Thomas Straker is TikTok's king of butter. Don't believe me? Spare half a minute to join the 13 million who've seen his bone marrow butter demo, where he makes churned cream look sexy. Sizzling marrow and soft butter get chopped, salted, whipped, and spread in second-long intervals. It’s a format that Straker, a Gordon Ramsay à la minute, has perfected. Hissing pans and chopping knives (and some chewing from the chef) serve as an ASMR-friendly soundtrack. The result? More than 25 million people have seen Straker’s cooking on social media, many of them leaving comments along the same lines: “I’m addicted to your account. I want this so bad, and I’m vegetarian.”
On TikTok – where #FoodTok alone has over 31 billion views – it can be hard for chefs to stand out. But Straker is a professionally trained chef with an eye for the viral. Before building up big followings on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, he hustled in London kitchens for over a decade, sharpening his skills at The Dorchester and Casa Cruz. When the pandemic shuttered restaurants, he moved to America to work as a private chef. “It didn’t take me all day to cook for a family of five. I just started making videos, and at the beginning, they were really long. I was editing them myself and all the aspect ratios were off,” he says. But as a chef who has trained fellow chefs, Straker has a keen sense of what works, and the importance of brevity. “I was able to get my points across in a relatively short space of time,” he says.
Straker now has a production studio in Park Royal, London, where he makes content with a dedicated team. His latest videos are whip-fast, running through entire dishes in 18 seconds, and he nails the unselfconscious selfie style favoured by TikTok. (The clipped English accent doesn’t hurt either.)
“He’s confident,” says Ollie Templeton, executive chef and cofounder of Carousel, the cool London restaurant-slash-creative hub. “He’s got the British charm. Confidence, potentially cockiness, but it’s all kind of cheeky and it works.” Templeton and Straker have worked together for years on different projects, including Rumble at the Deli, a “fight club meets Little Italy” showdown in Notting Hill. Chefs would go head to head, with guests voting blindly on a winner. During lockdown, Straker did a pop-up click-and-collect meal at Carousel, selling “600 tickets in 10 minutes,” Templeton says.
When we talk, Straker has just finished his 50th butter TikTok and claims to be done. His focus right now is off-screen: he’s getting ready to open his first restaurant, Straker’s.
Straker wants his eponymous eatery to bring “East London wine bar vibes” to the intimate spot in Notting Hill. “It’s an open kitchen, and we’re going to have great music,” he says. “It’s where you want to sit, eat, talk, drink, have fun, go home. It’s not fancy at all.” He’s thinking wood-roasted oysters with seaweed butter and fermented chilli, girolle tagliolini with lemon and parmesan, and blood sausages grilled over a fire. The staff will wear monochrome aprons designed by Straker’s friend Richard Oxley and embroidered workwear jackets from Oliver Spencer.
It’s not an easy moment to be opening up shop, with staffing struggles and rising energy costs plaguing the restaurant industry. “We haven’t struggled with staff,” Straker tells me. “Not blowing my own trumpet, but it’s really helped that I have a profile online, to pull in chefs.” He hopes charcoal and wood grilling will help the business conserve energy, using heat left over after service to slow-cook overnight.
Templeton has seen Straker’s vision for the restaurant evolve as his online presence has grown. “He’s put the miles in,” Templeton says. “That’s something I could never do. There’s a whole load of cooking influencers, mainly in the vegan territory, and there are a lot of people in the health and exercise game who are also in food. But it’s quite rare to have personalities who are just food-focused and don’t own a restaurant, and still have a big online profile.”
The famously heated atmosphere in restaurant kitchens has been the subject of scrutiny recently, with prestige films and TV like The Bear, Boiling Point, and The Menu painting a toxic portrait of restaurant life. Straker, however, thinks the genre is overdramatised. “When I was working, there was still a bit of that shouting: ‘How did you fucking burn the beetroot? You’re useless, go home and cry to your mum.’ But not now. It’s different. Chefs want to work 45-hour weeks. When I was starting, it was three, four doubles a week. Now, chefs are working one double a week. But I don’t think it’s enough if you want to learn, to get good.”
I ask him what his worst kitchen horror story is. “I’m not sure you’d be allowed to publish it for legal reasons,” he says with a laugh.
Straker’s viral stardom has given him confidence that his new spot will be busy (“I can almost guarantee it”), but he’s keen that the restaurant isn’t just TikTok fodder. “Everyone’s like, ‘Have a butter menu!’ and I’m like, ‘We’re not having an effing butter menu.’ I think it’s too easy to pigeonhole people these days with one viral thing. I don’t want to get known as the butter man all the time.” He’s eager to move away from social media, to focus on what it has always been about: the food. “It does take away from the enjoyment of cooking sometimes. If I want to make one dish, what would normally take me 10 minutes takes me half an hour. I am looking forward to just getting in the kitchen and not thinking about cameras.”