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One night in June 2012, Matty Matheson finished his shift as head chef at Toronto restaurant Parts & Labour, walked home and had a heart attack. He was only 29, yet somehow this most vital of organs giving out on him didn’t come as much of a surprise. He was coming off the end of a three-day bender, but really it was closer to 13 years of hoovering uppers, downers and psychedelics with all the gusto of the last man standing at an all-you-can-snort buffet. It was no coincidence that his favorite song to party to was Hüsker Dü’s “Dead Set On Destruction”. He loved that song so much that he planned to steal the name for a dive bar he wanted to open. While recuperating in his hospital bed at Toronto’s St. Joseph’s Health Centre, Matheson received a note from a friend, Alexisonfire’s Wade MacNeil. “Hopefully now you won’t be opening up that bar, Dead Set On Destruction,” MacNeil wrote. “And you can start being dead set on life.”
Dead Set On Life became the title of the Viceland series that made Matheson’s name, a food-based travel show in the lineage of Anthony Bourdain, except younger, louder and with whole lot more use of the word “fuck”. Matheson curses with the volume and extremity of Gordon Ramsay stepping on a Lego, and averaged around 150 expletives per episode. He followed that with another Vice show, It’s Suppertime, a cooking tutorial so exuberant and foul-mouthed that it would never, ever have made it past the censors at the Food Network.
Matheson’s punk attitude and larger-than-life charisma helped him redefine how a TV chef could look and talk while building a cultish fanbase. He’s racked up millions of YouTube views, published a wildly successful cookbook and amassed hundreds of thousands of social media followers, where he’s one of the very few New York Times bestselling authors to regularly post naked selfie videos direct from the comfort of a toilet. He’s also taken a spoken word show on tour around Canada and the United States and last month put on a food-and-music festival in Toronto, MattyFest, headlined by Wu-Tang Clan, Descendents and Danny Brown. He even has his own line of merch, selling everything from hoodies to trucker hats to oven mitts bearing the image of his own heavily tattooed hands. Look closely at the knuckles on the right hand and you can make out the letters: D S O L. Dead Set On Life.
This month Matheson launched his latest show on YouTube: Just A Dash. Self-produced and filmed entirely in his own kitchen, the show was partly born of frustration. After parting ways with Vice, Matheson had a series of meetings with production companies about making another show, but talks didn’t quite go to plan. “I was like, I’m going to go to LA and get a TV show tomorrow,” he says. “I came here and I didn’t, obviously, like a million other people. That’s fine. I think it’s amazing to have those humbling moments, but I got to the point where I thought: let’s just fucking make something.” He realized he didn’t need to have anymore meetings, to fly out to California or New York. “I don’t have to pitch ideas. I just need to cook,” he concludes.
Matheson meets me at Langer’s Delicatessen, a downtown Los Angles institution that’s stood on the corner of Seventh and Alvarado since 1947. Nora Ephron- who wrote* When Harry Met Sally* and was therefore a leading authority on orgasmic experiences in diners-once dedicated an entire New Yorker article to explaining why Langer’s serves “the finest hot pastrami sandwich in the world.” This is Matheson’s first time here, but he chose it based on reputation and ease. “I like going to classic spots,” he explains. “You don’t have to worry about getting a fucking reservation, you just walk in and it’s casual. You don’t even have to worry about what to order.”
We show the mistakes because the world needs to see more mistakes.
That’s because Langer’s is known for one sandwich above all: the #19, a huge mound of hand-cut hot pastrami balanced with an equal helping of coleslaw, Russian dressing and Swiss cheese, all served between two slices of double-baked rye bread. Matheson, who never does things by halves, also orders a serving of chilli cheese fries and a side of coleslaw for the table. He’s not one to blend in, in his tie-dye T-shirt and white bucket hat, so it’s not long before someone recognizes him. A guy on his way out casually stops to say hello and ask him what he thinks of the sandwich. “It’s amazing,” mumbles Matheson happily through a mouthful of pastrami. “Amazing.”
The secret to Matheson’s success may lie in the fact that he seems so approachable. In his shows he talks with the unpretentious enthusiasm of a close friend, albeit a friend who is a lot better at cooking than you are. Just A Dash captures him at his best. While Bourdain wanted to take you on cultural adventures, and other chefs thrive in the pressure cooker of a commercial kitchen, Matheson’s real passion is for demystifying the process of cooking at home.
“The thing about humans is that most of them don’t know how to cook, or most of them don’t know what to cook,” he says. “They’re like, what can I do with a chicken? You can do a million things with a fucking chicken. The thing I like to do is just spark an interest in cooking. I’m giving you the small, weird fundamentals that you can then take and make multiple things.”
The other thing that’s refreshing about Just A Dash—all 12 episodes of which Matheson says were shot in one take over the course of six days-is how comfortable he is showing himself fucking up. “We show the mistakes because the world needs to see more mistakes,” he says. “Everything is imperfect. On cooking shows, every single time it comes out it’s this perfect cake. No! The only way that fucking food television shows mistakes is through competition shows. Why can’t we see a chef make a mistake? Let me tell you something: chefs, while making fucking cooking shows, make fucking mistakes all the time. You’re going to learn way more from watching somebody make a mistake and then roll into making it better.”
He’s aware that home cooking can seem like an unnecessary hassle to people who have a city’s worth of food available at the touch of an app, but Matheson believes he’s teaching his audience something more than just practical cooking skills. “Postmates ain’t cheap, and Uber Eats is certainly not fucking cheap,” he points out. “Everything is going up in price and if people just cooked more then I think they’d be happier. It 100 percent builds your self-esteem, which is a very cool thing. If you cook and it’s really good and you take the time to get better at it, you’re gonna be proud of yourself. That correlates with self-esteem and self-confidence. You’ll literally become a better person from cooking. I did,” he says, proclaiming just how much of a gift cooking has been to his life. “I’ve had many careers now, but all of the decisions and all the craziness has gotten me right here. I got no regrets. I’ve done some stupid fucking shit, but I ain’t got no fucking regrets, man.”
Matthew Matheson was born on February 7, 1982 in the east coast Canadian port city of Saint John, New Brunswick. His father, Stephen, was an engineer and his mother, Joan, was and still is a waitress. He has two brothers, Stephen and Adam, and a sister named Sarah. While Matheson was still growing up, the family relocated to Fort Erie, a farm town about a 20 minute drive from Niagara Falls. The value of home cooking was drilled into him from an early age. “We never ate in restaurants,” he says. “We didn’t have money, but we always went to butcher shops and we always had good meat. That was the thing that stuck with me. We never had fucking fresh Nikes, but we always had good food on the table. That’s how you learn how to cook.”
By the time he was 16, Matheson was already known as a party kid and was indulging in the sort of serious drug habit that suited his appetite for everything else in life. “I was doing coke every weekend,” he remembers. “Then acid and shrooms and MDMA and meth and fucking crack. Just not heroin because my older brother was a junkie, so that was my line. I wasn’t going to do intravenous, but I would sniff anything and I would smoke anything. I’d steal your drugs and then help you look for them, you know?”
He moved to Toronto in 2000, age 19, to join the cooking program at Humber College. Of the four colleges in Toronto that he applied to, it was the only one that let him in. He chose cooking because it meant he wouldn’t have to take academic classes like math or science, but he had an ulterior motive for wanting to go into further education. “Cooking to me didn’t seem like school, but it was a way to still go to school,” he says. “The only reason I wanted to go to school was that if I went in Toronto my parents would pay my rent. Then I’m in the city! I can go do drugs with my friends, go to fucking punk shows, stay out all night long, go to after hours and piss my pants in the alleyway. I just wanted to be in the city, man!”
Matheson technically never graduated from that cooking course. He dropped out with two weeks left to go and join his friends on tour with their metal band. He tells me with an air of knowing self-deprecation that this was “because I didn’t need a piece of paper, because I’m punk,” but it turns out he was right. When he got back from the tour he went straight to work at “the best French bistro in Toronto”, Le Sélect Bistro, and within two years he’d worked his way up to sous-chef. A year after that he was a chef at La Palette. The following year, aged 26, he opened a restaurant. “I was getting articles like: ‘Who’s this wonderkid? Where did he come from?’” he says. “That kind of thing at 26 feeds your ego. I had all the drugs in the world and all the alcohol in the world. It was just an endless party for 15 fucking years. I was obsessed with the party scene, and obsessed with annihilating myself. ”
In the end, it took more than the heart attack to stop him. Within months of being released from hospital he was back doing coke and drinking himself stupid several times a week. “The ego got even bigger because I didn’t die,” he says. “I was invincible. So then I went even harder and sketchier because all my friends cut me off. If I was to go into people’s bars they would be like: get the fuck out of here, you’re not fucking dying in my bar. I got isolated and went even darker. All my drug dealers were my friends, so they weren’t going to sell to me. I had to start going to some crispy ass spots and finding some crispy ass people to hang out with. You just go deeper and darker into the wormhole.”
The party finally came to an end in November 2013, when friends and colleagues got together to stage an intervention. It worked, and Matheson got himself clean, but that presented it’s own unusual problem. Matheson had friends at Vice, and they thought he’d make a natural TV host. They’d pitched him for a show called Hangover Cures, where he’d get blackout drunk and then cook the next morning. Newly sober that clearly wouldn’t work, but they still wanted to do something with him. His onscreen career began with a six-minute video uploaded in April 2014. Shot inside his cramped one bedroom flat in the Parkdale neighbourhood of Toronto, with “kids smoking crack outside”, Matheson gamely demonstrates how to make “a perfect cheeseburger” (The trick, as he demonstrates, is grinding your own meat). The video was an instant hit, and has now been watched almost nine million times. The most liked comment is a fan simply cataloging every time he curses. “Please leave a like,” the fan concludes, “this took forever.”
Buoyed by the success of his burger tutorial, Matheson made a travel show called Keep It Canada, which expanded into Dead Set On Life when Vice launched their TV channel. Now that he has, in his words, “drifted away” from Vice, Matheson has turned to YouTube and the same DIY spirit that defines the bands he grew up worshiping. That suits him just fine. Just A Dash trims away all the extraneous fat and leaves Matheson free to be himself. “I just want to cook and make people laugh,” he says. “I figured it out. That’s all I want to do. Laughter and food are two universal things that everyone understands and everyone enjoys. You need food, and you need fucking laughter.”
Having demolished our #19s, we settle up and I head home to start reacquainting myself with my long-neglected kitchen. I load up the first episode of Just A Dash and watch as Matheson sings, shouts and dispenses freshly-baked wisdom all while cooking up Oxtail Pho. “You know in your life, you get cloudy sometimes?” he asks while skimming the scum from a pan of broth. “You’ve just got to skim your own scum! Then all of a sudden, what reveals itself is a beautiful you.” The video has already been viewed over 800,000 times. It could have been a hard sell trying to persuade a generation accustomed to instant gratification to cook for themselves, but Matty Matheson seems to have found the recipe.