idea ever. I was cooking fish and beef entirely in the microwave and fully committing to it. I thought people would love it, but no. Dead on arrival. Meanwhile, the videos I’m hesitant to upload are usually the ones that perform the best.

Between 2018 and 2025, you moved to Belgium, then London, then New York, all while building the channel. Did that instability help Anti-Chef happen? Honestly, yeah. Kristy got a job in Belgium in 2018, so I quit my Toronto film job and moved with her. I spent months waiting for work permits, which meant I suddenly had all this time to travel around Europe and make videos. Then we moved to London during the pandemic. Same thing—I was waiting on visas while stuck indoors during lockdown, so I just kept making Anti-Chef videos. A lot of things had to go right for this channel to work. Every move sort of accidentally extended the runway.

Which was the first video to take off? During the pandemic, I was juggling two series simultaneously. One was Jamie and Julia, where I was cooking my way through Julia Child recipes. The other was this side project where I was cooking dishes from every country in the world in alphabetical order. The Algeria episode from that series unexpectedly took off—the Algerian embassy even reached out to me. But the real turning point was “Julia Child’s Orange Cake Drove Me to the Brink of Madness.” Every single thing in that recipe went wrong. I almost didn’t upload it because I thought, This isn’t even a cooking video anymore; it’s just me suffering. It became the most honest thing I’d made, and people really connected with it.

Your success proves that schadenfreude is alive and well. It sure does.

At what point did the channel stop being a hobby and start becoming financially viable? It was a few months after the orange cake video, when I released my Julia Child cassoulet episode. That was the moment where the channel went from hobby to career. Once things started moving in 2022, it happened surprisingly quickly—suddenly this thing I’d been doing for fun became my full-time job.

When you left Toronto eight years ago, you said you barely thought about food. Now that you’ve come back as someone obsessed with it, where have you been eating? We’ve been going to Bodega Henriette a bunch. Maha’s, obviously. I recently went to Prime Seafood Palace, which was a very cool experience. There’s also this British-style pub in the Beaches, where we live, called the Feathers, which feels exactly like being back in the UK.

Which restaurants are currently on your to-do list? Ricky and Olivia and Oldeseoul Tavern. We have a newborn, so we’ve been mostly eating at restaurants in the east end. With all the traffic, you need a pretty good reason to get on the Gardiner these days.

There must be a point where you stop being the Anti-Chef and just become a competent cook. Have you hit that point yet? I’ve definitely improved a lot. Cakes used to completely destroy me, and now I can actually make them. But cooking has this amazing way of humbling you again and again. Especially with French cooking—one tiny mistake can ruin everything. You fix one weakness and another appears. I still feel very comfortable calling myself the Anti-Chef.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.