As a private chef in the Hamptons, Meredith Hayden achieved the American Dream. Now that she’s broken out of its pearly white gates, where is she going next?
Meredith Hayden’s apartment, as the story often goes, is stunning and lovely. The couch is white. The shelves abutting the television, on which the 28-year-old watches Martha Stewart Living on a loop, contain a ceramic artichoke, a rattan lamp, and Ginori serveware. The windows are floor-to-ceiling. The view is expansive, offering a Tom Wolfeian “Masters of the Universe” panorama of so many buildings, you forget which direction you’re looking. The apartment itself sits within a tooth-colored high-rise that declares itself against the skyline, in a waterfront part of Brooklyn that seems like another city entirely. It’s an apartment that suggests it would be gratuitous to actually board one of the leisure-barges drifting by, because you can see more from up here.
“I’m not the same person I was last December,” says Hayden. Technically, she is talking about the draft of her forthcoming debut cookbook, sitting in front of her beside a pen she’s nearly depleted. Technically, I’m here to help test through one of its recipes: a melty short rib bolognese that drapes itself over al dente noodles like it’s had an exhausting day.
But Hayden might as well be referring to the molting that is so common when one achieves the new American dream of figuring out how to go viral, over and over again. And the agony over what to do next.
Like most big names in new media, Hayden has no neat definition. She has followers, a lot of them. Three point four million across Instagram and TikTok, and more than 96,000 Substack subscribers. Known to most as Wishbone Kitchen, she was an architect of that class of TikTok cinema in which a relatable creator cooks aesthetically pleasing, aspirational meals for clients who are doing better—in several certain senses—than you or I. She was the private chef in the Hamptons, a new subgenre of chatelaine, one with a touch of Downton Abbey: the woman who looks at home in a big house, but who is fundamentally there on payroll. The laborer who blends seamlessly into luxury, with the suggestion of one day achieving it.
A year has passed since Hayden left the fancy private chef job that catapulted her self-funded media company, as she calls it. In the months since, she has finished a draft of her cookbook—think approachable, comforting, company-worthy seasonal fare—thrown a new focus behind her cooking instruction and lifestyle videos, and plotted her next moves. Now, Hayden is re-testing every single recipe in the cookbook, due to be published next May. Actually, she’s re-testing every single recipe again, because she has this fear that some minor figure or explanation will be wrong, and it will ruin someone else's job, dinner, or grocery budget for the week.
So, we’re making the short rib bolognese. Well, she is. I’m sitting at the counter, thinking about the things that catalyzed Hayden’s conquest of the Internet. Which in that moment means idly flipping through her manuscript, covered in red penned-words with all the neat curviness of cool girl handwriting, and attempting to suss out where that one spot is. Every influencer has it in their home: the corner where natural light converges with walls and reflective surfaces to create, basically, heavenly beams of sunshine at a specific time of day. Before I can ask to see it, though, Hayden hauls out three large bags of dried noodles.
“Pick,” she tells me. My options are gnocchetti sardi, irregularly shaped ribbed shells; macaroni, like rigatoni but less wide; or gigli toscani, larger corkscrews of loose frill. I suggest the third shape, realizing that as I wait for her agreement, I really do want her to approve of my choice. When she does, I exhale. I suppose that’s a part of Hayden’s effect: She has the power to make you want her to like you, even if you’re there to interrogate her.
She pours us two Diet Cokes and swirls them simultaneously with glass straws, one in each hand. As you might expect, the Diet Cokes are just crispier at Hayden’s apartment. Perhaps it’s because of how she serves them: each poured over ice in a tall glass with thin sides and a straw that clinks appealing as she stirs the liquid like a potion in a beaker.
More likely, it’s because to drink a Diet Coke in the presence of Hayden is to recall a brittle morning fizzing with possibility as she cracked one at dawn. In the early days of her social media ascendancy, Hayden would take a sip before inviting us to trail along digitally for her 17-hour Hamptons work-shift. On her first day, her then-boss asked Hayden what she wanted out of the job; she launched into a spiel about cookbooks, and working in magazines, and teaching lots of people to cook before he politely interrupted. “He was like, ‘No, what hours do you want for this job’,” she tells me, laughing a laugh that manages to be both self-deprecating and intoxicatingly confident. But even then, Hayden was a person who knew what she wanted, even if she would have to carve out a basically uncharted path to get it. She glides across the narrow kitchen in a chunky navy and white knit and oversized jeans, and she places the bowls of pasta on the counter beside the cookbook pages, her laptop, and the largest water bottle I’ve ever seen, in a color that matches her eyes. And we dig in.
If the modern influencer embodies the new American dream—the fantasy that it’s possible for anybody, not just a Bella Hadid or an Alix Earle, to make themselves good enough, charming enough, and useful enough to go viral, even if they’re just dancing with their great grandmother in a kitchen in some remote pocket of the world, and that going viral will change their life through money and comfort—then Hayden is Jay Gatsby. (Is it a coincidence that her initial wave of work was set in Long Island?) It was quietly opulent fare that had her toiling away, between sips of carbonated brown nothing: a summer squash frittata with thick cut bacon (served poolside), chicken parm garnished with basil that grew a few feet away in an onsite garden, filets of fish topped with crushed nuts and a lacy smattering of microgreens. I found Wishbone Kitchen the way most of you did: she was chugging a Diet Coke on camera and she claimed to be exhausted, at the outset of a long day, though perfect skin and bright eyes claimed otherwise. She was youth, she was labor, she was perfect.
She had all of the hallmarks of an influencer poised to hit it big. She was genuinely talented; her dishes were deft, her heirloom tomatoes juicy and thoughtfully plucked from just the right stall at the farmer’s market. She looked like someone who would smile at you on the subway, not look like she had been crafted from plastic and fluid-filled vials. Her down-to-earth, earnest desire to be a good host, paired with an internet-laced humor, made her catnip for a certain sort of TikTokker; she picked up slang and coined her own colloquialisms easily (“swamp soup,” picked up from a follower, described her green herby broth). People just liked her; she wasn’t a snob. Those heirloom tomatoes were thoughtfully selected and she was especially gobsmacked by them because she’d grown up on Romas from Stop & Shop. “I don’t just put fancy food on a pedestal,” she says. “I love Shake ‘n Bake.”
Even if there were still a line between a proper celebrity and an influencer, Hayden quickly raced past it. Now, she tells us how to spend football Sundays (eating twice baked mini potatoes topped with fish roe), gets paid to attend the US Open, hangs out with friends in a breathtaking summer rental, makes croquettes with Joe Jonas, talks frankly about depression and anxiety, and fields P.R. freebies from Dior. As traditional media collapses and consolidates, she and the rest of her cohort of Internet stars tell us how to live, and we listen, and we ask her to tell us the next thing.
Of course, this new American dream is no less a myth than ever. The first time Hayden went viral, it was February, and she had been working multiple jobs and posting as much as she could for the better part of a year. In fact, she’d been laid off from her ad sales gig at Condé Nast. She’d also been told no to her dream job as an assistant in Bon Appétit’s test kitchen. The rejection had sent her spinning. She knew that restaurant life was not for her, after a stint at Charlie Bird that followed her time in culinary school, but she knew that she wanted to cook. She found work as the chef for a family based in New York, and for months, until his husband said something about a fashion show, she had no idea she was cooking for Joseph Altuzarra.
But she did have an idea of where the money was flowing from and to whom it went. The ad sales job she’d lost had given her a front row seat to the way brands were spending money on talent. She’d been literally helping to place the sort of beauty ads that she herself might now star in. And she was fed up with gatekeepers, and the way traditional media encouraged its employees to “pay your dues in this toxic way,” she says. So she pressed record.
“There’s always the fear, it could go away,” she says, remembering the early days, and the weirdness of seeing that she had more likes than there were seats in Madison Square Garden. After a steady stream of followers found her, Hayden settled into a niche: stylish, cheerful, cozy food, with a bit of pop culture and fashion around the edges. “My goal is not to flex on people,” she says. “I want people to feel good.”
Femininity is a centerpiece: on the cover for her cookbook, she wears a Charlotte York-appropriate beige sleeveless dress, her hair down and loose. As we eat the pasta and sip our Diet Cokes, Martha Stewart whips meringue on screen behind us—Hayden comments on something she admires about her: that Martha is never cooking for a husband. She’s always cooking for herself, and entertaining because she likes to do it. Hayden’s genre of culinary labor cinema fit into a natural progression of that energy: she was no chef bro (skincare was a constant topic of conversation), but she was in it for personal gain, for ego and career ascension. On the couch across the room from where Martha whips the fluffy peaks, a needlepoint pillow declares the thing Cher said in a 1996 interview with Jane Pauley on Dateline, which became a sort of anthem among self-made women: “Mom, I am a rich man.” Taylor Swift displayed the same phrase, emblazoned across a painting, in the music video for "You Need To Calm Down.”
Still, “trad wife content” makes her wrinkle her nose when I bring it up. Hayden has this thesis that lots of people just like to see women suffer, and so even if the majority of videos of women making Cheetos from scratch for their husbands are rage bait—intended for engagement—she worries about the butterfly effects.
So, how is the pasta? It is velvety and rich, deeply flavored but judiciously seasoned, reminiscent of a chasu pork-miso ramen broth in Hokkaido. Sipping from her glass, Hayden tells me about what’s next: she’s just bought her own house in the Hamptons.
It’s a neat ending to a story about a place she says she was “predestined to dislike”—until she met friends, and farmers, and tasted the tomatoes. A place that defined her meteoric jolt into the public eye when she showed up with her chef’s knives and got to work building a fantasy not only for her clients, but for the rest of us watching along at home.
She’ll keep a place in the city, but hopes that owning a house will allow her to keep digging deeper into entertaining and decorating and whatever else might catch her eye. “Part of the charm is people watching me build the plane as I’m taking off,” she says.
We stand and then, when I ask, she shows me the spot—light streams through one of the massive glass window panes and projects a golden swath of light into one part of the kitchen. And then I leave, down the elevator and back through the lobby into which a Le Labo scent is pumped, out onto the street, where waterfront chairs suggest uncomplicated living and I think, just for a moment, maybe you or I could have it, too.
.avif)
.avif)
%20ANALOG%20glass%2C%20SOBO%20collection%20%C2%A9%20Robert%20Swierczynski.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.avif)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.avif)
.webp)
.avif)
.jpeg)
.avif)
_11%20x%2014%20inches%20(2).jpg)
.jpeg)
.avif)
.jpg)
%20(1).jpg)
.avif)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.avif)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.avif)
.avif)
.jpg)
%20(1).avif)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.avif)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
%20(1).jpg)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)
.webp)
.jpg)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)
-by-YAS.jpg)
-min.jpg)
.avif)
.jpg)
.webp)
.avif)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.avif)
.jpeg)
%20Large.avif)
%20Large.jpeg)
.avif)
.avif)
%20(1).avif)
.avif)
.jpg)
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.avif)
.jpeg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.webp)
.webp)
.webp)
.jpg)
%20(1).avif)
.avif)
.jpg)
