Building a Trad-Wife Parody Empire: Inside Chef Tova’s Wild Internet World

Lily Lady
5 hours ago
7 min read

CHEF TOVA interview by LILY LADY

PHOTOGRAPHY by ELLEN STAGG

Chef Tova is a New York-based influencer, host of the burlesque Sinners’ Shabbat series, and a private chef. Maybe you’ve seen some of her viral videos on Instagram or Tik Tok. She’s often in an empty kitchen, doe-eyed and cooking, chatting to the camera in a lilting, dreamlike cadence. In one such video, she swivels a large knife, chops bok choy, and makes a full meal while delivering the lines, “I overheard this guy at the gym say he could finally feel his feelings because he started taking ice baths. I’ve been feeling my feelings in warm baths…with bubbles. Like, that’s so embarrassing for you.” All that in under 15 seconds.

Chef Tova’s videos are perfectly snack sized. They’re bingeable without getting a stomach ache, and varied enough to hit all the food groups (some take place outside the kitchen bubble, like the Jewish/Muslim Girl bestie series).

Chef Tova has cornered the market for trad wife satire, with a sprinkle of foodporn, ASMR and mukbang. I chatted with her recently about the Internet rabbit hole, and the kitchen she’s set up inside of it.

CHEF TOVA:

…I grew up in Westchester. [When] I wrote a book about being a celebrity private chef, I was told by literary agents that publishers are no longer marketing for [their authors]. In order to be a writer, you have to have a following. So I started the Instagram to start my writing career. The thing that hit was dating content. There was a level of frustration about dating in New York…that the level of chivalry or the level of human decency within dating has gone so far down. The verging-on-misandrist comedy that I do spoke to a lot of women.

The first thing that really went off was the I'm looking for an upper middle class man to date series. The truth of the matter is that in New York, very few people are New York City upper middle class. Like they're upper middle class everywhere else in the country. But in New York, if you want to have kids in the city, you need to be like a multi-millionaire. I think normalizing actually preferring an upper middle class man over the people that you see on Hinge is this shaded preference that people have, but it makes you sound petty or whatever.

Turning that into comedy was a turning point for me. And since then I’ve done a myriad of different things.

LILY LADY:

What's the best part about being a public internet presence and what's the most challenging part?

The best part is definitely being able to interface with the people who follow me, whether that's at my events or on the street. I think about comedy as an intellectual exercise, and the benefit of that is that the people who follow me also like comedy in that lens. This sounds terrible for an interview, because it makes me sound full of myself, but…that the people who like [this type of] humor tend to be banter-y people. The girls and the gays. They're intelligent people.

The crowd that I've created for Sinners’ Shabbat, which kind of crossed over with my internet presence, has been huge. Not only am I able to have a following online, [but] I've met a lot of the people who watch my content, and they're really cool. That's made me feel incredibly powerful to put up a social media post and have 300 people show up for a live event.

I would say the negative [part] is that I get street harassment surrounding just being Jewish. I don't say my politics online, because I don't think that anybody really needs to hear the politics of a suburban girl from a cul-de-sac. But I think just being Jewish right now, you'll get street harassment from people who don't understand the difference between politics and identity. In addition, I have like, neo-Nazis who are constantly in my DMs and my comments section, sending threats and trying to find my location. I had to take my phone number down from my culinary website, because people were calling me from unlisted numbers, over and over again. That's like, inconvenient. It doesn't really bother me, because I think I'm a little dissociative to internet Nazis, because I don't think they have that much power. Like, they're probably peeing in a Gatorade somewhere in a basement, so like, do I care? Not really.