The stars of Netflix’s revival of “Queer Eye” form a basketball team’s worth of cultured fabulosity. There’s Tan France, the fashion expert, fussy and witty; Karamo Brown, the suave sophisticate, who, as the “culture” point person, mostly specializes in heart-to-hearts; Jonathan Van Ness, the hairstylist and groomer, ebulliently over-the-top and a clear fan favorite; and Bobby Berk, a soft-spoken designer with spiky hair and a penchant for navy blue. And then there’s Antoni Porowski, a former actor and model who parlayed a few private-chef gigs into a role as the show’s food-and-drinks man, where he now finds himself the unlikely center of a culinary conspiracy theory.
Since “Queer Eye” premièred, in February (no longer catering only to “the Straight Guy”), Antoni, in particular, has been everywhere, the subject of profiles and Q. & A.s decorated with photographs of him half-smiling over a cup of coffee, or puckishly pulling at the lapels of his jacket. All members of the Fab Five, as they are known, are solidly handsome and well kempt, but Antoni is dreamily beautiful, a grownup teen idol: lanky and toned, with deep eyes and soft cheeks and a boyish grin. He is never shown holding a puppy, but he seems at any time like he might be. He looks uncannily like the musician John Mayer, or, more precisely, he looks how John Mayer probably thinks John Mayer looks. All that, and he cooks, too.
Or does he? Antoni truthers call on us to tear our eyes away from the Superman curls falling over the rakish bandanna headband, the alluringly frayed slim-cut jean shorts and Strokes T-shirts over firm tanned arms, and instead observe that Antoni spends the show making recipes that verge on the remedial: grilled cheese, honey mustard, two-ingredient salads. “He’s preparing food a child would make when they’re old enough not to need a sitter,” Vulture’s Bowen Yang points out. Notice, too, his recipes’ questionable “twists.” “I’m, like, a dairy freak,” Antoni announces in Episode 1, and proceeds to add a dollop of Greek yogurt to a bowl of guacamole. Perhaps anticipating that a viewer with modest guacamole fluency might have, at that moment, shouted at her television in horror, he goes on to justify, “It has so much less fat than sour cream.” (At this point, a viewer who understands that sour cream also has no home in proper guacamole might have shouted again.)
There are further grounds for suspicion. A rigorous Junkee investigation reveals that Antoni has never been seen actually cooking over a standard stove or oven. The culinary wing of the Internet exploded in indignation after he shared an Instagram Story in which he personalized Marcella Hazan’s famously minimalist, and flawless, three-ingredient tomato sauce by adding a bouquet of basil and an entire wedge of Parmesan. On his Instagram account, which is full of gorgeously composed cheese (both literal and otherwise), he regularly refers to La Tur, the creamy, complex, three-milk Italian variety, by the jauntily familiar Tur, which an award-winning cheesemonger described to me as a faux pas on par with calling The Rock just Rock.
Antoni came to the attention of the “Queer Eye” producers thanks to Ted Allen, the food-and-wine expert on the original incarnation of the show. They both live in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and Antoni has cooked for Allen a few times. (In 2014, Allen and his husband bestowed upon Antoni a giant tomahawk steak.) This apparent nepotism has been fuel for critics, as has Antoni’s lack of a culinary-school degree or restaurant experience, not to mention the fact that he appears to be a non-drinker, sipping on seltzer-based sangria and only sniffing at his snifter during a whiskey tasting. In interviews and on social media, Antoni describes himself as mostly a self-taught cook, a scholar of PBS cooking shows and classic cookbooks; he’s a Europhile who bakes plums into clafoutis provocative-side-up, and knows that, when in Paris, he should go to E. Dehillerin to buy copper cook pots, and to Poilâne for bread. He clearly has skills at a technical level, too: watch him slice leeks in Episode 2, his manicured fingers holding the allium beneath the blade with tender confidence; in the next episode, he supremes a grapefruit like a seasoned pro. Last year, at Thanksgiving, he carved a turkey with an elegant, Martha Stewart flair.
Besides, as Porowski’s defenders (among them his castmates) have noted, his job on the show isn’t to produce high-flying multi-course meals or to dazzle the viewers with culinary party tricks. “What do you want these straights to do?” Vulture’s Matt Rogers asked in a delightful debate with Bowen Yang. “Be able to debone a duck after three days?” Fair enough. For most of the makeover subjects, the bar is exceedingly low—take Tom, the recipient of the yogurt-guacamole instruction, whose abilities in the kitchen began and ended with mixing Mountain Dew and tequila. Where Tan, the fashion expert, fills the men’s closets with no-fail mix-and-match clothing, and the design guru Bobby presents them with their newly redecorated homes, Antoni actually teaches hands-on skills, however modest: a man’s knowledge of how to throw a bunch of tinned beans in a Crock-Pot to make chili will persist long after his Stan Smiths have turned a dingy gray.
“Queer Eye” is a show of remarkable intensity, full of revelations and tears and seemingly genuine emotional growth. The Fab Five are a SWAT team deployed against the quiet trespasses of conventional masculinity, guiding their subjects to reckonings with their fears and prejudices. For some of the makeover subjects, the show represents the first occasion that they’ve spent real time with gay men. For others, the transformation involves confronting self-destructive habits, or having uncomfortable conversations about heavy topics like mental health, racism, fatherhood, and the judicious use of facial concealer. For most of them, the kitchen is as foreign a destination as a ballroom-dancing studio or the beauty-supply aisle at Target, part of the unmasculine domestic sphere. With basic grilled-cheese sandwiches, Antoni gives them access to a part of their homes in which they had been unable to comfortably be themselves. (Outside the show, Antoni has been poignantly candid about his own experiences negotiating gender expectations, particularly his history of dating women prior to his current committed same-sex relationship. His relative newness to gay culture, he says, set him apart from the other members of the Fab Five, and made his time with them an enriching personal experience.)
And yet! Whatever the value of Antoni’s kitchen lessons, his scenes on “Queer Eye” often feel peculiarly empty. He interacts with others woodenly, speaks lines that sound scripted, always holds himself at an emotional distance. In episodes bursting with antics and zingers, he offers little; for the made-over men, he’s never the agent of catharsis or introspection. He often seems to be positioned, physically, in the background, face half-hidden behind Karamo’s satin-jacketed shoulder or the silvery massif of Tan’s hair. This blankness is at odds with the persona Antoni cultivates offscreen, as a bookish aesthete—geeking out over Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “A Little Life” or the fact that the Strokes personally sent him a batch of T-shirts. Even there, his faves, like his gastronomy, are highbrow-shallow, just a dollar more than basic. “It’s like a brooch for a dress,” he told Bon Appétit, by way of explaining how a finishing sauce ties a dish together. Does that make any sense? Do we even care? As Antoni put it recently, in an Instagram Story featuring a quote from Carl Jung, “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”
