In a twist that none of us saw coming (but are eternally grateful for), the dark horse of TikTok, Iain ‘Huey’ Hewitson, was recently nominated for the Food Creator of the Year award at the 2024 Australian TikTok Awards. Despite only landing on the platform six months ago at the behest of his Gen Z daughter Charlotte, the suspender-wearing, moustachioed TV chef who raised us has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views on his TikTok channel. 

Now with a Food Creator of the Year nomination under his belt (congratulations to overall winner Michael Finch) and an entire generation of new fans, we sat down with Hewitson to talk all things cooking and fame, and what the future holds for the social media sensation that remains loyal to his landline.

“I don’t own a [mobile] phone. I don’t have a computer. I don’t even drive!” laughs Hewitson when asked who he’s following on TikTok. So that’s our follow-up questions out the window, but thankfully, the veteran chef’s jovial, comforting and reassuring ‘dad vibes’ are as genuine in real-time as they were on our TV screens in the 1990s. So how did we get here? 

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“My daughter came to me and said, ‘We should have a shot at Tiktok! But I don’t know whether anyone will know you, Dad, because you’re too old’,” Hewitson recalls.

While the message was delivered with the humbling honesty that only a 23-year-old could muster, the Hewitsons could never have predicted the chord that their first 30-second clip would strike with an audience that still holds the NZ-born chef in their hearts. 

Despite his limited experience in actually watching TikTok videos, Hewitson has rapidly scored partnerships with the likes of Leggos and sorted the wheat from the chaff when it comes to food content creators.

“I have to be very honest – I don’t watch a lot of TikTok,” he says. “But I think the thing about it is, you’re seeing people showing their heritage.

“They’re not all trying to cook French food. If they come from Australia; if they have a Lebanese background; or if they’ve got a New Zealand background, like me, with Irish blood and Scottish blood; what they are doing is they’re doing food that reflects their background. There’s a huge amount of authenticity in people’s cooking on [TikTok]. No fancy-pants sh*t.”

The resonance is unsurprising, considering that Hewitson designed his entire TV career around cutting out that “fancy-pants sh*t”.

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“I teach people how to do the basics that perhaps they never learned, like how to scramble eggs, make homemade mayonnaise, how to roast pork or how to simply cook a steak without too much hassle,” Hewitson says. “That’s my job. I’m sort of like the mum.”

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the Iain ‘Huey’ Hewitsons of the world have grown obsolete and out of touch. After all, we’re constantly inundated with smiling Frenchmen creating rocket ships out of tempered chocolate, mid-Western mums piling cheese and jarred garlic into a slow-cooker and home cooks battling it out on million-dollar production sets filled with saffron and a live seafood section.

Yet as our minds flood with memories of sick days on the couch or the first time we cooked a fish fillet without setting off the smoke alarm, it’s clear Hewitson has nailed the recipe for success. 

Techniques elevate and palates evolve, but the joy of mastering a simple dish and the flush of nostalgia that comes from remembering where it started for so many of us proves that chefs like Huey will never go out of style. Even if lemon-patterned suspenders might.

To read more about Iain Hewitson’s life, get your hands on his forthcoming memoirs, ‘Who Called the Cook a Bastard?’, on shelves mid-2025.

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