At Dear Margaret, Everything (Good) Takes Forever, As the Restaurant's Behind-the-Scenes Videos Show

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“Are you recording? Great,” deadpans Ryan Brosseau, executive chef of Dear Margaret, after mock-stretching in his customary striped navy apron. An upbeat Vampire Weekend guitar riff falls in, and the title screen announces another episode of “Everything Takes Forever,” the weekly-ish TikTok and Instagram series created by Lacey Irby, owner of this French-Canadian restaurant in Lakeview. 

Belying his seeming apathy, our reluctant chef host narrates us through a richly informative, 3-minute cooking lesson on Parisian gnocchi – “another use for a thing called pâte à choux,” he says. Brosseau explains that beating “the heck out of” flour in a pot with boiled water and melted fat develops gluten, cooks out the water, and gelatinizes the starch in the dough, which changes before our eyes into one big blob. He says that by slowly paddling eggs into the slightly cooled mixture, he’s emulsifying them into the dough, which morphs from lumpy to “silky and sticky.” Moments – or, more likely, a few days – later, a now startlingly beardless Brosseau brandishes a piping bag full of the cooled, herb-flecked choux dough, which he cuts into a pot of hot water. 

“I know what you’re thinking to yourself,” he says, referring to using a piping bag. “Is it gonna taste better? No. Does it look nicer? Yeah, a little bit.” The finished product would eventually pair with pan-roasted whitefish, English peas, mustard and garlic cream, and dill pickle vinaigrette on Dear Margaret’s menu. 

“The way he is in the videos is the way he is all the time,” Irby told me later. She and Brosseau were speaking from the closed restaurant on a Tuesday afternoon, a.k.a prep and filming day, where she’d later shoot Brosseau curing sablefish for conserva with roasted pepper, black olive, and thyme.

About 18 months ago, the two were discussing ways to connect with Dear Margaret’s customers, get a few new ones through the door, and “help the general public understand why things are the way they are at restaurants – why things cost what they cost, why the menu changes all the time, why sometimes things aren’t available,” Irby said. 

“We thought we could peel back the curtain a little and let guests in on what it’s like in the kitchen and what makes us and our food special.” 

Irby, who’s “chronically online” and loves watching TikTok, suggested they try making videos for the restaurant’s social channels. She bought a couple of $10 microphones from the TikTok shop and started out recording Brosseau bantering with Dear Margaret’s then-sous chef during prep. After the sous chef left the restaurant, the videos morphed into “two-minute, on-the-fly, sh***y cooking lessons,” Brosseau said.

Each week, they select a topic based on active prep Brosseau is doing for the restaurant, be it lacto-fermented corn for sour corn and shredded pork salad; Louisiana bullfrog legs confited in duck fat; beef heart and tongue terrine; or cured and smoked bay scallops. Irby records 20 or 30 minutes of content – sometimes over a few days, as with time- and labor-intensive terrines – and then edits each one down to roughly three minutes. In a sinister win for short attention spans, Instagram won’t push out content that exceeds that duration. 

“We’ve learned that the hard way,” Irby said, “but I try not to fret about it.”

Indeed, most of Brosseau’s cooking is too complex and labor-intensive for platforms that favor highly polished, 30-second clips. (He himself coined the phrase that became the series title during one of the videos.) Instead, Irby leans in, adding stickers and filters, dubbing over Brosseau and captioning his grumpy sound effects (“Harumph!”), and speeding up repetitive, slow tasks like stirring by 10 times, which makes his voice sound like a chipmunk. 

“At times Ryan will get going and people will glaze over,” she said. “What’s nice with videos is we can have a little fun with it.”

Silliness notwithstanding, Brosseau walks us through the math of making lamb sausage in house (eight parts lamb to two parts pork fatback), joking that he left his ChatGPT at home and so will have to use his brain instead. He tells us that cubeb peppercorns are more aromatic than black and sport little tails “like a puppy dog” in a video testing a braised chicken gizzard dish. Sometimes he lobs some of his trademark snark straight at his director.

“Am I, like, acting or am I just doing my thing?” Brosseau says at the start of a video on sea bass and seafood stew.

“You need to tell me what you’re doing,” Irby replies with a tinge of exasperation. 

Brosseau told me that, “The number-one thing is whenever I have an option to cheat I don’t. I will do everything the old-school way even if it takes longer if I think it’s the best way to do it.”

Although they joke about getting into TikTok’s creator program – “Do you know how many cents we could make?” Brosseau said – the goals have always been to educate, connect in a meaningful way, and get a few more butts in seats. Indeed, they get IRL comments on the videos almost nightly from customers, some of whom come in specifically because of a dish they saw Brosseau make. Regulars who follow the restaurant on Instagram frequently engage with and comment on the videos. Six months ago, one brought in a framed “Everything Takes Forever” sign she made, which is now on display behind the bar. 

Brosseau, who often runs food to customers at tables, is taking his fame in stride.

“As soon as it stops turning into people coming in, I’m going to lose interest,” he said. “I’m not a monkey.”

In many ways, the videos mirror the intimate, lighthearted, and nerdy vibes of this 36-seat neighborhood restaurant, where Irby always keeps a bar seat or two open in case a regular pops in; where servers who’ve worked at the restaurant since it opened in 2021 exclaim that the latest duck liver mousse is, in fact, Brosseau’s best yet.  

“We just try to be ourselves and show that you can be serious and have a good time,” Irby said. “You can share knowledge and technique and advice and still make it fun, even if it goes over the limit for what Instagram considers a reasonable amount of time for a video.”