The first time you see Brad Leone on It’s Alive With Brad, he f*cks up. Leone is tending to vats of kombucha, talking to the camera as he works a siphon to move liquid between containers when the tube slips out of his hand, then out of the bottle and onto the floor. “Oh god, oh god, oh cut,” Leone says, desperately trying to stop the fermented liquid from spilling onto the pristine tile floor of the Bon Appétit test kitchen, located on the 35th floor of One World Trade Center. “Cut Vin!” Leone shouts to now-former BA cameraman Vincent Cross, but the camera keeps rolling. The next shot you see the host sadly unfurling paper towels while other BA employees tease him. But once everything is up and running again, Leone’s expertise is soon revealed. What follows is a relatively scientific, extremely funny nine-minute video about the process of making the fermented drink — complete with pop-up citations, weird sounds, and video effects that punctuate jokes made by and at the expense of Leone. Three years after it was published, it’s been viewed more than 2.9 million times on YouTube. In the years since, It’s Alive With Brad went on to explore other fermented food items like cultured butter, sauerkraut, and kimchi. As viewership grew, it became the model for how Condé Nast learned to approach video online for its flagship culinary magazine. At first blush, it’s remarkable that Bon Appétit took its test kitchen manager and made him the face — and hands — of everything it represents in streaming video. But once you meet Brad Leone, you quickly learn he’s far more than a silly guy from New Jersey who specializes in fermentation. To call Leone a celebrity chef would probably be inaccurate. He’s definitely internet famous, though, which is to say he’s instantly recognizable to a legion of people who have seen him on YouTube, gleefully fermenting things high above lower Manhattan. Tens of millions have watched his Bon Appétit videos, he has more than 600,000 followers on Instagram as of this writing, and he’s made appearances on non-BA shows like Hot Ones and Late Night with Seth Meyers. Bon Appétit’s videos have their own Twitter “out of context” account and inspired a meme page on Instagram with 235,000+ followers (the account’s picture is, of course, of Leone), while a certain segment of Reddit breaks down his episodes and crossovers into other BA test kitchen series. The Marvel Cinematic Universe of cooking, if you will. Bringing Brad to the masses, however, bucked a considerable amount of conventional wisdom about what cooking looks like online, especially for a magazine like Bon Appétit. In a sea of top-down, fast-forwarded videos of dishes springing to life, the magazine’s offerings look strikingly different from the “hands and pans” videos that dominated Facebook feeds and have become memes of their own. Much of that has to do with Brad, and how quickly his quirky videos took off once they hit YouTube. “Putting Brad in a conventional cooking show environment didn’t make any sense,” says Matt Duckor, vice president and head of programming lifestyle and style for Condé Nast. Duckor recalled a story I’d heard a few different times about Leone and other Bon Appétit staffers attending a “media training” run by a woman who was far from impressed by the beanie-clad kitchen manager. Each chef did a test video in a traditionally serious stand-up style. Leone called his “terrible,” and it was bad enough that he and Cross decided to try something different.

“People like hanging out with him. He’s always doing weird projects and stuff in the kitchen. Just go get a camera and follow him around,” Leone explains, detailing how the first It’s Alive With Brad was shot. Leone told me the kombucha episode “sat on a hard drive in someone’s drawer” for nearly a year until Matt Hunziker edited what became the first episode, full of floating “Brad Says” heads and text graphics reminiscent of Pop Up Video and Talk Soup. “It almost never happened,” Leone says. “They were finally convinced, just put it out. Who cares? Take a risk. What’s the worst that can happen? No one watches it and we delete it. Can you delete things from the Internet? I don’t know.” You can try, but Bon Appétit didn’t have to. The video became a cult hit on YouTube, carving its own lane in the “quirky” brand of cooking videos — which range from gross food challenges to amateur chefs carving out a following using humor and general weirdness. It’s a style that other companies are starting to mimic, too, passing the all-important “authenticity test” with flying colors. That it worked so well for Leone, however, speaks less to the power of Bon Appétit’s reputation and more for how much fun the host made it look to poke around in the test kitchen fermenting things. It’s Alive is a hangout show, perhaps more than even a cooking show. In-person and online, Leone has a certain Newman-esque quality of natural affability. His thick northern New Jersey accent turns water to “wurder” and he often punctuates sentences with a quick two-part laugh. He uses filler words like “bing” and “bang” and “boom” that pop up, notated, on screen. A decade ago, he was a carpenter, working in construction and paving roads. He then “took a risk,” secured a loan to move to New York, and got into culinary school. He didn’t want to work in a restaurant, though, and took a Condé Nast internship after graduation. Once the internship ran out, Leone learned the kitchen was restructuring and they’d need someone at the very bottom of the ladder. Dishes, sweeping, that sort of stuff. Over the course of nine years, he parlayed his low-level gig into the test kitchen assistant, then the kitchen manager when he started filming It’s Alive. “I basically took a job as a glorified dishwasher and just kind of worked my way up.” The BA kitchen itself — full of stainless steel tables and experimental appliances — has become a character all its own. Condé Nast has a full kitchen studio in Industry City in Brooklyn, but BA’s move to One World Trade in 2016 put their working test kitchen high above Manhattan. It became the natural location to shoot videos, often with other chefs working and interacting in the background — capturing a certain spontaneous and collaborative element.

“No one would ever think of it as a video shooting space,” Duckor says. “There’s floor to ceiling windows with uncontrollable light sources. But that just sort of adds to the realness of what we’re doing. People can see themselves popping into the test kitchen.” In-person, the kitchen is far smaller than it looks on YouTube. The entrance is behind the refrigerator, and unseen behind the camera are a few conference rooms where BA photoshoots and other meetings take place. The run and gun vibe adds some element of surprise to what happens on camera and the editors seem all too ready for happy accidents. “It’s really just a room for these people to all do what they do,” Duckor said. “There’s no real magic to it aside from these incredible people who work together every day.” For Leone, that work is now shooting videos full-time. His popularity has allowed BA to expand It’s Alive, including a native streaming app with its content available beyond YouTube. With It’s Alive: Goin’ Places, the Brad show has gone on the road much more often, with longer runtimes and shooting in locations like a Sotol distillery in Texas and spearfishing in Hawaii. For Leone, the trips are fun, but they also provide an opportunity to do something he’s truly passionate about: telling the story of where our food comes from. “At the end of the day I think food is a universal language, and so is humor,” he says. “Combining that with the educational and flecks of important stories and facts and situations that are happening revolving around the planet and the people… I think it’s great. It’s a great opportunity to flex that platform for not only me but Condé Nast and Bon Appétit to really, you know, have that kind of three-point punch of entertainment, fun, and educational stuff to really get behind some important stuff.” Goin’ Places — complete with drone shots, well-edited musical cues, and interviews — feels miles removed from Leone spilling kombucha on the test kitchen floor. Which is good, because it’s much closer to the kind of show Leone wants to make. The jokes are still there and Leone is still himself, but the story is not about Leone’s journey as much as it is a spotlight on others doing interesting things with food and drink. Leone’s insatiable curiosity, captured in those first It’s Alive episodes, is at its most potent when he’s off seeing the world. Like the first video outside of the test kitchen, when he visited an oyster farm in Duxbury, Massachusetts, gleefully learning how responsible oyster harvesting and shucking happens in the real world. “I was kind of lobbying for lack of a better word, ‘Hey, let’s go do these things,’” he says. “Because fermentation’s great but in my mind, I always wanted to tell those other stories. My dream is telling where food comes from and connecting people back to food. So I’m glad it progressively started to allow me to do that.”