
In 2014, it seemed like chef Justin Warnerās star couldnāt rise any higher. He was on Zagatās 30 under 30, he had won season 8 of Food Network Star, which would net him at least a pilot of his own cooking show, and he ran a successful restaurant, Do or Dine. By 2015, heād lose both.
Warnerās path to Twitch Creative was hardly straightforward. He started out in restaurants as a waiter, later auditioning for an episode of Food Network reality television show 24 Hour Restaurant Battle in 2010. He was dating an actress at the time, and she had a habit of taking him to her casting calls.
āWe went to the audition, and they were like, āWhoās gonna cook?ā and I was like, kind of half jokingly, ācause we were kind of hungover, āIāll cook,āā he told me. āThey were like, āBut youāre a career waiter...how is this gonna work?ā Anyway, we end up getting on the show, somehow, miraculously.ā
Warner is still surprised that he wonāhe didnāt have any professional cooking experience at all. āI out-cooked a like, cook,ā he told me. āSo then my head gets really big and⦠Iām like, maybe I could get a group of dudes together to open a restaurant in Bed Stuy.ā
Do or Dine established him as an unconventional chef in the New York food scene. He served comfort food with a twist: fish and chips with a whole fried fish and a yuzu-shallot vinaigrette, nachos with masago sour cream, a foie gras donut The New York Times review of his restaurant is glowing. āThe whole scene sounds too ironic, too hipster-ish, too Brooklyn,ā it reads. āInstead, it is charmingā¦. this is demented, and unaccountably delicious.ā
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It seemed like there was nowhere to go but upāheād go on to win season 8 of Food Network Star. But things began to stall. His restaurant closed, and Food Network passed on his pilot. āThe prize that you win is that you get to have a show on Food Network,ā he told me. āThe problem with me is that I donāt exactly fit into the sunday morning relaxed cooking demographic. ⦠The viewership demographic dropped by like fifteen years when I was on,ā he said. While that might not seem like a problem, for a television network that can reliably buy ads for a particular demographic, a sudden change can be disastrous. āYou canāt just roll up to ad sales and be like, āHey cool, weāve got 50 year olds that are gonna buy this non-stop, all the time, all night on Food Network, except for this half hour when that weird kid is on.āā
āI wanna teach people things, I wanna get people really amped, I wanna use weird ingredients. I want to have fun. I didnāt want to do anything watered down.ā And indeed, when Warner is on camera, he comes off relaxed and casual, but also very knowledgeable, making complicated or scary ingredients seem normal and approachable.

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And as for Do or Dine, āThe restaurant stopped making money,ā he told me. āThe joy that we had experienced when we had first opened it was just not there. Hype is a weird thing. Our restaurant was very much like No Manās Sky syndrome.ā
He went on to write a cookbook, The Laws of Cooking: And How To Break Them, and it did well, and he has freelance television jobs as a judge on cooking competition shows, but he was at a loss for a daily gig. āI am a gamer, so I obviously know about Twitch,ā he told me. āSo I kinda just went down a couple wormholes one day with Twitch Creative. I was like, āMan! I think with just a little bit of TV finesse, we can really really do this. We can do this really well.āā
Itās hard to talk to Warner without falling into some kind of video game metaphor. He is an avid gamer, saying, āI mostly cook when Iām not playing games.ā But his Twitch channel, Chef Shock, which airs a cooking show every weekday, isnāt a nerd themed show. While heās dabbled in geeky food in his freelance work for Food Network, like making Splatoon themed squid dishes, Chef Shock is meant to be an appreciation of cooking as a craft.
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āWeāre going to start with raw ingredients at the beginning, and weāre going to end up with food,ā Warner told me of the concept for the show. āAnd if you look almost anywhere, you almost never see that. Thereās always some other gimmick, or thereās always some other television effects.ā He doesnāt pull out a fully made dish from a cabinet after he sticks what heās prepped in the oven. His audience is going to be there from start to finish, and theyāll find out if his food is good at the same time he does. And that gives him room to interact with his audience and chat about his other obsession: games. While cooking pasta he might ask, āIs anyone else a little bummed that Sombra didnāt come out today?ā Yeah, Justin. We were all really bummed about that every day.
āI didnāt want to show up on Twitch and be like, oh Iām a straight cook,ā he said. āI wanted to show that hey, thereās a big overlap here. We can all hang out. We all have the same interests in games, and we all have the same interest in food, but letās just make dinner.ā
Chef Shock is not like most cooking shows. His set is his actual Bed Stuy apartmentās kitchen, which is overstuffed with cooking gadgets and adorned with his own gaming plushies and figurines.
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Warner comes off as a confident chef, but also as someone who is willing to mess up on camera or to improvise. In his Linguine with Clams episode, while heās cracking eggs for his homemade pasta, he accidentally breaks the one he wasnāt intending to use. āHey, thatās never happened before,ā he said, pointing at it. But it doesnāt feel like a disasterājust one of the hurdles of cooking. If youāre not an experienced cook, it makes tackling harder dishes feel less intimidating.
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Warner wasnāt expecting to grab an audience so quicklyāChef Shockās first season was only two weeks long, but each night there can be upward of two or three thousand viewers in the stream. It is by far the most successful cooking show on Twitch Creative, as most only net a hundred viewers or less.
āOne thing that gets people right off the bat is that I decorated my set with my actual stuff,ā he said. āI think when someone is coming from a largely gaming medium and they see someone doing something other than gaming, theyāre like āwhat is this? why is he here?ā and then theyāre like, āHey is that Reaper and Soldier 76 guarding a squash?āā Indeed, heās got a plush Boo and a Reaper figurine sitting on top of his microwave, keeping watch as he shows off his knifework.
He likes cooking on Twitch because of the immediacy of the feedback from his audience. Any time Warner brings out Salt Pig, chat spams the salt emote and more often than not asks for a close up on it. āI break out the VIP spoon and everybodyās like āyay, the VIP spoon!āā he said.
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āWhat I love about food is like, food brings people together,ā Warner said. āWith Twitch iām bringing so many people together and ... just celebrating the glory that is like, hey, great cooking, hanging out and chefān and jivinā, you know?ā
And indeed, his audience will share with him the meals theyāve made according to his recipes, sometimes cooking along with him.
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Chef Shock is on hiatus while Warner is on vacation in Japan, but will return for a second season starting December 15th.