Binging with Babish: YouTube star, Mendon native has quirky appeal

When Andrew Rea was a high-school student at The Harley School in Brighton, he helped his classmates make a campaign video for student council. His friend, Sawyer Jacobs, remembers playing Saddam Hussein in that video, which Jacobs recalls only as "gruesome."

"You can’t show this,” was the response from The Harley School administration, a point of view that Jacobs says is obvious in retrospect.

It's that out-of-the-box creativity, demonstrated in his younger days, that has made Rea a YouTube star — and he's in the process of taking that success to the next level.

Rea is the host of the YouTube cooking show Binging With Babish, which has a whopping 2.5 million subscribers. Named for a minor character on The West Wing, Binging with Babish depicts Rea replicating dishes from pop culture with a keen eye for detail. It has a fast pace and uses an unusual hands-and-torso-only camera angle; Rea's distinctive, velvety voice and deadpan humor contribute to its appeal. The production values are impeccable, reflecting Rea's film degree from Hofstra University and time spent working in the film industry.

The quirky appeal of Binging with Babish

The Mendon native recently filmed an episode of Binging with Babish at his alma mater as a group of energetic male teenage fans hung on his every move.

The recipe: cheesy blasters from the television show 30 Rock. While a frozen Wegmans pizza baked in the oven, Rea cooked hot dogs along with slabs of Monterey Jack cheese. He placed the gooey, cheesy hot dogs on the hot pizza and rolled it all up, burrito style, and cut it in half. The young men ate it up, literally and figuratively, relishing both the trashy dish and the experience of being a part of the production.

Cheesy blasters are nowhere near the most ludicrous dish he has re-created. Take the Fifteen-Flavor Taco, from a Taco Town commercial bit that aired on Saturday Night Live in 2005.

The process started with a simple crunchy taco stuffed with beef, tomatoes, lettuce, a southwestern sauce and nacho cheese. Next, he added a flour tortilla smeared with refried beans, as well as a toasted tortilla with Monterey jack cheese. He nestled that in a chalupa with guacamole sauce, then wrapped it all in a corn husk. The next layer was a crêpe with egg, cheese, sausage and mushrooms.

That all was wrapped in a frozen pizza and then a giant blueberry pancake. The entire creation was coated with beer batter, placed in a giant pot of 350-degree oil, fried and served in a commemorative tote bag filled with spicy vegetarian chili.

“I can’t believe that this is pretty good,” Rea commented at the end.

Most watched videos

His most watched videos have been based on animation: the Krabby Patty from Spongebob Squarepants (6.7 million views), ratatouille from Ratatouille (6 million views), Jake’s perfect sandwich from Adventure Time (6.2 million views) and burgers from Bob’s Burgers (5.7 million views).



Rea says he generally has a sense for which episodes will blow up, but he is often surprised. His episode on The Garbage Plate was one that exceeded expectations. (Rea partakes in a plate whenever he visits the area to see his father and his brother's family.)

He had heard a rumor that the Nick Tahou's sauce was made from the scrapings from burgers cooked on the flat top, so he employed a technique to create crisp pieces of ground beef in the mixture. He also upgraded the macaroni salad by using orecchiette ear-shape pasta instead of elbow macaroni, added sour cream to the mayo — "just a coat" — and throwing in peppadew peppers for a flavorful kick.

"The mac salad that normally goes with a Garbage Plate is not that great," he said. "That was the best mac salad I've ever had."

The video now tallies 2.8 million views, which exceeded Rea's expectations.

"Not only was it an obscure dish but it was attached to a relatively obscure movie," he said. The movie, The Place Beyond The Pines, didn't show the dish, but only mentioned it by name. He attributes some of that episode's success to fellow YouTube star and Rochester-area native Jenna Marbles, who did a video on Garbage Plates shortly before Rea's.

"I think that the internet was having its moment with Garbage Plates," he said. "The world was having its little fascination with our gross official dish," he said jokingly, affection in his voice.

From Babish to Binge Entertainment

During the past several months, Rea has launched several Babish spin-off projects:

• A second YouTube cooking show, Basics with Babish, actually shows Rea talking to the camera and making conventional dishes.

• Because fans had told him that they found his voice to be calming, Rea started a podcast, Bedtime with Babish, during which he reads poetry and classics.

• Rea published Eat What You Watch: A Cookbook for Movie Lovers in 2017. The combination coffee table book and cookbook includes recipes from classic and cult films. A Binging With Babish companion cookbook is due to be published in 2019.

• In 2019, he will embark on a live tour, taking a variety show approach to cooking demonstrations. He hopes to take along a food truck that serves recipes from movies.

New digs

He recently moved from a small Harlem apartment to a larger place in Soho. When construction is complete, his new digs will have a full studio kitchen complete with large banks of lights, three cameras, a robotic camera slider and other "cool toys" to streamline the show's production.

In the living room are two desks — one for Andrew and another for Jacobs, his friend from the video. A fellow 2005 Harley grad, Jacobs left his job as an attorney at Conde Nast to help Rea complete ambitious plans to create an entertainment brand called Binge Entertainment. Their plan is to amass the work of other YouTubers to create "enriching, enlivening, entertaining but informative content."

"I like to call it the group of goofballs that know what we're doing — we don't take ourselves seriously, we show our mistakes and we have fun doing it," Rea said. "We hope that you leave it both entertained and also having learned something and grown in some way."

“The entertainment landscape is changing,” Rea said. There’s an “arms race for content” on YouTube, and he plans to take advantage.

TRACYS@Gannett.com