Owen Han didn’t know how much the internet loves sandwiches when he posted a TikTok video of grilled chicken, bacon, smashed avocado and chipotle mayo between two slices of sourdough bread one day in the summer of 2021. But he soon found out.
“It was my first video to break a million views,” says Han in his Venice studio apartment, where a large kitchen takes up most of the small, tidy space, outfitted with a six-burner range with built-in griddle, more knives and pans than some restaurants and a deli-style meat slicer.
“The way in which it happened was kind of just by chance,” he says. “I was planning on filming a cioppino, which is a fish stew. It takes a lot of time, has a lot of ingredients, and I was feeling a little bit lazy, so I was like, ‘You know what? Let me just film making my lunch.’”
Three years later, Han has a following of 4.3 million on TikTok, 2.2 million on Instagram and nearly 800,000 dedicated YouTube fans. His first cookbook, “Stacked: The Art of Making the Perfect Sandwich,” will be released by Harvest on Oct. 15, when he kicks off a coast-to-coast tour. And he has just returned from cooking at a pop-up in Ibiza and a cheesemaking tour in Oregon with Tillamook, one of the many brands wooing him for content.
Even by TikTok standards, which have created a new equation for fame, Han’s rise was meteoric. Based on the success of that chicken-bacon-avo sando, “I just figured, let me try another one, which happened to be the steak sandwich, which is on the [cookbook] cover, and that broke 10 million views. I was like, wow, this is crazy. People like sandwiches, and I also like sharing my passion for sandwiches.”
He followed that up with a breakfast sandwich. “And then from there, people were already dubbing me ‘the sandwich guy.’ It kind of has a good ring to it,” says Han, being modest.
He was already the Sandwich King.
‘It’s a comfort thing’
And that was just the start. His tomahawk steak sammie has reached almost 13 million TikTok views. Chicken tikka wrap: 16.6 million. Open-face ham and cheese: 24 million. Beef shawarma wrapped in laffa: 52.3 million (that’s more than the entire population of South Korea).
Tall and dark-haired, Han barely speaks in a majority of his videos. They almost always start the same: He squishes the sandwich, cuts into it with a smooth slice or thwacking chop, takes a big crunchy bite and beams a big smile. And though quick edits and ASMR are nothing new to social media, the way he slaps deli meats and splatters sauces on bread obviously resonates with his audience.
OG Spicy Chicken Sandwich With Avocado And Bacon
Why do people love sandwiches so much? “I think what it comes down to is it’s a comfort thing, it’s such a comforting food,” says Han. “I mean, tons of memories come to mind,” including his Italian grandmother’s pan e Nutella and the sandwich of the day at his high school cafeteria in Sarasota, Fla. “I loved the cafeteria staff. I remember super vividly Friday was tuna melts. Thursday was burger. No matter what was being served, I’m always getting the sandwich.”
Born in Milan and raised in Florida, Han spent summers with his grandmother in a tiny village in the mountains of Tuscany, with no Wi-Fi until recently. “So there wasn’t really much to do besides spend your time outside running around or watch Nonna cook,” he says. “And I was much more a fan of staying in the kitchen with her.”
All in the details: Owen Han makes the OG Spicy Chicken Sandwich — a recipe for spice-rubbed chicken with bacon, avocado, red onions and chipotle mayo on sourdough is in his new cookbook, “Stacked.”
Pasta was the first thing he learned to make, and Nonna — along with Han’s Shanghainese father — instilled in him a passion for food, especially her cucina povera: sugo di pomodoro, stracotto (pot roast), carbonara, turkey braised with vegetables and wine, pizza from her outdoor oven.
She enrolled him in a cooking class at a local restaurant, but he’s otherwise a self-taught chef who studied economics and nutrition at USC. After college he landed a job as a “nutrition ambassador” at a hospital in Los Angeles. “That’s a fancy way of saying I was delivering food to patients and taking their orders,” he says.
That’s when his life took a turn. In April 2021 his father — a former concert pianist who helped spark Han’s passion for cooking — died due to COVID-19. Han writes in his book that after his father’s death, returning to his job “where I was constantly surrounded by families undergoing similar hardships and pain was extremely difficult. At that point in time, a typical workday consisted of me crying in the bathroom for hours while neglecting my work.”
His roommate at the time, H. Woo Lee, was posting food videos to TikTok and, because Han loved to cook, encouraged him to do the same. “I really owe it to him for encouraging me to start,” Han says.
“I had an Instagram at the time, but I was too embarrassed to post food content,” Han says. “Because there were 800 people I know that followed me, I was like, ‘I’m not gonna embarrass myself there.’ So I went on this new platform, TikTok.”
Among the first videos to go viral was shrimp toast, based on a recipe from his Chinese grandmother’s cookbook, passed down to him by his father. He takes the stained, barely bound-together copy of “Recipes: Chinese Cooking” from the bookcase in his kitchen (where there’s also a trophy inscribed with “Sandwich King Owen Han,” a gift from Bon Appétit personality Brad Leone) and shows where she wrote “celery leave (sic) chopped” on the page. “She had some edits in here,” he says.
By the time his first chicken sandwich hit a million views and the first brands reached out to him, he had quit his hospital job, turned down an offer to work in operations at Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles in Hollywood and decided to focus full-time on sandwich content.
Is lasagna a sandwich?
On a recent August day, he’s standing at the stove stirring the tomato sauce for polpette, a recipe from Nonna. But “Nonna never made meatball subs,” Han says. “I doubt she knew what a meatball sub was.” Until he shot a video of making one with her in Italy this summer.
“She was really weirded out by eating [meatballs] in a sandwich. But she was like, ‘This is actually very good.’”
Nonna’s Meatball Sandwich
Nonna’s meatballs are especially tender, bound by milk-soaked bread (rather than traditional breadcrumbs or panko) and beaten egg. One key to a good meatball sub is not to oversauce, Han says. “Nobody likes soggy bread.”
Han has cooked and made videos with Nonna, Giada De Laurentiis, Martha Stewart, Alex Guarnaschelli and Padma Lakshmi. When he explained to Stewart his broad definition of a sandwich — any stackable ingredients with a flour/bread component — “She was quick. She said, ‘Does that mean lasagna is a sandwich?’”
A simple tomato sauce is part of Nonna’s meatball sandwich.
But you can’t eat lasagna with your hands, I respond.
“I have,” Han says.
The “Stacked” cookbook includes recipes for tacos, burgers, burritos and wraps, a quesadilla, chicken and waffles, as well as more traditional sandwich styles, both classic and inventive. (But no lasagna.)
Mining his Italian and Chinese heritage and inspiration from social media, “I have yet to run out of ideas,” says Han, who estimates he has made nearly 1,000 sandwiches since becoming a self-described sandwich influencer and keeps a continual list of ideas on his phone.
“It’s definitely a fear of mine, but if I’m ever at a dead end or lacking inspiration, I will just pull that up. … There are times where I will literally wake up from a dream or a nap, and will come up with an idea and I’ll just add it to that tab.”
When asked about critics of TikTok cooking content who point out that 30-second videos are more entertainment than instructional, he says, “I fully agree. There is some instructional element to the short videos, because if you slow it down or watch it enough times, [you] get the gist of it.”
But, he says, he was inspired to write a cookbook partly because he receives comments and DMs with requests for recipes. “I wanted to share my story and recipes with people.”
His cookbook proposal stood out because Han is “authentic, charming, genuinely loves to cook and comes by this naturally,” says Harvest executive editor Sarah Pelz. With his fan base, “He has a direct connection with them. We’ve seen this with authors who have big social media platforms. I think readers feel they know this person. So there’s a very personal connection” that publishers can’t create for authors.
That’s what catapulted “Baking Yesteryear” by B. Dylan Hollis, who makes retro recipes such as Kool-Aid pies and chocolate syrup cakes, to the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Other cookbooks from TikTok creators have climbed the bestseller list, including “An Unapologetic Cookbook” by Joshua Weissman and “The Korean Vegan” by Joanne Lee Molinaro.
The next frontier for Han is YouTube, he says, where he has been experimenting with a couple of cooking series. One is “Ciao Chow” — “like Italian ‘ciao’ and Chinese ‘chow’” — with Han’s mashups such as dan dan Bolognese. The other is “My Nonna Knows,” in which Han consults with his grandmother via FaceTime and she rates his renditions of classic Italian dishes.
“I definitely want to continue pushing out long-form content on my YouTube,” he says. Once the book tour is done, he plans to make YouTube his main focus and come up with another series.
“Right now I don’t even speak in my [social media] videos, so one, it’s a great way to let the audience kind of see a different side of me, and then also to experiment. And show that I can cook more than just sandwiches.”
See Owen Han at L.A. Times’ Food Bowl making Nonna’s Meatball Sandwich on Saturday at 9:10 p.m.