When Gio Luciano, a line cook at La Cantine, began posting videos about his dinner, he didn’t expect them to reach beyond Bushwick. He didn’t expect Addison Rae, one of the world’s most popular influencers, to notice. And he really didn’t expect to ignite a debate about Bushwick culture, “The Bear” and the blurred line between authenticity and performative masculinity.
But that’s what happened after he shared a 42-second clip of his meal: an iced Americano, a little gem salad with radicchio and hazelnuts, followed by two cigarettes for dessert.
“It’s Sunday night and here’s what I eat before service as a line cook in Bushwick,” Luciano said at the start with a cheeky grin.
Luciano, 24, epitomizes a certain idea of a Bushwick transplant: eyebrow piercing, backwards hat, silver chain, patchwork tattoos and clear glasses taped together with duct tape.
Within a few days of posting his “line cook food haul,” the series brought in millions of views and sparked a slew of other TikTok videos where users debate whether Luciano genuinely acts like this or if it’s all just a bit.
While some people are comparing him to Anthony Bourdain, the chef-turned-author-turned-CNN-host, or lauding him for simply shining a light on the life of a line cook, others say he’s a “cosplaying” fraud. As gentrification sweeps through Bushwick, some New York locals have begun to call out newcomers who dress poor on purpose.
“Performative everything,” one commenter wrote, racking up 34,000 likes.
“When you watch one episode of ‘The Bear,’” joked another, referencing the popular, fictional FX show about the life of a young, award-winning chef who manages a frenzied kitchen.
“Anyone who thinks he’s performing just has clearly never worked in the industry before,” said Nyanyika Banda, an award-winning chef who worked in the 2010s under restaurateur Danny Bowien at Mission Chinese Food and at Michelin-starred wd-50. “That kid is one in a million in terms of the line cook aesthetic.”
Luciano said he finds humor in being a “meme on the internet,” but he also said that some of the judgment is unfair. As both a trans man and a young person, he’s aware of how often people scrutinize and judge others who are different from them in order to align them with their own world view.
Luciano has indeed worked in restaurants for the last five years. Yes, he rolls his own cigarettes. Yes, he drinks out of quart containers — “I’ve been doing that since I was 19, you know” — and yes, his glasses are really broken and he really is that scrappy.
He knows he’s tapping into stereotypes of young men in trendy parts of Brooklyn: the nail-painting, Clairo-listening, feminist-literature-reading, heartbreak-inducing boys.
“Like, I know that guy,” he said, laughing. “I’ve worked with that guy. I somewhat represent that guy now, I guess, according to people on the internet.”
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But while he pokes fun at the online discourse, he also feels that trans people — and maybe even men in Bushwick — are often unfairly scrutinized simply for expressing the identity that feels true to them.
“I do think people that are maybe transphobic do hop on the train of calling me performative,” Luciano said. “Being trans, you’re outside looking in. I’m very aware of the male performance. And I’m not trying to do that. I’m just laughing.”
One of the more popular video parodies of Luciano is from Andrew Buzby, 22, who’s moving to Brooklyn next month. His clip follows a similar construction of talking through a meal with elaborate ingredients (“a bushel of wild berries I found scavenging in Central Park”) and got over 700,000 views.
He said Luciano’s videos resonate because they’ve tapped into larger conversations about masculinity and how it’s changing.
Drag queen Viviana Rodriguez, 21, has been following Luciano since his “King Princess days,” nodding to the early era of his TikTok presence, when he made queer-related content.
She thinks that Luciano is doing what’s true to him, but accentuating it a bit on social media. He knows that he’s “good-looking,” she said, and that his act is a little “absurd.”
“Everything we do is a performance on social media,” Rodriguez said. “I’m a performer in real life, and I’m a performer on social media.”
Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at NYU, said that Luciano, like Bourdain, is tapping into people’s desire for behind-the-scenes moments in the restaurant industry. And in a world with social media, everyone online is performing to some extent.
“In a sense we have all become performance artists all the time,” he said. “The wall between everyday life and theater has collapsed.”
Luciano says he’ll just continue being himself — making his favorite dish (pasta from scratch; he finds emulsifying sauces to be very satisfying), rolling his cigarettes and filming vlogs for anyone who’s interested.
“I’m just kind of rolling with everything,” he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
