32-year-old Brian Manowitz, better known as the Vegan Black Metal Chef, has one of the most unusual cooking shows on the internet. Dressed in his vinyl Armor of Death and boasting a KISS-inspired face paint mask, he cooks all kinds of delicious vegan meals to the sound of black metal.
Manowitz, a freelance sound engineer from Orlando, has been a vegan for the last 13 years. He’s also a big fan of black metal music, so he decided to combine both of his passions into a unique and entertaining project known as Vegan Black Metal Chef. He set up a site where he posts recipes and photos of his delicious cooking, but it was his YouTube channel that brought him worldwide fame a couple of years ago. Brian’s videos always open to the sound thunderous drums and distorted guitar riffs, and show him in his dark dungeon-like kitchen decorated with leather-bound cabinets, medieval chopping tools and spooky candles, as he explains how to prepare vegan dishes with a crackly voice. All vegetables are “butchered” with his collection of awesome knives, or smashed with a mace, and cooked on a pentagram stove altar. “You can’t summon the essence of Satan into your food without the pentagrams,” Manowitz says.
The Vegan Black Metal Chef was an instant hit. The first video he uploaded to YouTube in 2011 got over 2 million views, and everyone was talking about this black metal guy cooking vegan food. He did interviews with major media outlets, and was close to getting his own show on MTV. Unfortunately, the network pulled back deeming the concept too inaccessible. Although none of his subsequent materials had the success of the famous Pad Thai video, he had already created a whole new niche and garnered a loyal following. But for the Vegan Black Metal Chef, it’s not about becoming popular. Sure, he wanted to gain some attention, but only to fulfill the two purposes of his project: 1. “to help answer the question “what do vegans eat”/show vegan cooking in the most informative and fun way possible while making some great music to go along with it,” and 2. “to help people bring consciousness to their lives and actions.”
Asked about how he creates an episode for his internet show, Brian Manowitz said he usually starts by thinking about what he is going to prepare. He then puts on his vinyl Armor of Death, paint his Mask of Demons and goes into the kitchen. Using a Canon digital SLR with a swivel screen and a tripod, he starts shooting himself while chopping and cooking the foods. He has to do it all at night, so there’s no sunlight coming through the windows and the process goes on until about four or five in the morning. But filming is the easy part. The Orlando-based sound engineer says he usually spends between ten days and two weeks adding the music and the voice-overs to his videos. He puts a microphone in front of the computer and sings along as the video plays. It’s a painstaking process, but the Vegan Black Metal Chef is proud to do it all himself.
Brian makes it clear that he has no experience as a chef. Everything that’s presented in his videos he has learned from the “school of experimentation”.
via Laughing Squid
