The Shameless Impropriety of Joshua Weissman: An investigation into the provenance of Weissman’s recipes led to many of his former employees who described exploitive behavior, patterns of abuse, and pervasive sexual misconduct.
On Joshua Weissman’s website, in a first-person narrative, he referred to himself as one of the most renowned chefs in the world. More apt would be to describe Weissman as the head of a food media production company and the face of his company’s YouTube channels. Weissman’s brand was built through cooking videos. With over 10-million YouTube subscribers, the 29-year-old has been one of the 50 largest food-based accounts on the platform, and he has been big enough to support a full-time staff for cooking research and development, production, and video editing.
In Weissman’s early days with a full-time staff, video concepts were brainstormed by Weissman and his team, and once an idea was decided, Weissman would give a recipe to his defacto culinary director. The culinary director, along with an assistant, did prep work, and executed and tested the recipe. I was told that when doing a shoot, Weissman would go to the kitchen, make a video, and leave and that there wasn’t much cooking from Weissman outside of what was filmed for videos.
Weissman’s recipe development process was described to me as a secret endeavor. A former employee told me, I would see him on his computer all the time, and a different employee said that he will pull up a recipe out of nowhere. Both quotes aligned with accounts from other staffers. I was told that Weissman instructed staff to change the ingredient quantities on recipes, but one employee assumed at the time that Weissman was interested in tweaking his own numbers.
