BY JOEY SWEENEY | It began, one day in the beforetime, with a video of the tornado omelette, served to me from an algorithm that probably began long ago, when I started to occasionally use YouTube to learn how to make new things. It wasn’t out of character for our Internet overlords to show me this, is what I am trying to say. For those who follow food trends, that tornado omelette was having a moment last fall and winter. 

And perhaps, reader, I lingered over it. Perhaps I watched it a few times before I would try (and ultimately, fail totally) at the tornado technique. But in the doing, something else happened. On an overall tonal and visual scale, this video soothed me. It had no narration. It had no background music. It was just a no-frills video of a chef in some greasy spoon on the other side of the world, calmly making something beautiful, strange and delicate out of scrambled eggs. 

And, as is the case so often these days, the machine knew I wanted more before I knew I wanted more. Soon the videos were peppered in with my Desus & Mero, my John Mulaney, my Fairport Convention clips. I fell in, at first mystified but then delighted at… Egg YouTube? Or, more clearly, people all over the globe doing elaborate shit with giant bowls of eggs. 

From Kyoto to Singapore to Seoul, I have watched line cooks, hobbyists, and villagers do things with eggs. What they share is not just this particular protein, though; each clip is hypnotic, meditative, and instructional, all at once. And in each one I began to favorite, something else would happen, some kind of inscrutable magic, a wild flex of technique that rendered the incredible edible egg even more so.

As the pandemic crept in, I began to send them to friends. First they laughed, but then, they too knew the strange solace of Egg YouTube, waiting for the quiet moment of revelation like it was the drop in an EDM track.

One morning, at the peak of lockdown, I woke up one morning to text from my friend, that just said, “That one was amazing.” It was timestamped somewhere deep in the night.

“Yeah man,” I texted back. “It was transcendent.”

Today, I share these with you. May they bring you the wonder they have brought to me and mine.

Watch Joey Sweeney’s egg playlist, in its entirety, here.