"Marry Me Selena Gomez" chicken

Benny Blanco’s ‘Open Wide: A Cookbook for Friends’

Something light after my Roman/Baz post was read by 25,000 often indignant people!? It speaks to the purpose of this project that an honest review of two bestselling cookbooks by public-facing authors generated so much discussion and outrage, so thanks for engaging with it, even if (especially if) you are one of the Alison stans calling me a failure on Reddit (an honor).

Last week I received a galley of Tyler Malek’s Salt & Straw: America’s Most Iconic Ice Creams, which contains gourmet riffs on standard scoop shop flavors like chocolate and strawberry. Its arrival coincided with a springtime kitchen appliance reshuffle that saw my Cuisinart Ice-30 win one of four coveted wall sockets, but the recipes have so far failed to get me churning. All of them use corn syrup and xanthan gum as a base, and while many in the ice cream making community will tell you that this ingredient combination produces a superior texture, to me it tastes metallic. I’ve instead become obsessed with making Benny Blanco’s halva ice cream from his book Open Wide: A Cookbook for Friends, which takes its sweetness from maple syrup and dates, and is fantastic, and has almost definitely been spoon-fed to Selena Gomez post-coitally. Far more alluring than Salt & Straw’s whole special-treat-for-someone-living-in-a-mid-sized-city thing.

It was published a year ago but the timing is right for me to review Benny Blanco’s cookbook, I think. Blanco, who has been sending songs to number one since the late 2000s, has recently become as famous as the pop stars he produces megahits for by getting engaged to one. His relationship with Gomez offers light distraction in dark times and has resulted in this nonsensical fake Charli XCX song that I have been listening to three times a day for many weeks.

Fellow Selenators know she’s been through a lot to get here

The Open Wide book deal went down just before Blanco and Gomez got together, during the era of Blanco’s New York Times-featured pop-up dinner parties thrown for famous friends and hangers on. Blanco has been made fun of lately for romancing a woman who is taller and prettier than him but his goofy appeal feels to me very obvious, and this book makes clear that he is constantly surrounded by people who genuinely enjoy spending time in his company, or more specifically attending what sound like at least semi-orgies in the West Hollywood mansion that Teenage Dream built.

Nearly every recipe humbly credits the influence of a friend, often a food world star like Rick Martinez (Mi Cochina) or Adeena Sussman (Shabbat, Sababa), who consulted on Chrissy Teigen’s cookbooks. The impression you get is that all of these people simply know and like Blanco well enough to help him out. Blanco’s biggest culinary influence is his close pal Matty Matheson, who is invoked frequently, but Open Wide is co-authored by greens queen and former Martha Stewart right hand woman Jess Damuck (Health Nut, Salad Freak). So there’s a tension between Munchies-era burgers and Erewhon-y New Californian cuisine throughout, as I suppose there is in many non-famous kitchens these days. The perfect version of this cookbook would find a way to merge these two sensibilities, but Blanco isn’t a chef, so it’s a lot to ask. What we do get is the exact banana pudding that he serves to SZA in the studio, and that for me is enough.

The recipes are mostly grouped as regionally-themed dinner party plans: Italian, Greek, Tex-Mex, Japanese, Middle Eastern (mainly featuring recipes co-written by Michael Solomonov), Southern soul food. There’s a Thanksgiving menu (“I can’t get behind the ethics of this holiday, but boy can I get behind the food,” writes Blanco, meaninglessly) and selection of Jewish-American favorites like kugel and matzo ball soup. A fascinating few pages of diet recipes are accompanied by a rundown of Blanco’s exact workout routine. He claims to subsist on 1400 calories most days. Hosting tips are scattered throughout, including advice for getting rid of lingering guests at the end of the night and picking crowd-pleasing bottles of wine. In a guest essay High Maintenance’s Ben Sinclair explains how to “curate the perfect weed experience” at your dinner party. Towards the end of the book Blanco provides a list of his favorite restaurants in New York and Los Angeles as though he’s some sort of Substack influencer. On the New York list, Abuqir makes the cut alongside Carbone.

Something I like about Open Wide is that Blanco seems to have written it (and I do think that he came up with much of the headnote copy himself — there’s no other explanation for its frankness or typos) under the totally reasonable assumption that it will be received as a gag gift by most and cooked from diligently by few. And yet he makes sure that motivated readers are rewarded anyway, both with enthusiastically presented recipe ideas and glitzy glimpses into his life, which seems to have been a lot of fun so far. He documents celebrity house party culture in pleasing although not necessarily FOMO-inducing detail: Lil Dicky getting brutally rejected by Kendall Jenner, Justin Bieber singing Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls” in between Whip-Its, Sia napping in the driveway. Blanco also confesses to various personal eccentricities, including a fear of flying so debilitating that he once traveled from New York City to London by ship, sharing a cabin with Ed Sheeran. This “romantic” experience apparently inspired several songs on Sheeran’s 2017 album ÷.

When he doesn’t know how to do something, Blanco humbly pulls in a more knowledgeable person he so happens to know and adds a few grafs of their verbatim advice, which often seems to have been received via email or text. Billie Eilish’s mom Maggie Baird lends her (way too fiddly for me to bother with) vegan cinnamon roll recipe; Jon & Vinny spill the secrets to their spicy fusilli, complete with provocative screed about how certain other famous Italian restaurants stole their vodka sauce. Speaking of which, Carbone’s lasagne verde takes up four pages, after Blanco supposedly spent two years begging Mario to let him print it.

Open Wide loses structure about halfway through. I wish it had been edited to more closely adhere to the dinner party theme. The scrambled eggs recipe is unnecessary, as are most breakfast recipes in most cookbooks. There’s a brief section dedicated to food that will help get the reader laid, which is an amazing conceit that Blanco for all his R&B horniness (a QR code Spotify playlist at the beginning of the book is full of get-it-on songs like Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” as well as a single Mac DeMarco track) sadly doesn’t commit to very hard. It is possible that if you are the guy who produced “Shape of You” sex comes fairly easily, and the women reclining by your pool will eat and compliment whatever dish appears in front of them.

The best vanity project cookbooks are honest and therefore ridiculous. I do not want Gwyneth Paltrow to pretend that she eats red meat or really any substantial food at all. I do want her to name drop Cameron Diaz. Open Wide lives up to its title in more ways than one, although Blanco obviously still only reveals what is convenient to his brand (gross-out stories starring Ed Sheeran rather than insights into his current relationship with former mentor Dr. Luke or pleas for Justin Bieber to forgive him for breaking bro code by getting with Gomez or a single strong political stance, despite numerous allusions to the importance of charity work and helping the less fortunate). To be published in hardcover is a privilege and I wish that every celebrity thrown a random cookbook deal would embrace it with the same happy stoner’s enthusiasm. I’d mostly rather eat the rich than cook their food, but the greens and olive pasta on page 74 tastes great.