It’s Monday and Albert Cho is coming in hot from a big weekend, having dined on pork-fat pretzels and duck schnitzel with salmon roe at Parnell restaurant Alpha.
A few days earlier, he ate a Mars bar inside a lasagne Toppa. For the 81,000 followers on his Instagram handle @EatLitFood, it's exactly this kind of hedonistic appreciation of both high- and lowbrow cuisine that has made him famous, just as his pathologically honest, regularly spicy, often hilarious reviews of dining establishments around the city have made him infamous.
His writing is equal parts culinary appreciation and louche, potty-mouthed opinion. In a sea of carefully curated, preening Instagram posts, his authenticity is refreshing to say the least.
We've met at Annabel's on Ponsonby Rd, a small, dimly lit wine bar not far from his full-time copywriting job, and the only thing being consumed is an americano. He has now expanded from Instagram star to author, having penned a memoir called I Love My Stupid Life.
There are recipes, many of which come from friends, whose kitchen hacks like putting soy sauce in spag bol he’s lovingly included, tales of slurping pumpkin porridge in Korea and inadvertently eating whale in Japan, and memories of his candy-infused tweenhood when he was bullied for being pudgy.
There’s the story of his rising social currency and how that dovetailed with his dwindling size and pursuit of an international modelling career, of starting Eat Lit Food while at university, and the food writing job at a magazine that came out of it.
It could’ve just been a book about food, “but my life wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows”, he says. He also writes of the sexual abuse inflicted by a foster brother, his dark travails into drug addiction, of coming out to his parents, and perhaps the most perplexing for someone in his vocation, the eating disorder that has shadowed it all.
He can’t bring himself to read the book end-to-end just yet but his father has, and he “hates” it, Albert says sadly, particularly the candid revelations around his son’s drug use and sex life.
“I expected it. My parents are pretty traditional Catholics,” says Albert who, IRL, exudes a more chilled vibe than his droll online persona, his delicate features enhanced by hazel contact lenses."
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Advertise with NZME.“After years of writing for other people, I kept having to remind myself, this book isn’t for my dad, so why do I have to take that into consideration? So I just wrote it for myself.”
As a young male dealing with sexual abuse and an eating disorder, it was rare, he says, and still is, to hear men talking about such things. And although he finds it an uncomfortable thought becoming a spokesperson for either, it has only recently occurred to him that he is more inclined to share facets of his life than others are.
Some of his pro-skinny posts on Instagram can be disturbingly glib but the way he sees it, he’s normalising what people are already thinking. Eating disorders are commonly about exerting control, he adds, but that’s not why he’s suffered from them.
He agrees there are a multitude of triggers in his book, but worrying about how it’ll be read only stifles your writing, “and if you get triggered by a book, you really need help”.
Six iterations of the book ensued (not all that unusual, according to the publisher), and some of the more sordid tales were toned down.
However, there is an account of a lonesome all-nighter in his family home, high on leftover festival molly [MDMA], “the most miserable thing I’ve ever done. Waking up and other people are doing normal things and you are out of your mind and by yourself. I hope people read that stuff and take away from it that there was no glamour at all. It was the most antisocial I’ve ever been.”
The armchair critics he suspects can’t wait to rip the book to shreds will no doubt question why such behaviour needs to be recorded in the same format as a chocolate cake recipe or if he’s even old enough, at 25, to pen a memoir. He quips that between the ages of 24 and 25 he’s matured a lot, “but only a tiny bit”.
“If I’d kept all of [the original text] in, I would’ve probably rolled around in my grave in 10 years’ time. When I started writing it I was such an angry person about everything that’s gone on in my past. It was very much an exposé.”
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Advertise with NZME.Therapy has helped him find some distance from his demons, leaving him free to skewer even the dark moments. Yet unlike the book, in which the publisher played gate-keeper, there’s no such handbrake on Eat Lit Food, and Albert has learnt the hard way that when you’re publishing on social media, the tide of public support can turn quickly.
As his fanbase has steadily grown, his feed filled with mostly positive posts that have shone a light on some of the hospitality industry’s unsung heroes, a few controversies have threatened to “cancel” him (do a Google search for his name alongside Goodness Gracious or Pasture for evidence).
It’s not uncommon to hear people complain that Albert’s salty reviews could crush a business. If that were true, he argues, “that business was already on its way out. I agree that I can definitely harm the business temporarily. But when it comes to ruining a business, I’m pretty sure not even, like, Gordon Ramsay could do that. People in Auckland just like to throw their arms up about everything.”
When the Goodness Gracious scandal happened (short version: Albert criticised a bagelry, they shot a cheeky response back and all hell broke loose after the tete-a-tete was reported in the press), Albert found himself caught in a storm of online vitriol, much of it blatantly racist.
“The first time I got that I was quite shocked,” says Albert. “There was so much stuff about my parents, my race, I was like, how is this relevant in any way to talking about food?”
It’s mentioned in the book; and he manages to find the funny side, pointing out the fact that if someone is disparaging about his ethnicity, “I can’t sit my parents down and tell them to rebirth me.”
As for his other detractors, people often have a fixed idea of who’s “allowed” to critique restaurants (a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, say), and who’s not (a young, paying influencer who jokes in his book he doesn’t know the difference between parsley and coriander).
“A hundred per cent,” Albert agrees. “But I never said I was a food critic. Everyone did that to me, so it wasn’t my fault. I literally just rode the wave and I’ve got to where I am now. It’s something that started off as a funny thing in uni. Well, not funny. It started because I had to recover from my disorder.”
As his understanding of food has grown, the pleasure of good food eventually superseded his desire to be uber-thin. But he acknowledges that eating disorders can be slippery devils, forever lurking. He says he’s indebted to his friends who keep him in line.
One is his old Takapuna Grammar buddy Ella Yelich-O'Connor, aka Lorde. She sent him a "gnarly, wake-up call text" from the other side of the world when he made a passing comment about not eating prior to a photo shoot, just as she plays an almost Yoda-like figure, preternaturally wise, throughout I Love My Stupid Life.
Albert has also become chummy with Viva's dining out editor Jesse Mulligan, no stranger himself to getting heat online for his food reviews. This year they're working together to select the top 50 restaurants in Auckland for a second time (stay tuned for the special issue, out soon), a job Albert says has given him more credibility.
“He is sweary and he is dirty,” Jesse wrote about Albert last year, “but the more I read his writing, the more I realise that he knows as much about food and restaurants as anyone else in the city.”
Their inaugural list, with Michael Meredith's Mr Morris at number one, was mostly met with positivity, although a minority still complained at the sight of two men on the cover (despite there being a female on it most weeks).
“It was really confusing,” says Albert. “People said there was a lack of diversity. Like, what? I’m Asian and gay, I think I win in this department. But you can’t please everybody. A lot of people say that I’m not Asian enough anymore. I don’t go to Dominion Rd as much and I go to all these Ponsonby restaurants. First of all, I live around here. And second, that’s really f***ed up. Can Asians only go to Dominion Rd and get 10 for $20 dumplings?”
When he and his sister were younger, they’d play against the stereotype of the “timid, reserved Asian” by shocking prejudiced strangers with their bolshiness. It’s a trait that’s lingered, along with a natural charisma that Albert channels on YouTube, making sassy videos.
He's set to star in a six-part reality series called The Hustle NZ for Discovery (screening on Three from November 24), in which a camera crew follow him and other NZ-Asian creatives, including Yu Mei founder Jessie Wong and musician Harper Finn.
While his on-screen presence might seem loose, his posts reckless at times, he is (for the most part) a busy professional who gets on with the job of being an accidental internet star turned marketing professional turned author.
If anyone is surprised at his phenomenal popularity, it’s Albert Cho himself, who muses that in his parents’ day, memoirs were written by people who’d won medals at the Olympics, whereas he “runs an Instagram”.
“I’m like, what the hell has the world come to that I get a book deal? Like, what the f***?”
I Love My Stupid Life, by Albert Cho, (Penguin, $37) is out on November 8, and is available for preorder now.
*To speak to a volunteer with experience in eating disorders, call the EDANZ helpline on 0800 2 EDANZ.
