Andy Baraghani is more afraid of becoming stagnant than he is of dying. Stagnancy, he’s quick to clarify, is different from stillness. Stagnancy is like a fetid pond; stillness is meditative. Baraghani seems to be at risk of neither.
It is late morning on the first actually chilly day of autumn and we are staring one another down across a stainless-steel prep table, which has been dragooned into use as an island in his outrageously good-looking kitchen. He is about to make me scones—salty-sweet ones with dates and lemon zest, an offering under development for his forthcoming café Ditto. But first, we’ll need to pop out for cream.
Quite literally in motion since I arrived, Baraghani finishes his point on stagnancy: He fears a life in which he is not learning, moving, or evolving “as a writer, a cook, and a good gay,” he says.
He lives just a few blocks from the Union Square Greenmarket, where niche pepper varieties are currently splayed in colorful fractals across folding tables. We have just completed a ground floor tour of the apartment that the chef–cum writer–cum chef shares with his husband Keith Pollock. Now, he moves across the kitchen and pauses at the Crittall-style window. It gives me 30 seconds to take inventory of his countertop alliums.
These details feel important. Baraghani has become a sort of standard-bearer for exquisite seasonal produce, and the exquisite life one can lead preparing such stuff. I clock a couple of shallots, which sit in a Swid Powell bowl beside five heirloom tomatoes. It occurs to me that even onions are more beautiful in Baraghani’s universe.
“Oh,” he says casually, following my gaze. “Torpedo shallots.” As if all of our countertops look like this.
In the decade or so since he became a household name for a certain set of a certain era (food-obsessed aesthetes who love an acidic drizzle and a hard, salty cheese), as a video star for a certain magazine—okay, this one—his fandom has only continued to explode.
His debut cookbook, The Cook You Want to Be, was a New York Times bestseller and the recipient of a James Beard Award. He has more than 370,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. He’s been called “the Internet boyfriend of our dreams.” Vogue covered his wedding. The New York Times published his ideal Thanksgiving menu. In the last 24 hours alone, Baraghani has been busy beating out creative director Terrence O’Connor for a Best Body prize at the podcast How Long Gone’s inaugural “Goneies” Award Show, (Baraghani was asked to remove his blazer to reveal a form-fitting Dario Vitale-era Versace pink tank top) before running into David Tanis while shopping for groceries.
When Baraghani announced he would be opening a restaurant this fall near Union Square with restaurateur Michael Silber, publications began tripping over themselves to cover the news. Still, he says, few have pushed him on the true meaning of the name Ditto. Perhaps they were too busy trying to keep up.
Baraghani takes a seat on one of the iron stools beside the prep table and there is a rare, brief silence, which is broken almost immediately by the tinny opening notes of a techno song emanating from the crew performing a renovation on the lower floor. I inquire about his cortisol levels as he juggles opening Ditto a few blocks away, the second cookbook he has just shot in this apartment, and now the remodel below us.
Baraghani grins. “I feel calm,” he insists. “If something goes wrong, I can fix it, because I feel pretty clear on what I want to achieve.”
He has spent the last 10 years peppering his recipes with caveats. “I know that my food may be a touch too lemony for some,” he writes in The Cook You Want To Be. “And that I use what has been called a ridiculous amount of herbs.”
His background too. Years ago, he penned an essay for this magazine about growing up Iranian in a post-9/11 America; he started to go by Andy instead of Andisheh and bought an “ITALIAN STALLION” tee shirt. He wrote about learning to accept his sexuality in restaurant kitchens, where he rarely encountered other gay men, and in his family life. He grew up in the Bay Area, the son of parents who had emigrated from Iran to Berkeley in 1977. The piece ended with an admission: “So as nice as it would be for this story to end with that Iran feature or getting my dream job at Bon Appétit, the truth is that I’m still trying to figure things out. It’s not always steady progress.”
Since I had a baby six weeks ago, I have been walking around floored that the adults in my life could have ever been children, but with Andy, I don’t have to work too hard to picture it. He has a particularly cheerful sense of wonder. When I ask about it, he says it comes from his upbringing. His parents were political activists. Andy’s mother worked as an aesthetician (yes, he established his famous skincare routine early). He grew up surrounded by a diverse community of immigrants who would invite his family to their celebrations and into their homes, where a young Baraghani got to taste dishes from far-flung places. After he landed in New York, he would take respite in stints abroad, traveling from hostel to hostel so he could eat his way across Vietnam, Lebanon, and Turkey.
Now, though, Baraghani says he is done footnoting his vision. In the intervening years since that essay, Baraghani has written and cooked and tasted at warp speed. He was bound to self-actualize in the same timeframe it took the rest of us to figure out how to style barrel-legged pants. Or perhaps it’s the reality of having to reckon with what he can’t change: In 2024, after a battle with small-cell lung cancer, his beloved father passed away. Baraghani tells me that before it was stagnancy, his greatest fear was losing a parent. He has since learned that loss isn’t something to solve, but a tremendous void one must learn to live with.
“There’s an explicit confidence you’ll see [at Ditto,]” he says. The dishes will weave together all of the threads of Baraghani-ism: seasonal vegetables prepared deftly with Persian flourishes, blending tart and sour and aromatic with a firm point-of-view. If the specifics seem hard to picture, I think that might be the point. Baraghani has thrived historically by taking a straightforward-seeming dish and twisting it just off-kilter, so it is a few degrees punchier and much more beautiful than you were expecting. The result is food that is as much about the people and places evoked by the flavors as it is about aesthetic provocation. (That Italian Stallion shirt, he tells me, is long gone.)
Literally speaking, Ditto will be a revival of the sort of counter-service restaurant Baraghani has long adored, from Gjusta in Los Angeles to City Bakery in New York. He and Silber sprang for a shiny rotisserie oven, for what they’re calling a “beyond chicken program,” with plans for spit-roasted porchetta, romanesco, and cabbage.
The goal is dishes that are palpably human, in a space Baraghani hopes will seem accessible to everyone. It was important for both owners to find a space in a hub neighborhood. With the storefront they chose, a former Agnès B. on 16th Street, Greenmarket shoppers can stop by for a selection of California-ish sides and salads displayed Ottolenghi-style, counter pastries, or just to peruse marketplace provisions: tahini, harissa, dates (and for now,no tinned fish). Maybe, one day, they’ll stay open for dinner service, but for now the plan is breakfast and lunch.
Suddenly Baraghani is moving again, reaching for his phone to show me a photo of a dish he would have loved to serve, had Con Ed turned on the gas in time for a September opening: a mound of spicy tuna salad piled perkily in a blanched tomato, with a turret of scallion greens.
The sight makes me hungry and I realize we still haven’t gone out for that cream. Ninety minutes have passed and I have yet to ask any of the questions I’d prepared for Baraghani, who keeps surprising me with disclosures. (Such as: he did not speak until he was three years old.)
Suddenly, it is time to head to Ditto for a tour, cream and scones be damned.
As we walk over, I ask about the restaurant’s name. He asks if I’ve seen the movie Ghost. I have, but not for a while. “It’s another way to say ‘I love you,’” he says simply, before disappearing to join a meeting.
Later, I dig up that scene Baraghani mentioned and press play. In it, Whoopi Goldberg tries to convince a frustrated Demi Moore that her recently deceased boyfriend has returned as a ghost. Moore jumps up in disbelief to flee the restaurant as Patrick Swayze, the boyfriend, scrambles to find a way to prove to her that he’s right there. “Tell her ‘ditto,’” he urges Goldberg, who screams “ditto” after Moore as she bolts. “Ditto!” It’s their code word for, I love you too.
Moore stops in her tracks and turns, her gaze connecting with a man she misses, who she isn’t totally sure is there.
And for the first time in a while, she is no longer in motion. She is still.
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