For the most part, Bon Appetit, a culinary magazine with a large YouTube presence, is handling the coronavirus crisis like many media companies. Their contributors and editors are all working from home and their video production team has been put on leave. The sole exception to that is senior editor Claire Saffitz. Claire Saffitz is a professional pastry chef who has recently come to prominence as host of the wildly popular youtube series Gourmet Makes.
Earlier in March, when it first became clear to producers that COVID-19 was likely to impact day-to-day operations, they made sure to notify all personnel. But Claire had just started on a new episode of Gourmet Makes and was under a standard reality/cooking show control. Which stipulates that, in the event of national emergency, the talent is only to be notified if an immediate family member is impacted.
So, as Bon Appetit staff members slowly began to start working from home and video crew members were sent home, Claire has remained blissfully unaware. She is now completely alone in the office with the exception of one single member of the production team. We spoke to Steven Gunderson, who was left behind to film the rest of the episode, to see where Claire’s head is at as of Friday, March 20th.
Honestly, Claire is pretty absorbed in her work. On this episode of GP*, we’re doing Coco Puffs and she had a lot of difficulty getting the milk to become chocolate milk. So mostly she’s been talking about coco powder and how best to adhere a powder mixture to the puffs so that enough falls off to create the chocolate milk but enough is reattained on the puffs to give it’s exterior a chocolate flavor. But occasionally she looks around and notices no one else is here and she looks confused and sad.
But I don’t think she has quite figured out what is going on. Yesterday, she got out a tray to bring her finished product down to the offices. But there was no one there. So we just wandered around an empty office with a tray full of breakfast cereal for an hour.
Steven Gunderson, 1st Assistant Camera
*Gourmet Makes was originally pitched as Gourmet Produces so many crew members still refer to it as GP.
We spoke to several Gourmet Maker producers and they all confirmed that Claire seems to be nearing completion of the project and they fully intend to tell her about the coronavirus situation once the episode has wrapped. There is some debate as to whether or not they should film it.
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