The stars of Netflix’s revival of “Queer Eye” form a basketball team’s
worth of cultured fabulosity. There’s Tan France, the fashion expert,
fussy and witty; Karamo Brown, the suave sophisticate, who, as the
“culture” point person, mostly specializes in heart-to-hearts; Jonathan
Van Ness, the hairstylist and groomer, ebulliently over-the-top and a
clear fan favorite; and Bobby Berk, a soft-spoken designer with
spiky hair and a penchant for navy blue. And then there’s Antoni
Porowski, a former actor and model who parlayed a few private-chef gigs
into a role as the show’s food-and-drinks man, where he now finds
himself the unlikely center of a culinary conspiracy theory.

Since “Queer Eye” premièred, in February (no longer catering only to
“the Straight Guy”), Antoni, in particular, has been everywhere, the
subject of profiles and Q. & A.s decorated with photographs of him
half-smiling over a cup of coffee, or puckishly pulling at the lapels of
his jacket. All members of the Fab Five, as they are known, are solidly
handsome and well kempt, but Antoni is dreamily beautiful, a grownup
teen idol: lanky and toned, with deep eyes and soft cheeks and a boyish
grin. He is never shown holding a puppy, but he seems at any time like
he might be. He looks uncannily like the musician John Mayer, or, more
precisely, he looks how John Mayer probably thinks John Mayer looks. All
that, and he cooks, too.

Or does he? Antoni truthers call on us to tear our eyes away from the
Superman curls falling over the rakish bandanna headband, the alluringly
frayed slim-cut jean shorts and Strokes T-shirts over firm tanned arms,
and instead observe that Antoni spends the show making recipes that
verge on the remedial: grilled cheese, honey mustard, two-ingredient
salads. “He’s preparing food a child would make when they’re old enough not to
need a sitter,” Vulture’s Bowen Yang points
out. Notice, too, his recipes’ questionable “twists.” “I’m, like, a dairy freak,” Antoni announces in Episode 1, and
proceeds to add a dollop of Greek yogurt to a bowl of guacamole. Perhaps
anticipating that a viewer with modest guacamole fluency might have, at
that moment, shouted at her television in horror, he goes on to justify,
“It has so much less fat than sour cream.” (At this point, a viewer who
understands that sour cream also has no home in proper guacamole might
have shouted again.)

There are further grounds for suspicion. A
rigorous Junkee
investigation reveals that Antoni has never been seen actually cooking over a standard
stove or oven. The culinary wing of
the Internet exploded in indignation after he shared an Instagram
Story in which he personalized Marcella Hazan’s famously minimalist, and
flawless, three-ingredient tomato sauce by adding a bouquet of basil and
an entire wedge of Parmesan. On his Instagram account, which is full of gorgeously
composed cheese (both literal and otherwise), he regularly refers to La
Tur, the creamy, complex, three-milk Italian variety, by the jauntily
familiar Tur, which an award-winning cheesemonger described to me as a
faux pas on par with calling The Rock just Rock.

Antoni came to the attention of the “Queer Eye” producers thanks to Ted
Allen, the food-and-wine expert on the original incarnation of the show.
They both live in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, and Antoni has cooked
for Allen a few times. (In 2014, Allen and his husband bestowed upon
Antoni a giant tomahawk
steak.) This apparent nepotism
has been fuel for critics, as has Antoni’s lack of a culinary-school
degree or restaurant experience, not to mention the fact that he appears
to be a non-drinker, sipping on seltzer-based sangria and only sniffing
at his snifter during a whiskey tasting. In interviews and on social
media, Antoni describes himself as mostly a self-taught cook, a scholar
of PBS cooking shows and classic cookbooks; he’s a Europhile who bakes
plums into clafoutis
provocative-side-up, and
knows that, when in Paris, he should go to E. Dehillerin to buy
copper cook pots, and to
Poilâne for bread. He
clearly has skills at a technical level, too: watch him slice leeks in
Episode 2, his manicured fingers holding the allium beneath the blade
with tender confidence; in the next episode, he supremes a grapefruit
like a seasoned pro. Last year, at Thanksgiving, he carved a
turkey with
an elegant, Martha Stewart flair.

Besides, as Porowski’s defenders (among them his
castmates) have noted, his
job on the show isn’t to produce high-flying multi-course meals or to
dazzle the viewers with culinary party tricks. “What do you want these
straights to do?” Vulture’s Matt Rogers asked in a delightful
debate with Bowen Yang. “Be able to debone a duck after three days?” Fair
enough. For most of the makeover subjects, the bar is exceedingly low—take Tom, the
recipient of the yogurt-guacamole instruction, whose abilities in the
kitchen began and ended with mixing Mountain Dew and tequila. Where Tan,
the fashion expert, fills the men’s closets with no-fail mix-and-match
clothing, and the design guru Bobby presents them with their newly
redecorated homes, Antoni actually teaches hands-on skills, however
modest: a man’s knowledge of how to throw a bunch of tinned beans in a
Crock-Pot to make chili will persist long after his Stan Smiths have
turned a dingy gray.

“Queer Eye” is a show of remarkable intensity, full of
revelations and tears and seemingly genuine emotional growth. The Fab
Five are a SWAT team deployed against the quiet trespasses of
conventional masculinity, guiding their subjects to reckonings with
their fears and prejudices. For some of the makeover subjects, the show
represents the first occasion that they’ve spent real time with gay men.
For others, the transformation involves confronting self-destructive
habits, or having uncomfortable conversations about heavy topics like
mental health, racism, fatherhood, and the judicious use of facial
concealer. For most of them, the kitchen is as foreign a destination as
a ballroom-dancing studio or the beauty-supply aisle at Target, part of
the unmasculine domestic sphere. With basic grilled-cheese sandwiches,
Antoni gives them access to a part of their homes in which they had been
unable to comfortably be themselves. (Outside the show, Antoni has been
poignantly candid about his own experiences negotiating gender
expectations, particularly his history of dating women prior to his
current committed same-sex relationship. His relative newness to gay
culture, he says, set him apart from the other members of the Fab Five,
and made his time with them an enriching personal experience.)

And yet! Whatever the value of Antoni’s kitchen lessons, his scenes on
“Queer Eye” often feel peculiarly empty. He interacts with others
woodenly, speaks lines that sound scripted, always holds himself at an
emotional distance. In episodes bursting with antics and zingers, he
offers little; for the made-over men, he’s never the agent of catharsis
or introspection. He often seems to be positioned, physically, in the
background, face half-hidden behind Karamo’s satin-jacketed shoulder or
the silvery massif of Tan’s hair. This blankness is at odds with the
persona Antoni cultivates offscreen, as a bookish aesthete—geeking
out over Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “A Little Life” or the fact that the
Strokes personally sent him a batch of T-shirts. Even there, his faves, like his
gastronomy, are highbrow-shallow, just a dollar more than basic. “It’s
like a brooch for a dress,” he told Bon Appétit, by way
of explaining how a finishing sauce ties a dish together. Does that make
any sense? Do we even care? As Antoni put it recently, in an Instagram
Story featuring a quote from Carl Jung, “Thinking is difficult, that’s
why most people judge.”