Owen Han didn't know how much the internet loved 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 surpass a million views,” Han says in his Venice studio apartment, where a large kitchen takes up most of the small, tidy space, equipped with a six-burner stove with built-in griddle, more knives and pans than some restaurants and a deli-style meat slicer.
“The way it happened was kind of serendipitous,” he says. “I was planning to film a cioppino, which is a fish stew. It takes a long time, it has a lot of ingredients, and I was feeling a bit lazy, so I thought, ‘You know what? Let me film while I make my lunch. ’”
Three years later, Han has 4.3 million followers on TikTok, 2.2 million on Instagram and nearly 800,000 loyal fans on YouTube. His first cookbook, “Stacked: The Art of Making the Perfect Sandwich,” will be published by Harvest on Oct. 15, as he embarks on a coast-to-coast tour. And he’s just returned from cooking at a pop-up restaurant in Ibiza and a cheesemaking tour in Oregon with Tillamook, one of the many brands courting him for content.
On Owen Han’s kitchen bookshelf, his grandmother’s copy of Time Life’s “Recipes: Chinese Cooking” sits next to the cookbook he wrote, “Stacked: The Art of the Perfect Sandwich.”
Even by the standards of TikTok, which has created a new equation for fame, Han's rise was meteoric. Based on the success of that chicken, bacon and avocado sandwich, “I thought, let me try another one, which turned out to be the steak sandwich, which is on the list.” [cookbook] “The video cover got over 10 million views. I was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy! People love sandwiches, and I love sharing my passion for them, too. ’”
Next, he had a sandwich for breakfast. “And from then on, people already nicknamed me ‘the sandwich guy.’ It sounds good,” Han says, being modest.
He was already the Sandwich King.
“It's a matter of consolation”
And that was just the beginning. Their tomahawk steak sandwich has reached nearly 13 million views on TikTok. Chicken tikka wrap: 16.6 million. Open-faced ham and cheese: 24 million. Laffa-wrapped beef shawarma: 52.3 million (that's more than the entire population of South Korea).
Tall and dark-haired, Han barely speaks in most of his videos. They almost always start the same way: He flattens out the sandwich, cuts it with a soft slice or sharp swipe, takes a big crunchy bite, and smiles. And while quick edits and ASMR are nothing new on social media, the way he spreads cold cuts and splashes sauces on bread obviously resonates with his audience.
Time 40 minutes
Yields Makes 2 sandwiches
Why do people love sandwiches so much? “I think it’s a comfort food,” Han says. “A lot of memories come back to me,” including her Italian grandmother’s Nutella bread and the sandwich of the day at her high school cafeteria in Sarasota, Florida. “I loved the cafeteria staff. I remember very clearly that on Friday there would be tuna sandwiches and on Thursday there would be burgers. No matter what they served, I would always have the sandwich.”
Han was born in Milan and raised in Florida. He spent his summers with his grandmother in a small town in the Tuscan mountains, where until recently there was no Wi-Fi. “So there wasn’t much to do other than spend time outside running around or watching Nonna cook,” he says. “And I much preferred staying in the kitchen with her.”
It’s all in the details: Owen Han makes the OG Spicy Chicken Sandwich: A recipe for spicy chicken with bacon, avocado, red onions and chipotle mayo on sourdough is in his new cookbook, “Stacked.”
Pasta was the first thing she learned to make, and Nonna, along with Han's Shanghainese father, instilled in her a passion for food, especially her cucina povera: sugo di pomodoro, stracotto (roast beef), carbonara, turkey braised with vegetables and wine, pizza from her outdoor oven.
She signed him up for a cooking class at a local restaurant, but he's a self-taught chef who studied economics and nutrition at USC. After college, he got a job as a “nutrition ambassador” at a Los Angeles hospital. “It'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 going through similar hardships and grief, was extremely difficult. At the time, a typical workday consisted of crying in the bathroom for hours while neglecting my work.”
His roommate at the time, H. Woo Lee, was posting food videos on TikTok, and since Han loved cooking, he encouraged him to do the same. “I really owe him a lot for encouraging me to start,” Han says.
“I had an Instagram account at the time, but I was embarrassed to post food content,” Han says. “Since I knew I had 800 people following me, I thought, ‘I’m not going to make a fool of myself there. ’ So I moved to this new platform, TikTok.”
Among the first videos to go viral was one of a shrimp toast, based on a recipe from his Chinese grandmother’s cookbook, passed down to him by his father. He pulls the stained, barely bound copy of “Recipes: Chinese Cooking” off his kitchen shelf (which also holds a trophy inscribed “Sandwich King Owen Han,” a gift from Bon Appétit star Brad Leone) and shows where she wrote “celery leaf (sic) chop” on the page. “She had a few 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 already 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, Han is standing at the stove stirring tomato sauce for polpette, a recipe from Nonna. But “Nonna never made meatball subs,” Han says. “I doubt she even knew what a meatball sub was.” Until he recorded a video of him making one with her in Italy this summer.
“She was really weirded out by eating [meatballs] in a sandwich. But she said, “This is actually really good.”
Time 3 hours
Yields Makes 4 sandwiches
Nonna's meatballs are especially tender, held together with milk-soaked bread (rather than traditional breadcrumbs or panko) and beaten egg. One key to a good meatball sandwich is not to put on too much sauce, Han says. “No one 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 ingredient that can be combined with a flour or bread component), “she was quick to say, ‘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] “Understand the essence of the matter.”
But, she says, what inspired her to write a cookbook was in part that she receives comments and direct messages with requests for recipes. “I wanted to share my story and my recipes with people.”
Owen Han looks out of the window of his studio in Venice. What's next for TikTok's sandwich king? YouTube.
Her cookbook proposal stood out because Han is “authentic, charming, he really loves cooking and that comes naturally to him,” says Harvest executive editor Sarah Pelz. “He has a direct connection with his fan base. We’ve seen this with authors who have big social media platforms. I think readers feel like 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 like Kool-Aid tarts and chocolate syrup cakes, to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. Other cookbooks by TikTok creators have climbed the best-seller 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’s been experimenting with a couple of cooking series. One is “Ciao Chow” — “like Italian ‘ciao’ and Chinese ‘chow’” — featuring Han’s concoctions like dan dan Bolognese. The other is “My Nonna Knows,” in which Han consults with his grandmother via FaceTime and she rates his versions of classic Italian dishes.
“I definitely want to continue posting long-form content on YouTube,” she says. Once the book tour is over, she plans to make YouTube her main focus and create another series.
“At this moment I don't even speak in my [social media] “Videos are a great way for the public to see a different side of me and also to experiment and show that I can cook more than just sandwiches.”
See Owen Han in LA Times Food Bowl Making Grandma's meatball sandwich on Saturday at 9:10pm
