Wishbone Kitchen’s Meredith Hayden Wants You to Make Every Gathering a Little More Luxe

Every time she gathers with her closest girlfriends, all of whom grew up with her in New Jersey, Meredith Hayden makes a toast. Whether they’re sipping champagne or drinking Diet Coke, no get-together is too low-key for a touch of something special. She’s even been known to turn household chores into an occasion: “If I do my laundry and put it away on the same day,” she says, “I’ll order Taco Bell, put some kombucha in a wineglass, and eat dinner watching my favorite Bravo shows—that’s my idea of celebrating. Maybe for you it’s about eating your soup out of your fanciest bowl or drinking your iced coffee with your favorite straw. There are so many little moments around food that you can use to bring more joy into your life.”

Finding a Following

Of course, as tantalizing as it may be, unwrapping a Cheesy Gordita Crunch with extra sour cream (her go-to order) isn’t what Meredith’s roughly 2.3 million TikTok followers come to her for. A former private chef, the 28-year-old social media sensation and cookbook author (her first, The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook, comes out in May) has built her brand on the modernized, brightened-up versions of classic dishes that she cooks for family, friends, and clients.

Her posts strike just the right balance between impressive—she’s a culinary school graduate, after all—and relatable: Her New Year’s Eve dinner last year was two hours late after the prime rib emerged from the oven raw in the center. She shared footage of every excruciating step of that beefy journey, which concluded with, in her words, “putting on my big, fat idiot hat” and searing off slices in a sauté pan. In the end, of course, her guests happily devoured it, along with mashed potatoes and her famous Christmas Confetti Salad, a mix of shredded radicchio, shaved Brussels sprouts, dried cranberries, goat cheese, almonds, and roast chicken dressed in an apple cider-maple vinaigrette. “This is the salad that caused me to almost lose my finger,” she declared in her video about that dish, referencing a nasty run-in with a mandoline. “And despite this traumatic accident, I still continue to eat it for four days in a row.”

A Young Foodie

The idea that food can spark joy, bring people together, and even be its own kind of adventure is something Meredith has understood since childhood. Her mother is an avid cook, and Meredith took to the stove herself at age 7, motivated by her preference for what she called “blonde pancakes” on Sunday mornings. “I liked them to have a very light brown exterior (no dark spots!) so they required cooking on very, very low heat,” she remembers. “My mom was having none of it, so I would jump in and make my own—and then insist on making them for my stuffed animals too.”

Before long, Meredith was cooking more complicated dishes, starting with a copycat of her favorite chicken Marsala from The Cheesecake Factory. “I think the first time I ever googled something was searching how to make it,” she says. “And it was really my introduction to the concept of recipes. From there, I used every opportunity to be nosy in the kitchen and bother my mom.”

Building Her Foundation

By the time she arrived at Clemson University, Meredith knew she wanted to work in the food world. After graduation, she moved to New York City, and her parents agreed to help foot the bill for culinary school if she also worked a full-time job. She juggled a nine-to-five as a sales and marketing assistant with evening and weekend classes at the Institute of Culinary Education—which, conveniently, was across the street from her office—until she earned her degree, after which she began working the dinner shift as a private chef for fashion designer Joseph Altuzarra and his family.

A few months later the pandemic hit, Meredith lost her day job, and the Altuzarra family asked if she’d be willing to spend the summer with them in the Hamptons, cooking breakfast and lunch in addition to the dinners they’d fallen in love with. At the time, she had her heart set on a career in food media, but “after getting hundreds of nos, I realized I needed to pivot in order to pay my bills,” Meredith remembers.

A Fork in the Road

Along the way, to promote her private chefing and catering business, Meredith began filming cooking videos and posting them on social media. At first, she stuck to food, earning likes with recipes such as her pink pasta—rigatoni with a bright fuchsia beet-and-goat cheese sauce—but, she says, “everyone was doing food videos, so it was hard to stand out.” The most successful content creators, she’d been told, made the sort of videos they themselves liked to watch, and for Meredith that was day-in-the-life vlogs. In early 2022, she decided to film her own version: a weekend in her life as a live-in private chef in the Hamptons, which followed her as she picked kale and herbs from the garden, cooked multiple meals, grocery shopped, and scrubbed the stove top. “I got too embarrassed to even edit it because I thought, This is so silly! Why would anyone want to see this?” Meredith says.

It wasn’t until four months later, when she was slipping into credit card debt and started hearing rumors about TikTokkers racking up lucrative brand deals, that she thought, “I guess I have nothing to lose. And that moment of desperation is really what gave me the courage to put myself out there. The vlog ended up getting a couple of million views and gave me my first 100,000 followers.”

Meredith’s Recipe for Success

In the years since, Meredith’s following has grown exponentially, and she’s diversified to other platforms, including YouTube and Instagram. This past year, thanks to brand partnerships that run the gamut from Armani Beauty to Walmart, she was able to buy her own house in the Hamptons, a converted barn that she shares with her beloved Bernese mountain dog, Poppy. There she films everything from silly puppy videos to elegant dinner party footage and recipes for cheddar-chive biscuits and Korean-inspired short ribs made with Asian pears harvested from her yard. But, while her cooking skills may be impressive, the secret to Meredith’s success also lies in her can-do confidence.

Her self-assurance led her to take on a wedding as her first-ever catering job and shop a proposal for her freshman cookbook, complete with entertaining advice and sample party menus, to publishers. “I have no idea where it came from, but it’s been a constant for me since I was little,” she says of her willingness to jump without a net. “My parents would see me doing some crazy, new thing and ask, ‘How do you know how to do that?’ And I would say, ‘I just learned it up!’ That was my go-to phrase. I’ve always been someone who doesn’t read the directions and just figures it out. Most of the time, it works out just fine.”