Each week, thousands of people tune in online to watch Chuck Cruz and Hailee Catalano cook Friday night dinner.
Whether they’re making a glorious beach sandwich, steak and potatoes (with black garlic-herb compound butter “to jazz it up”), or a recipe from Catalano’s cookbook By Heart: Recipes to Hold Near and Dear, the chef couple’s videos are soothing, hunger-inducing, and endlessly watchable. With frequent cameos by their dog, Gus, and a pure sense of wonder in how they cook, the kitchen at their home in Asbury Park, New Jersey, is the polar opposite of the high-stress kitchen of The Bear.
The couple met in culinary school at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY, in 2012, where they were paired up as station partners in a fundamentals class. On the first day of school, Cruz was two hours late and talked back to the chef. Catalano thought: “He’s probably a really intense, so-good-at-cooking, like, chef guy.”
That wasn’t quite the reality. “I was really bad,” Cruz says. Before going to culinary school, he had worked at The Cheesecake Factory and a Chinese buffet. She had won high school cooking competitions. Cruz remembers how, in orientation, the students were asked about the five mother sauces. “I was going, what the hell are mother sauces?” he says, as he and Catalano laugh. “Hailee knew all of them. I was like, damn, how does she know that?”
It made for a perfect pairing. “When we were paired together, we would both try to help each other out,” Catalano says. “It was fun. [I realized] he’s not intense. He’s just a goofy, funny guy.”
They started dating in 2014, and went on to work in restaurant kitchens together in Chicago (where Catalano is from) and Jersey City (not far from where Cruz grew up, in Piscataway), often on the same station. “We’re just good at cooking together for some reason. The dynamic is hard usually, working with someone in a high-pressure situation. But we always just know where the other person is going,” Catalano says.
In 2020, Catalano joined TikTok (“At first I thought it was just the dancing,” she says, until her algorithm fed her cooking videos), and soon started making videos and gaining a following. She now has nearly two million followers on the app. For Cruz and Catalano, cooking and making videos are a way to spend time together.
“When we compare to how we used to cook together in high stress, nowadays—and we still enjoyed it then—the way we get to cook together, now it really is our time of enjoyment and spending time together,” Catalano says. “It’s been our hobby for so many years, and really it’s just like having a partner to be nerdy and hobby with, that’s what we like to do.” (One food thing they nerd out about? Hot dogs. When they’re in a new place, they make it their mission to “find the regional hot dog,” Cruz says).
Even when they worked on the line together, they would look forward to cooking for fun on their days off, embarking on longer projects like braises, stews, or pasta. “Now when we do it, it brings back those days,” Cruz says.
For their first Valentine’s Day together, as culinary school students, they went to Burger King. “And it just so happened that the Burger King that we went to was all decked out for Valentine’s Day,” with tablecloths and roses. “And I was like, this is the perfect Valentine’s Day for me,” Catalano says. “A chicken sandwich and a slushee at a plastic pink tablecloth at Burger King.”