Meet Mike Chau, the Man Who Eats New York

Food Baby, aka Mike Chau, might be the first food account that I ever followed on Instagram, though it’s hard to say. It’s certainly one of the most memorable New York City food accounts: a man and his wife and their three adorable children constantly going to restaurants, eating colorful croissants and giant ice cream cones. I’ve lots of thoughts on Mike and what he does—what he means, what he stands for—in this little foodie community of ours, and beyond. He offers us an invaluable service. He shines a light on so many restaurants and celebrates food in New York in a way that is thorough and obsessive and, against all odds, full of joy. He is a man on a mission, and that mission is to taste and document as much food as he possibly can. It’s a mission as admirable as it is Sisyphean. I wanted to sit down with the man himself to find out what he thinks about all of this, what makes him tick. So, on a sweaty July afternoon, we met at Supermoon Bakehouse. I ate a croissant, he didn’t eat; he’d spent the morning trying all the offerings at a new cake shop. What I found is that he’s taller than I would have thought and he’s exactly who he says he is: an earnest family man who’s in it for the love of the game. Rainbow bagels may come and go, but Food Baby is here to stay. 

———

J LEE: Thanks so much for meeting with me.

MIKE CHAU: Of course. Nice to meet you.

LEE: So, who are you?

CHAU: I’m Mike Chau. I guess a lot of people know me as Food Baby from my Instagram internet presence.

LEE: How long have you been doing Food Baby?

CHAU: Since 2014.

LEE: 11 years, damn.

CHAU: 11 years, yep.

LEE: Where did you start?

CHAU: A lot of people know I started doing stuff on Yelp way back in the day.

LEE: Were you doing reviews?

CHAU: I was, yeah. Even before that, I guess, I was doing something called Foodspotting, which was an app. I find it very similar to Beli now. You know Beli? It was just literally taking pictures of food and posting it at restaurants. I kind of have a very obsessive personality.

LEE: It seems that way.

CHAU: Yeah. So I was heavy into that app and I loved it. And then Instagram came around and I was like, “It’s the same thing, just putting words to it”

LEE: I think you were probably one of the first food Instagrams that I knew about, in New York at least. Were there people that you were looking at before that?

CHAU: I mean, back then Instagram was so pure, it was not a thing. It wasn’t like, “I’m going to do this to make money,” which is why I liked it. I was just doing it because I wanted to. I got joy out of taking pictures of food and sharing them with people.

LEE: That’s the thing. It seems like you actually like what you do.

CHAU: Yeah.

LEE: But it’s not your job job, right?

CHAU: No, not at all. I make basically no money. I spend way more than I make.

LEE: So you do this out of pure passion?

CHAU: Yeah. I barely make money ever. I was doing some ads, I guess, in the heyday of it, but I’m not one of the huge accounts these days. You know what I mean?

LEE: You’re pretty big. How many followers do you have?

CHAU: 320,000 on Food Baby.

LEE: So how many times a week are you going out to eat?

CHAU: Pretty much every night during the week. Not Mondays—Mondays we stay home and hangout with the kids. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday—I go out with my wife. We check out new restaurants and the kids hang out at home. My wife’s dad watches them a lot. My mom watches them once a week. And on the weekends we all go out together. 

LEE: Sometimes, you’re eating like, three dinners though.

CHAU: Not as much anymore. It’s getting more challenging to eat at a lot more places now that the kids are older. Back then, it kind of started because we’d just had our son and we were running around eating with them and he’d just sleep in the car and it was easy. And what else were we going to do? Lately we don’t go nearly as many places because they’re real people now, and they have opinions and they want to do things and we want to do things with them.

LEE: Do they like food like that?

CHAU: Not like that. Nobody likes food like that.

LEE: It’s hard to like food like that.

CHAU: They’re getting into it, though. They enjoy it. You can see them start to appreciate when they have good things and they can start to tell the difference. 

LEE: I have a really embarrassing story.  One time I saw your wife and one of your kids at Marlow & Sons and I was like, “Food Baby!” And then your wife was like, “Come on, man. It’s not Matt Damon.” I was embarrassed.

CHAU: That’s hilarious. That must have been a long time ago.

LEE: Yeah, he was still a little kid. How many kids do you have now?

CHAU: I have three now.

LEE: They all look like Food Baby. The food baby genes are popping.

CHAU: The Food Baby genes are strong.

LEE: They must get recognized all the time.

CHAU: They do, yeah.

LEE: Do people ask them for their autograph?

CHAU: Selfies sometimes.

LEE: Do the kids at school know that they’re celebrities?

CHAU: I think some of them do. It’s funny, my son started middle school last year and there’s a group of kids that are always like, “Food Baby!” when they see him or when they see me. And they’re like, “We love your Snapchat account.” I’m like, “All right, cool.”

LEE: So are these restaurants inviting you or are you finding places on your own?

CHAU: It’s both. I mean, a lot of times a restaurant will invite me, but I’ll have been already. So like I said, it’s more just because I enjoy doing it.

LEE: How do you even keep up? It’s kind of my job, but I feel like I don’t have the stamina.

CHAU: It is hard to keep up, totally.

LEE: What’s your workout regimen?

CHAU: I don’t really work out that much, to be honest with you. I walk a lot.

LEE: You look great.

CHAU: Thank you. I appreciate that.

LEE: But you eat so much food.

CHAU: I do. [Laughs] I play tennis sometimes with my wife in the mornings, because she’s obsessed with tennis lately. But it’s mostly walking. I used to run a lot when I was in the office and I used to walk around a lot throughout the city all day. But yeah, it’s mostly just a lot of walking.

LEE: How long have you and your wife been together?

CHAU: Since we were 17.

LEE: That’s crazy.

CHAU: Yeah, yeah. We met when we were 14. We had some classes in high school together. We started dating senior year of high school.

LEE: That’s adorable. Were you always super into food?

CHAU: No, I was obese when I was young.

LEE: Really?

CHAU: Like, 210 when I was 12 years old. Crazy.

LEE: I mean, you’re pretty tall.

CHAU: Yeah, but I wasn’t tall when I was 12. I weighed more when I was 10 or 11 than I do now, probably. But I wasn’t eating anything good. My dad took us to cool restaurants in Chinatown and Flushing, but we didn’t really eat at nice places too often. So I didn’t know anything about food, really. I still don’t. I just like to eat.

LEE: What changed?

CHAU: After college, my wife and I finally got our own place, we were living downtown. And I guess I just realized, we’re in New York, there’s so much good food, what are we doing? I started getting excited about all the food that was around.

LEE: Do you remember the first time you went on Yelp and wrote a review?

CHAU: I do, actually. And I don’t do this anymore because I realize now what goes into running a restaurant and how hard it is. But I did one of those typical Yelp keyboard warrior things where I was like, “This place was terrible.” I was so annoyed at this place we went to that I went online and wrote a one-star review. I never do that anymore. But I do remember that’s how I started. That was the day I started using Yelp.

LEE: I mean, I look at what you do as a real service to the restaurant industry in New York. What do you think your role is, or how do you envision yourself within the industry?

CHAU: People tell me all the time that they find out about restaurants from my instagram. So my account is almost more like a news source of new places that are opening.

LEE: You’re literally at every new bakery.

CHAU: It’s fun for me to go to new places. It’s not like a review page—I’m not giving scores or anything like that. That said, people that follow me can tell if I like a place or not.

LEE: What do you think is your biggest success story? There are certainly restaurants that you’ve made or kind of introduced to the masses.

CHAU: My wife always says I’m too modest, but I would never think that we really have that big of an impact.  I think that these places are just successful because of how good they are. It’s hard for me to take credit for any of that, really. Sometimes restaurants reach out and thank me, which is nice to hear.

LEE: That’s like the opposite of me.

CHAU: I admire what you do too.

LEE: I always love the posts when you can tell that you didn’t like a spot. I love to see the little cracks. Does it get exhausting for you to have to be trying new spots all the time?

CHAU: It’s not exhausting, I guess, just because it’s fun to do new things, especially with the kids. Certain places I go back to a lot. I come to Supermoon literally every week.

LEE: That’s a great place to bring kids. My thing is, I’m like Mr. Anti-Croissant.

CHAU: Oh, really?

LEE: I love croissants, but it’s just become such a thing in New York over the last year or two. I guess you are kind of the person who invented croissants.

CHAU: Yeah. I’m the one who invented croissants. [Laughs] We pretty much go to a bakery every Saturday and Sunday with the kids.

LEE: My thing about croissants is that I like croissants, I just feel guilty. They’re too crazy.

CHAU: Oh, yeah. I feel like shit most of the time.

LEE: What bagels do you like?

CHAU: These days, I like Apollo.

LEE: Apollo is, I think, the consensus best right now. I don’t eat bagels. That’s another food that I don’t really eat very often.

CHAU: Yeah, I don’t eat bagels too often. For a more classic one, I like Utopia.

LEE: I think this is what everyone wants to know. How much of the food do you actually eat?

CHAU: I eat a good amount of the food. I really do. We take home leftovers. I mean, when you see me with a giant scoop of ice cream, I don’t eat it all. That’s insane. Or if it’s a lot of pastries, I don’t finish them all. I just went to a new bakery today, a new cake place, Saint Street Cakes. I ordered everything because I wanted to try it. I was by myself, so I had a couple of bites of each of the cakes and then just gave them to someone on the street afterwards because it was way too much. 

LEE: What are your thoughts on the interconnectedness of food culture and social media? How has social media changed the way that we dine?

CHAU: I mean, they’re so intertwined now. I mean, it drives how so many people eat. I see so many people getting in long lines to eat things because they’ve seen somebody post about it online, which is crazy. 

LEE: I get scared that people care too much about the visuals of food now. I guess that’s always been an important part of eating, but now it’s like, a rainbow colored bagel, or seeing how far cheese can stretch. I hope that people still care about how food actually tastes.

CHAU: Yeah, totally. I don’t love that kind of stuff, really. I guess I used to do that more a few years ago and now I kind of shy away from it.  It’s never that good.

LEE: Would you ever open your own restaurant? Surely, you’ve thought about it.

CHAU: I haven’t really, because the whole point of Food Baby is that I like to spend time with my family. I like to eat with them, and I know that if you open a restaurant it’s all-consuming. I mean, I love ice cream. It could be fun to have an ice cream shop. I love pizza, that sounds fun. But you don’t really get to spend time with your family, and that’s important to me.

LEE: How old are your kids now?

CHAU: 11, nine and six. We’re out of the thick of it now. Everyone can wipe their own ass.

LEE: So, no more Food Baby?

CHAU: No more baby.