My friends and I spend far too much time talking about Albert Cho. We M normally do this on a boozy Saturday evening as we scroll through his hugely popular Instagram account, Eat Lit Food, trying to decide whether to spend our measly salaries on doughy noodles or pasta.
Last time we did this, we settled on noodles. Between slurps, we tore into the pettiness of his public tantrum over not receiving free samples of Whittaker's latest chocolate, all agreeing to unfollow him after dinner. None of us have.
With 75,000 followers, Cho is one of New Zealand's leading food influencers, but his rise and role within the food scene is unconventional. For starters, he maintains a day job in Auckland marketing agency Mark by South. And his highly opinionated Instagram-caption reviews of the city's restaurants and eateries are as known for their (often sexually) explicit rambling as they are for dictating what's hot and what's not.
In a Zoom interview with the Listener, Cho is right on form. His skin is flawless for the camera, accentuating his sharp jawline - he was, after all, briefly an international model - and he has a couple of things to declare. It is, he says, time for people to stop obsessing over burrata at restaurants. It is also time for him to finally share his story, which he has done in a new book, I Love My Stupid Life.
A memoir at the ripe old age of 25 might seem absurd, but Cho who grew up on Auckland's North Shore with a sister and South Korean immigrant parents has already accumulated plenty of interesting anecdotes in his life. And behind the modelling and relishing the self-described "C-list celebrity fame" there is a dark side: he has been a victim of racist online frenzies; experienced the extreme emotions involved in disordered eating and substance addiction; and, as a young child, was sexually abused by someone connected to his family, a situation he only came to understand later in his life.
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