ICE Alum Meredith Hayden Goes from Viral TikTok Chef to Cookbook Queen
To celebrate 50 years of ICE, we’re celebrating the legacies of 50 distinguished ICE alumni. Among them is Meredith Hayden, a wildly popular TikTok chef who is forging her own path in the culinary world — and not taking no for an answer.
Hayden’s breakout moment on the Internet was a minute-long TikTok video wherein she plates a day’s worth of cooked meals. Among them is bubbling hot shakshuka and perfectly grilled lamb chops over mint and pistachio pesto. The video currently has more than 24 million views.
Online viral success can seem like it happens overnight, but for Hayden, it was years in the making.
Hayden graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education's Culinary Arts program in 2019. She got a job as a private chef in the Hamptons with the long-term goal of working her way into cookbook publishing. “I went into private chef work knowing it was temporary,” Hayden said in an interview with Better Homes & Gardens earlier this year.
On a whim, in 2022, she posted that “day in the life” video to her account on TikTok, where she only had a few hundred followers at the time. The video went viral and Hayden’s follower count ballooned. Her platform continued to grow as she shared more of her behind the scenes footage of life as a private chef.
Soon, daily tasks like mincing shallots and giving the kitchen a good post-cooking scrub were yielding millions of views and thousands of likes.
Hayden now has over three million followers across her social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok; 150,000+ subscribers to her Substack newsletter, The Group Chat; and enough brand deals to support the purchase of a multi-million-dollar home in the Hamptons. Forbes recently named her a 30 Under 30 in the food & drink category, and in March, she realized her longtime dream of publishing a cookbook, The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook.
But none of Hayden’s success was a given. And it all came “after many years of failed attempts,” according to an interview in Elle Magazine.
After culinary school, Hayden wanted to break into food media. She applied for jobs at major media publications, but didn’t land any of them. Still, she persisted, falling back on the fundamentals she learned in culinary school to build a career in food.
More importantly, Hayden was willing to embrace her mistakes in the kitchen. “Even if I’m a classically trained chef, I’ll still mess up a cake because I forgot to double-check the measurements,” she told Elle.
Being honest and transparent on camera made her more relatable, an important characteristic for anyone aiming to appeal to a broad audience, whether online or on TV.
Hayden has more to say to people who want to turn their culinary skills and creativity into a business.
“My biggest piece of advice is to accept failure as part of the process,” she said in a recent interview with People Magazine, adding that cooking is “something you have to learn.”
“It's kind of like if you want to run a marathon,” she said. “You can't just wake up one day and run a marathon. You have to practice.”
Now that she’s achieved some of her biggest goals, what’s next for Hayden? To start, she’s still cooking — every day. She’s also developing new recipes for her audience and, possibly, another cookbook. And of course, she’s doing it her way. “I never measure. I go off of vibes,” she says.
Spoken like a true chef.
Bravo, Chef Meredith. Your ICE chef-instructors, career advisors and fellow graduates and students couldn’t be prouder.
* Experience varies by student, with outcomes contingent on factors including graduate aptitude, job market, place of residence and work history, among others.
