If you come across one of Harrison Wallace’s TikTok videos, you’ve probably given him a follow. His videos make you feel like you’re sitting in his kitchen, watching him cook a large batch of chicken spaghetti or a Caesar salad kit with homemade croutons or sheet of brown butter chocolate chip cookies for his older brother, who just had a baby.
“Being the perfect brother that I am, I wanted to send some food over there so they didn’t have to worry about cooking,” he jokes in his video.
In between explaining the directions for the cookies, recipe courtesy of Claire Saffitz, he shares personal anecdotes, like his “very brief flirtation with a vegan phase.”
These little stories and the insertion of personality into Wallace’s videos makes you feel like you’ve been lifelong friends. Wallace has 186,000 followers on TikTok under the username @harrywwallace, with several videos past the million-view mark. In addition to cooking content, Wallace also posts outfit checks and inspiration and grocery hauls.
“Shopping is my second love after eating,” says Wallace. “And I don’t see a lot of people who look like me sharing clothes on social media.”
Though you would never guess from the complexity of his cooking videos, Wallace is a self-taught chef. Born and raised in the Dallas–Fort Worth suburbs, Wallace’s love of cooking came from the mid-afternoon TV shows that were on when he came home from school. “As a kid, I was really, truly, deeply obsessed with Food Network,” he says with Unwrapped, Rachael Ray, and Ina Garten being some of his childhood favorites.
Wallace started cooking in his college kitchen, trying new recipes he read in Bon Appetit and The New York Times cooking section his dad gave him.
“When I was a kid, my dad did pretty much all of the cooking. A lot of my recipes carried over from him,” says Wallace. “Just really simple, classic, utilitarian recipes that parents use to feed all the kids.”
The first recipe he ever asked his dad for was his chicken spaghetti, which he has multiple videos about on his TikTok account.
Though Wallace has the skills to work professionally, cooking is more about pleasure for him.
“Never say never, but I think I would crumble if I was working in a restaurant kitchen, and a head chef yells at me because I’m not cutting the bell peppers right,” he says. “I’m more than happy just to be alone in my kitchen, doing what I know to do at the pace that I know how to do it.”
For Wallace, cooking is not only a personal outlet, but also a way to bring people into the same space, especially after the COVID lockdown when everyone was so far apart.
“Post-pandemic, we weren’t really gathering in big groups for so long,” he says. “I think now to be able to do that again is really beautiful. The best part of that is just getting everyone in the same place.”
In one of his videos, he posted a few recipes he made for a TV show watch party.
“I need no excuse for a party,” he says in the video. “So, last night, I threw a little get together to watch the reunion for the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
And at the party, he made a pizza that had a bit of special meaning for him and his friends: “I’m kind of basing this off of a flatbread from one of our favorite restaurants that we used to go to all the time, and then closed,” he says. “It was very sad, but it’s very easy to replicate here at home.”
Wallace uses these occasions to test new recipes for a large group of people while embracing his love of hosting. In his early 20s, Wallace’s best friend and his best friend’s brother would host a giant Christmas party with everyone they knew. “What was so great about it was that they would invite work friends, family friends, college friends, and it was just everybody in a room together, ” Wallace says. “That’s what always made it so fun because there was always someone new to meet.”
With this lesson learned, Wallace now enjoys bringing the important people in his life together to connect. He loves mixing social groups — at a recent party he threw for his nephew’s second birthday, Wallace witnessed his high school best friend and his cousin meet for the first time. To Wallace, it’s all about celebrating with loved ones, new and old, over any good food. “Food is just an excuse for a bunch of people to get into the same room,” Wallace says.