Laurent Dagenais keeps the cooking real (and the people love him for it)

Laurent Dagenais’ airy kitchen is just the way it looks in his videos, with the big sliding window overlooking his balcony. There’s a huge gas stovetop, that kitchen-envy oven with the French doors, and a magnetic bar on the wall with the cheery trained chef’s prized knives. This bright space is where Dagenais’ two million followers on TikTok – and almost the same number of fans on Instagram – see him slice, dice, sauté, stew, and throw his fork over his shoulder when he’s finished tasting one of his delicious creations.

Dagenais and his partner Amandine Francoeur are the team driving his success. He does the cooking (and the cleaning, she tells me), and she does the filming. They’re warm and welcoming when I visit their spiral staircase walk-up in the heart of Montreal’s leafy Rosemont district on a Saturday morning, finishing up the week’s laundry – and each other’s sentences – as they recount in French and English what’s happened to them over the past two and a half years.

“It started randomly,” Dagenais recalls. “We had 10 TikTok followers in April 2021, and then one night – after the famous gravlax video – we woke up to all these notifications.” They kept going, with fried chicken sandwiches, fire-roasted lamb leg, foraged wild garlic pizza, and grilled octopus. And the number of followers kept increasing, including on YouTube.

Dagenais had never liked sitting in a chair at school, he tells me; he’d started working in a skate shop and then went to a culinary trade school near his home, learning everything from butchery to pastry, and loved it all. He worked in Montreal at Le Local (which no longer exists), and went out to Whistler, British Columbia, to snowboard and cook, ending up at top-ranked Araxi.

Restaurant work wasn’t for him, though: there was too much pressure. (He does attribute his swift chopping skills to those pressures, though, because there’s never enough time in a professional kitchen.) When he broke his arm snowboarding, he came back to Montreal and took a break from cooking professionally. He couldn’t stay away for long. “I like knives, and I like to chop stuff!” he declares.

That passion for cooking and eating is key to understanding what makes him so likeable on screen. Each video starts with an invitation: “Let’s make some…short ribs! sushi! fettuccine alfredo!” he calls out, manifesting an infectious energy that’s entirely genuine. His signature caps – baseball and Québecois knitted tuques – and his penchant for taking a big nip from the wine bottle when he cooks just add to the charm. (There’s the occasional puff from a legal-in-Canada blunt; Dagenais originally intended to focus on cooking with cannabis but abandoned that notion early on.)

Are you having as good a time as it looks? I ask. “One hundred percent,” says Dagenais, Francoeur nodding in agreement. “It’s not a front. This brings me happiness, and I’m less stressed than when I worked in restaurants.

“I make cooking approachable,” Dagenais reflects. “Chefs and home cooks want to know how to make something from the beginning: that’s how it should be. I don’t think I come off as someone who takes himself too seriously. We don’t pretend to be working at a Michelin-starred place.”

“Laurent seasons well, chops well, and always uses quality ingredients,” says David Gauthier, Montreal chef and co-owner of the sleek Bar St-Denis which Dagenais visits online and served as the venue for the launch of his first cookbook, Toujours Faim. (The English version, Always Hungry, comes out on 26 September.)

Dagenais and Gauthier grew up together on Montreal’s South Shore, and mutual admiration binds them. “He’s my mentor,” Dagenais says of Gauthier, who taught him how to make drunken noodles during 3am post-service sessions when they both got off their restaurant shifts. “You can see he knows how to cook,” says Gauthier. “He’s not just some guy who slaps down a steak; he takes the right steps, he’s creative, and he’s incredibly talented.”

Taking the right steps is important to Dagenais. He loves that most of his followers are young, though he has older fans, too. His popular lasagna – over 820,000 likes on Instagram at the time of writing – exemplifies his approach. Accompanied by an Andrea Bocelli soundtrack, Dagenais masterfully minces a mirepoix, adds ground meat and a few bottles of wine as the base of his ragù, and leaves it to simmer while he prepares béchamel from scratch and rolls out homemade pasta into a remarkably beautiful layered dish.

“That lasagna is not the kind of thing you’re going to think about making on a Monday night at 6pm,” Dagenais says with a laugh. “It takes about five, six hours to make. The light changes while we’re making it and shooting it! But good cooking takes time; people appreciate that.”

Chris Bianco, the James Beard Award-winning restaurateur, pizzaiolo, and organic tomato purveyor loves Dagenais’ unique style. “Each frame shot of his work has the sight or sound of a significant moment, each part illuminating the sum of his intention,” Bianco says. “It’s always with a great, soulful cooking sense, and most importantly, a great sense of humour.”

An increase in followers goes hand in hand with a profusion of collaboration offers, making Dagenais a desirable partner for sponsors. As Bianco says, Dagenais “makes things fast, fun, and delicious: what’s not to love?”

That love now comes from both local and global companies. Always true to his roots, Dagenais shares his love for Montreal bagels and maple syrup. He’s worked with Québec brand La Belle Excuse since the beginning, initially with their Mediterranean sea salts and most recently collaborating on a co-branded Greek olive oil. And there’s more in the works.

Dagenais and Francoeur are about to head to nearby Jean Talon Market, one of the largest open-air farmer’s markets in North America, to do their shopping. It’s a field trip he loves – he was featured in a car advert driving there and shopping at his favourite vendors – and he’s excited to see summer’s produce unfold.

He’s excited, too, about his followers and their journey with him.

“When somebody watches the videos and says, I’m getting in my car, I’m going to the market, I’m buying all the ingredients, I’ll cook at home for five hours, and post it proudly on Instagram, tagging me, that’s great,” Dagenais says. “It’s worth all the flowers in the world, and I’m grateful every day for this.”

Photos courtesy of Robert Rose Inc., by Laurent Dagenais © 2023 www.robertrose.ca Reprinted with permission. Available where books are sold.

Three chefs Laurent Dagenais loves

Whooghys/@whoogys

"We’ve been working together for a while, and this summer Hugo’s rented a house on the Côte d’Azur to play pétanque, cook, swim, and drink some rosé and some pastis together."

Matty Matheson/@mattymatheson

"I’m a fanboy! Matty’s been an inspiration for a long time; he opened the way to be this kind of digital chef. We’re shooting in September at one of his studios, and we’ll be eating at his Prime Seafood."

Padma Lakshmi/@padmalakshmi

"Padma is everything."