Swamp soup, tomato galettes, sungold tomato pasta—name a mega-viral food trend from the last few years, and you can probably trace it back to Wishbone Kitchen, aka Meredith Hayden.

With a combined 3.7 million followers across her accounts—TikTok is her largest platform, with 2.3 million followers—and a steady track record of millions of video views, Hayden’s social media credentials are beyond verified, but her real-world credentials are equally impressive. Hayden is an Institute of Culinary Education-trained chef who spent years working as a private chef; she spent her childhood shadowing her mother in the kitchen and once dreamed of a career in food media. Now, with a cookbook (The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook, out May 6) on the way and a passionate fanbase (just ask them about how one might spend a day in the Hamptons as a private chef), Hayden’s dreams are a little bigger, and she’s hard at work making them all happen.

For our May cover shoot, we spent the day with Hayden at the Hôtel Barrière Fouquet’s New York, nestled in the same cozy TriBeCa neighborhood as her new apartment. (Tragically, her housemate Poppy, a heart-stealing Bernese Mountain Dog named for Hayden’s favorite flowers, had a prior engagement.)

We talked about her self-proclaimed flop era, first viral videos, and hottest hot food take; we celebrated the end of a successful photo shoot with two of Hayden’s favorites, Diet Coke and caviar, with the caviar served in Wishbone Kitchen style: a generous dollop of crème fraîche and a scoop of caviar on potato chips. (The chips, of course, were Bonilla a La Vista, a Spanish brand available at Citarella, one of Hayden’s most-frequented grocery stores from her days as a private chef.)

Read on for snippets from the convo we had with Hayden on shoot day, and be sure to check out our May cover story featuring Meredith Hayden for more about social media’s favorite chef.

The Early Days

Your mom inspired the name Wishbone Kitchen; did she also inspire your love of cooking and hosting?

I have really fond memories of weeknight dinners, and she was always great about making delicious meals for us every single night. It made me really appreciate home cooking and that family aspect of gathering around the table every night to have dinner.

Tell us about your first “Day in the Life” video.

I filmed my first Day in My Life as a weekend in my life as a private chef in the Hamptons. I filmed it October 2021, and I didn’t post it until February or March 2022 because after I filmed it and edited it, I was like, “Who cares? This video is so silly. What am I going to do with this? Why would I ever post this? No one’s going to care.” So I didn’t post the video for five months. And when I finally posted it and it started doing really well, I was like, “Oh my God, I could have been doing this the whole time.”

What made you finally post the video?

I was broke, and I had to pay the bills. I heard people were making a lot of money on TikTok, and a lot of my catering clients were canceling because of the Omicron variant. A lot of events were getting canceled. People had just started hosting again after the pandemic, and then there was this blip of, OK, wait, we all need to go back inside and stop getting together. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I need to make money fast.” And I thought the humiliation of being vulnerable on the internet was worth potentially being able to pay rent that month.

Tell us more about that challenging time in your life. Would you call it your flop era?

My flop era was important for me because it instilled a level of desperation that encouraged me to go outside my comfort zone and take the leap and be vulnerable on the internet. Without that desperation, I don’t know if I ever would have had the confidence to do that.

How did it feel, going viral on social media like that?

I was really excited, because I’ve always loved social media. I’ve always loved creating content, and so when I saw my first few videos go viral, I started imagining a future with this being my job, and I got really excited to potentially have that opportunity to keep making food videos and make a living off of doing that. It seems to have worked out pretty well so far!

Your following grew really quickly; did you feel like things changed equally quickly for you after you started posting regularly?

It’s funny because a lot of my life stayed the same for two years. I was really just videotaping myself at work, and it was really exciting to see people responding so well to the videos. It gave me hope that I could make something out of this in terms of posting content online rather than being a private chef. It was very much an out-of-body experience, in some ways.

What was it like, going from private chef to viral video and recipe creator?

I went into private chef work knowing it was temporary. My end goal had always been to do cookbooks and content, whether it was recipe blogging or working for a food magazine. I always knew that was the direction I wanted to go in. The second my first video went viral, I was like, “OK, we’re going to make this work.” I had my blog up with recipes long before I had any sort of following. I had like 200 followers on Instagram when I started posting recipes, so it was kind of always the goal.

Cookbook Corner

Did you run into any surprises while creating your cookbook? You’re not new to recipe development.

I’m surprised at how fast time goes by. You think, “Oh, we’re going to make this book in a year and a half. That’s plenty of time.” Oh my God, I would have doubled or tripled the amount of time I had to make this book if I could have. I think that was a big surprise for me, how big of an undertaking it was.

What are you excited for fans to see in the cookbook?

One thing I’m excited to see that I’ve never posted about and never talked about online, that people don’t know, is in the book are all of these gorgeous watercolor paintings between chapters. They’re all inspired by different parts of the Hamptons and different parts of the dinner party process. We hired this incredible artist who did these paintings, and they’re just so whimsical and so cute. I wanted the book to be fun for people who weren’t even planning on cooking, so they’re just these really cute, fun prints sprinkled throughout the book. It’s really almost like a photo book.

In the Kitchen with Meredith

What’s your hottest take about cooking right now?

Normalize not meal prepping really big containers of ground meat and rice and reheating them for five days in a row. There are other options. We don’t have to be doing that.

So what do you suggest instead?

Make soup that you can put in the freezer and not give yourself food poisoning. You could also batch out your food prep, so you prep ingredients instead of fully cooking your meals all the way through. Like chopping up an onion in the beginning of the week to use throughout the week so you don’t have to get out the cutting board. I think that’s sometimes the time-saver that you need instead of just relying on fully cooking everything to completion and microwaving it. It’s a good little hack.

Do you measure as you cook?

I never measure. I go off of vibes. Tasting as you cook is much more important than measuring. But I will say that if you’re just starting out in the kitchen, it’s really great to measure, to get familiar with the proportions of certain ingredients. And know this is a standard amount of garlic for this amount of tomato sauce, for example. And then eventually you’ll start to pick up on the small patterns of cooking, because it’s all really the same, just different combinations of the same techniques. Once you follow recipes and measure recipes enough, you’ll get comfortable enough to throw out the measuring spoons.

Do you allow animals in your kitchen?

Yes, animals in the kitchen. Because I love dogs.

Pretend it’s a cozy night at home: Are you ordering takeout or cooking?

There are certain moments where I’m really enthralled with the idea of making a certain recipe, and I cannot go to sleep until I make it. If that’s the case, I’ll cook. And I like to use my cozy nights in to do those fun, experimental recipes. But honestly, I’ve been on a pretty serious takeout bender recently.

Swamp Soup, Birria Tacos, and Chicken Salad, Oh My

Your swamp soup has been one of your most popular recipes—how did you come up with the recipe?

I have a special relationship with swamp soup. I wasn’t even going to post that recipe video. It was literally me cleaning out my fridge and using leftovers to make something that I could eat for lunch. And I was like, I guess I’ll film this. I need to post something this week. And it ended up being my most popular recipe. So I’ll always love her, but I think my favorite soup of all time is the ribollita soup in my cookbook. But I’m not just saying that to plug the cookbook, it actually is so good. It’s tomatoes, vegetables, white beans. I blend it up so it’s a silky puree consistency with these thyme sourdough croutons on top. It’s really good.

What has been your favorite viral TikTok food moment?

Birria tacos. I feel like we forget, in 2021, those were popping off, and I had never heard of them before. I’m from New Jersey, we don’t have great Mexican cuisine up here, but I made birria tacos, and my life has changed forever. They’re so good.

What dishes are you making the most right now?

I’ve been making a lot of chicken salad. Normalize it! I’ve just been a busy girl, making a lot of chicken salad. A lot of oatmeal, blueberry oatmeal. Again, boring, but this is life. And—oh my God—these brown butter pecan cookies I developed in December. I made the recipe so many times that I didn’t end up deciding on the final recipe before the holidays, so it has yet to come out. But these cookies are serious, and I’m addicted to them, and I have one every morning when I walk the dog.

You posted about celebrating the holidays with a caviar, potato chips, and crème fraîche combo. Will you be serving this high-low pairing all year long?

I lean more towards serving this during the winter months, when seasonal produce is at a lull, and there’s nothing super fun and exciting at the farmer’s market or at the grocery store. It’s a very easy, fun, exciting appetizer. But in the summer, I am grabbing for caviar less, because I’m usually foaming at the mouth for a tomato or a beautiful squash.

Hosting + Homemaking

What does hosting mean to you?

Growing up, we always had really over-the-top Thanksgiving weekends with my family and my cousins. My dad’s the oldest of five, and we have so many cousins, and I just loved having those extended weekends at my cousin’s house with all of us running around, all the sleeping over. And I think that’s where I fell in love with hosting in a home setting instead of going somewhere. It just feels comfortable, and it feels really personal. And I think that’s my favorite part about bringing people to your home: You’re able to just relax and do your thing.

There are a ton of different depictions of homemaking out there. What does homemaking mean to you?

Homemaking for me is just within me: I feel this urge to nest at all times, and I’m not preparing for a baby. I’m not nesting for a man, I’m not nesting for a family. I’m doing it for myself. That’s the beef I have with trad wife content, I guess. It’s always through the lens of, “I’m doing this for my husband.” And that makes me feel icky, because if you’re not doing it for yourself, you shouldn’t just do it for your husband. That’s not right. So I like to approach hosting, homemaking, home cooking, with a lens of, I’m doing this because I enjoy it. It makes me happy. And this is how I like to spend my time, period. End of discussion.

On Decorating and Design

You just bought a new house—how is the decorating process going?

There have been a lot of learning moments as I started furnishing my house. I really like making it up as I go, and there have been some failures for sure, but it’s been a lot of fun.

What’s your approach to decorating?

I think it’s really just, I see something, I like it, I see a different thing, I like it, and I hope they go together. Sometimes they don’t.

How do your personal style and your decorating style overlap?

My personal style and my home style are similar in that I like a jeans-and-a-white-top moment, but a little bit different, whether it’s structurally different or a pop of color. That’s kind of how I’ve approached all of my different design eras. It’s been a pretty plain base with either pops of color with throw pillows or texture or whatever, but when you pare it down to what the actual base of the room is, it’s very simple. It has a jeans and a white T-shirt feel to it. I feel like that’s my signature approachable approach. But also, I love that it’s malleable: As my taste and my interests change, I can swap out throw pillows for a whole different room.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.