Favorite “Characters”: Antoni Porowski (Queer Eye)

Coming around to the last of my Favorite “Characters” posts about the Fab Five. Last but not least is food and wine expert Antoni, who addresses heroes’ lives in the kitchen.

By the time I started watching Queer Eye, the show had already been out for a while, and I quickly found the jokes online about how Antoni really isn’t that impressive. People complained that the cooking skills he displayed weren’t anything special, and there were memes about how all he added to the show were good looks and avocados. But for me, that wasn’t at all when I saw when I watched Antoni at work.

Plenty of the heroes on the show do not cook. Like, at all, to the point where their friends and family confide that they’re pretty sure this person doesn’t know how to make toast. Antoni’s job, then, on the show, isn’t to turn them into virtuoso chefs. It’s to 1) help them reframe the way they think about food and 2) teach them some simple basics to get them started on their cooking journey.

That lesson looks different for different people. The priority might be to introduce fresh ingredients to someone who only eats processed foods. It might be to add variety for someone who consumes nothing but protein shakes. It might be to learn how to make some kind of hors d’oeurves or dish to share that looks/tastes great but won’t require slaving in the kitchen. It might be to learn a recipe that a hero can prepare together with their kids, or it might be to spend time with their mom or grandma learning how to make the foods that are part of their cultural heritage.

And when viewed through that lens, Antoni’s role is an important one. Sometimes a hero has a little more experience in the kitchen and they can handle more ambitious dishes, but sometimes they’re starting at square one, and Antoni meets them where they are. Even if it’s something as basic as how to hold a knife, he goes through it and doesn’t make the hero feel dumb or ignorant for not knowing it.

I especially like how passionate Antoni gets about food and its power to bring people together. Whether it’s the act of preparing something to serve to others (showing love/care through cooking) or the act of sitting down to a meal together (fostering connections through shared time,) he’s a big proponent of the unifying power of food. I also appreciate the way he sometimes brings in other people – the occasional expert from a local restaurant, or maybe one of the hero’s family members – particularly when working on dishes from other cultures. It’s a way to show respect for where these dishes come from, and when he connects with someone in the hero’s family, we’re served a double whammy of cultural respect and personal history as treasured recipes get passed down from one generation to the next.