Antoni Porowski never said he was a chef, but he definitely knows his way around a kitchen.

As the resident food and wine guy on “Queer Eye,” which had its premiere on Netflix in February, he is responsible for imparting humble lessons in home cooking to men who are undergoing weeklong transformations. Mr. Porowski’s food demonstrations are just part of a series of self-improvement seminars the show’s subjects attend. They go shopping with Tan France. They get groomed by Jonathan Van Ness. They experience “culture” with Karamo Brown. And the show’s interior designer, Bobby Berk, makes their homes livable and often gorgeous.

These makeovers are master classes in empathy. The Fab Five pepper their subjects with compliments, I-know-where-you’re-coming-froms and hugs.

But the cooking classes have brought out the worst in viewers, many of whom feel that Mr. Porowski’s dishes are overly simplistic. Their loud critiques have fueled what The New Yorker’s food correspondent Helen Rosner called a “culinary conspiracy theory.”

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, at his Brooklyn apartment, Mr. Porowski whipped up a minimalist spaghetti and meatballs that proved that sometimes simple is anything but simplistic.