Molly Baz

Dinner at a SoCal steakhouse with Molly Baz, who built a recipe empire on Morty-D and Cae Sal

- LAUREN BANS

WHEN THE Caesar-salad cart rolls up at the Dal Rae steakhouse, Molly Baz whips out her phone and starts recording. "I'm sometimes an annoying person to go to dinner with?" she says. But it's part of the job. She's self-aware enough about what life as a social-media-famous chef requires. "It's like I'm trying to sell me, not just my recipes," Baz says. "What I look like, what I sound like, what I'm eating. It's trippy." I'd insisted Baz, 35, take charge of the ordering. She's the one with a best-selling cookbook, a subscribers-only recipe club, and 720,000 Instagram followers who fangirl in the comments whenever she posts a cooking Reel. If, a century ago, Betty Crocker marketed the idea of the perfect housewife, baking the day away for her husband and children, Baz is offering the chill wife in her airy, Gen-Z-yellow kitchen (featured, naturally, in Domino) hosting pool parties for her furniture-designer husband and effortlessly cool friends. It’s a few weeks out from the publication of her second cookbook, More Is More, and Baz is a bona fide celebrity. At least in some circles. No one has come up to her tonight, but we’re also the youngest people here by at least 20 years. “If I go to Bub and Grandma’s in Eagle Rock, there will be four encounters in one lunch,” she says. Tonight is a nice change of pace: “No one has any fucking clue who I am. It’s epic.”