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 .
