We recently connected with Keyan Madani and have shared our conversation below.

Keyan , appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

My mom first inspired me to cook, she makes amazing traditional Afghan and Persian food that is bursting with flavor. I remember coming home from skateboarding with my friends and being so excited to eat her food. She taught me plenty of lessons in cooking and was extremely patient with me. She also taught me the most important lesson: “If I’m cooking then I shouldn’t be the one cleaning”

I also learned what kind of food I wanted to make from Action Bronsons’s show “FTD” and Anthony Bourdain’s show “No Reservations”. I remember watching Action’s show one day and thinking, “I want to feed those big boys one day”. Funny enough, I met him two years ago and he gave me some really good words of advice to not stop cooking foods from my own culture. He said he knew plenty of cooks who switched over from their cuisine to other cuisines like to French and Italian but the food that really shined was their own culture.

Learning how to cook came first and video editing followed. I edited a few skate videos when I was younger, but when I started cooking I wanted to get good at video editing. So I modeled my cooking videos sorta like the skate videos I grew up watching like DeliStatus, Illegal Civilization, and William Stobeck videos. I would do a lot of jump cuts, dance, and put music I liked over the videos. The more and more videos I edited the better I got and the more of a style I developed (I’m still developing my style).

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Keyan and I’m an internet chef. I post silly little videos of me cooking with music I like. I also make recipe videos going into detail in how I cook specific dishes and I have a website where I post written recipes.

How I started all this is one day my cousins came over and I cooked them a meal, specifically fried chicken and mac cheese. And after the meal, we were extremely full and just melting on the couch drinking sometime. One of them said I should start an Instagram for all the food I make. it took a little convincing but I agreed. They helped me set it up and that eventually grew into me starting a TikTok account and then creating my website with recipes.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding part of what I do is the wonderful and kind messages I get from my viewers. When I get a message about when someone cooked my recipe or they said a video of mine helped them it makes me feel ecstatic. It is a nice feeling when you work on something creative and it actually aids someone or inspires someone to do something that they otherwise do not do. My mom actually has some of the kind messages I have received printed out and taped on the fridge.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

The way I grew in TikTok was by using specific music in my videos. I would post cooking videos with various different “underground” rap songs. These did well because no one combined the two niches. Because of all the new viewership, many people started asking me for recipes so that sparked the idea of starting a website so I quickly got to work and released it. I get wonderful emails occasionally of people sending me pictures of the food they made off the website or just nice emails about how my website/videos inspired them to cook which makes me feel happy to hear.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://keyanskitchen.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/keyanskitchen/
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@keyanskitchen?lang=en

Image Credits

All of the were taken by Nabeeh Shamieh @nab__shot