Pierce Abernathy

Couscous salad and labneh dip with the delectable model, social-media chef, and sustainability influencer.

- BROCK COLYAR

I LIKE TO COOK. It's how I show love," Pierce Abernathy tells me while deftly slicing an eggplant. I try not to swoon, staring at his hands. I mean... his knife skills. "I was going to butcher a whole fish for you. I thought that might be a little too much," he says.

We're in Abernathy's full-floor Crown Heights apartment-high ceilings, pocket doors, big fireplaces (he says it once belonged to a fur trader)-making a couscous salad. With a message. This particular couscous we'd be eating, he informs me, comes from a women's farming collective in Palestine. "Good grains!" he chirps.

Pretty much everyone I know has a crush on the 29-year-old Instagram chef and model these days. Scroll his socials-he has 454,000 followers on Instagram and 3.5 million likes on Tik Tok (where his handle is @pierzza for some reason) and it's easy to fall into a fantasy of this wholesome boy with long, center-parted locks and wire-rimmed glasses serving you breakfast in bed in his plaid robe and bringing you flowers from the farmers' market. Watching him at home washing a cucumber or licking labneh off his pinkie finger, I almost let out a completely inappropriate "Yes, chef," though to be honest, his version of kitchen life couldn't be further from the sweaty scramble seen on The Bear. For Abernathy, it all seems to come together without much fuss or mess.

But we don't follow this sample-size kid from Kentucky to learn how to cook, exactly. It's revealing that he calls his content his "journal entries." The videos he posts are more ASMR than instructional and don't get bogged down in tedious step-by-steps. Click on one and you'll see his pretty face, then his pretty farm-fresh ingredients, and... seconds later, a pretty little snack.