Jesse Jenkins: ‘Aubergine parm has taken me a long way’

Photography by Hayley Benoit

It’s what’s on the stainless-steel island that throws me: two breaded cutlets of charred aubergine flattened into a pear shape, with a little stalky beret sticking out the top. Jenkins is making his riff on aubergine parm, a dish he unveiled to his followers in October 2023 with a (frankly indecent) video that has been watched nearly 7m times. I’m veg-struck. “It’s taken me a long way, this dish,” says Jenkins. “It’s my most copied and most recreated recipe. And it’s the one that chefs mention to me, ‘Oh, that was a good dish, that was smart.’ That’s a really good feeling.”

The recipe, which also features confit garlic, a sweet, spicy tomato sauce and blobs of creamy burrata, is, Jenkins willingly concedes, more famous than he is. The hype around it helped him land a deal for his brassica-forward new cookbook, Cooking with Vegetables.

In some ways, this is an age-old (well, 2010s) ascent: home cook makes noise on the internet (often with a wellness spin), grows followers, bags book deal. But Jenkins’s rise feels different; more credible, less naff. The blurbs on Cooking with Vegetables are from Jamie Oliver (“everyone needs this beautiful book”) and Spring chef Skye Gyngell. His recipes, which are presented in bold, brash, slick videos, share an affinity and aesthetic with the likes of Alison Roman and Ben Lippett: credible, ambitious one-stop meals for adventurous omnivores who love food.

Jenkins, born and raised in LA, assiduously avoids calling himself a chef, even though he has been one – initially as a teen in an outdoor mall in the San Fernando Valley and latterly at Orasay, Jackson Boxer’s acclaimed Notting Hill seafood restaurant (now reopened as Dove). But these days he cooks, records and uploads from his light-filled home.

Before Jenkins was a food influencer, he was a fashion photographer and music video director. This makes a lot of sense: his Instagram posts are closer to short films – or The Bear’s artsy kitchen sequences – than typical DIY, POV reel-fillers. Then there are the ADIP signatures: Jenkins doesn’t talk in his videos, but there are heightened, clink-clank sound effects; each has with a title in foreboding gothic script, a nod to the credits in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

Jenkins was advised against most of these devices, but half a million followers later, he has been validated. In the early days of ADIP, Jenkins not only didn’t speak, but he wouldn’t appear on camera. “I assumed that if I put myself in the videos, I wasn’t going to get another job,” he says. “Also, I was too scared, too shy. Didn’t want to put myself on the chopping block.” Whatever the reason, it imbues the videos with an enigmatic cool. “There’s a lot of amazing filmmakers that use food as a medium, right?” says Jenkins. “And then, vice versa, amazing cooks, but don’t really care about the video-making. I genuinely am obsessed with both.”

Jenkins has shaven dark hair and piercing blue eyes. Today he wears a white T-shirt advertising Paradise Spa (“A total luxury”), dark jeans and Vans, and tattoos spiral around his arms. Quite a few of them relate to Morrissey lyrics (“Which is kind of embarrassing now”), but there’s also a more revealing, discreet “Too Fast” written on his right wrist. Jenkins has ADHD, dyslexia and OCD, and as we chat he seems to like having something to chop, stir or fry. “I constantly find myself running through everything that I’m doing, whether it’s brushing my teeth or whatever,” he says. “So I’m just like, ‘Slow down. Slow down. I think that’s why I love cooking. You have to slow down. If you’re not a spiritual person, it’s the closest thing to that. It’s methodic, and you can lock in. You can feel connected to something that’s bigger than you, that grows from the ground.” A big smile: “And there’s animal sacrifice!”

The garlic is confited and the tomato sauce now a deep brick-red. Two aubergines are dexterously laid to rest in a shallow bath of hot oil. We talk about how Jenkins got to this point: his first love was skateboarding and, from the age of 10, he devoted his life to it, spending every waking hour making videos on the streets of LA, often at night, aiming to become a sponsored rider. That happened in his teens. “I went all in,” he says. “Like, I barely graduated high school. I didn’t read a book cover to cover until I was 30 years old. So I really struggled in school.”

And life at home wasn’t exactly straightforward. His mother worked for the American chef Nancy Silverton, whose Campanile restaurant and La Brea Bakery were hugely influential in the 1990s. His parents were both Buddhists in the thriving LA scene of that time: “I grew up with hordes of people chanting in my living room, I would fall asleep to it most nights.” His mother had addiction issues, and Jenkins didn’t see her for most of his teenage years. “My family is nuts,” he says. “My mom was absolutely mental, and she passed away from alcoholism. My sister passed away from drug addiction. I made it out. I’m so grateful and feel super lucky to have ended up where I have.”

By the age of 17, Jenkins was already aware of his skateboarding peers surpassing him. And the chaos in his family was a major motivation for escaping to the UK in his early 20s.

As a photographer, Jenkins shot for the likes of Love, stylist Katie Grand’s influential fashion magazine, and advertising campaigns for Mui Mui and Agent Provocateur. But when the Covid lockdown hit, the fashion work dried up and Jenkins found himself cooking obsessively. It proved to be auspicious timing. With everyone stuck at home, there was a captive and fast-growing audience for escapist food posts on social media. Also, Jenkins slotted neatly into the fast-expanding intersection of gastronomy and fashion. Model-influencer types such as Nara Smith and Gabbriette were amassing huge followings on TikTok and Instagram with videos that often featured stylised food prep. Egypt-born, US-based Laila Gohar turned tableware into an artform, collaborating with Prada and Hermes.Elsewhere, chefs influenced style, reaching a logical zenith in 2024 when The Bear star Jeremy Allen White appeared on billboards in Manhattan in just his underpants (holding an apple) to flog Calvin Kleins.

Making it and staying ahead in the influencer game is no easy business. These days, most of Jenkins’s videos have around 150,000 to 200,000 views, but his goal is for one in 10 of his posts to go viral. If he hasn’t had a hit for a while, he admits he starts to worry: “If I’ve done 10 videos that have gotten really low numbers, I’m like, ‘I’ve got to really think about this now.’” More than just being scrolled over though, Jenkins wants recipes that will make people come back to the channel long-term.

Getting to write and shoot a cookbook is old-media validation for Jenkins: he focused on vegetables not because he’s a vegetarian (he’s not, and some of the recipes involve meat), but because those are the Instagram posts that elicit the most impassioned response. “People go bananas when I put a fennel recipe up,” he says, entirely seriously. “Once you learn how to use fennel, there’s no turning back. Y ou get really obsessed with it.” (This chimes with research that puts the UK’s vegan population at 2.5 million, a rise of more than a million between 2023 and 2024, along with 3 million vegetarians.) And, like Yotam Ottolenghi, Jenkins brings a carnivore’s sensibility to celebrating vegetables, with dishes such as kimchi-grilled cheese, miso-glazed courgettes and carrot and cumin dal with crispy chickpeas.

The doorbell goes. It’s a delivery of pasta from a company itching to be included on the ADIP platform. But Jenkins is adamant, for his platform to have any longevity, he only includes products he uses, likes. “I say no to 99% of it,” he says, doing a semi-curious live unboxing. “Mainly because I don’t think you should accept things if you’re not going to post about them.”

Life is sedate these days: Jenkins is married with two kids. He does the school pick-up most days, and still skateboards at least once a week. Two boards are lined up in his hallway, waiting.

Back in the kitchen the smoky aubergine parm is finally – FINALLY! – ready. “It’s not the prettiest dish,” he says, using a tea towel to wipe specks of tomato from the lip of the plate, “but it does taste good.” A couple of mouthfuls later, Jenkins is confident that I agree. “It’s the dream,” he says, of his latest career turn. “This is my little newspaper, and as long as people are looking I want to keep delivering. It combines everything I love.”

Cooking with Vegetables by Jesse Jenkins (Pan Macmillan, £28) is out now. Order a copy at observershop.co.uk for £25.20