YouTube cooking channel involves two guys making surprise lunch for strangers

If there's one thing the internet isn't in short supply of, it's YouTube cooking channels.

The market's crowded, to say the least. These days, you need to a have a decent unique selling point if you want to stand out.

Enter Stranger Kitchens. The channel kicked off in 2018, and is the work of three 20-year-olds: copy editor Ed Krish, and students Hal Krish and Nick Green. Each episode basically involves the hosts knocking on random doors around London and offering to make lunch for the people who live there.

"We were bored over last summer and started off thinking about making a POV cooking show, and as we were talking about it, it became more and more about the people we were going to cook for," the Stranger Kitchens team told Mashable. "Eventually our friend Nick who works with us on Stranger Kitchens said, ‘Well why don’t you go and cook for strangers then?’

"He said this sarcastically. We took it literally."

The channel got off to a bizarrely fortunate start. In an encounter that seems far too authentic to have been engineered, Ed and Hal end up knocking on the door of Instagram chef (and published author) Miguel Barclay. After hitting several not-so-enthusiastic doors, they landed on that of Barclay, who invited them into his home, where they cooked and shared a lovely noodle salad.

Ed and Hal described the making of that episode as their favourite experience so far with the channel. Not bad for a first go.

"I think it was probably the process of editing our first episode until 3 a.m. the day after filming it," they explained. "That was when we realised what Stranger Kitchens was going to be and how much we loved doing it."

The way the episodes are edited is part of the channel's charm. While there's little explanation as to the steps of the cooking itself, the POV vibe is complimented with plenty of abrupt zooms, flashes of text on the screen, and some entertainingly hectic cuts.

"Our approach has always been to make videos that we enjoy watching, and because what happens in the houses is random and hard to control, we have to piece it together when we’re editing, which often creates a fast-paced and choppy style, as we focus on stories and comments that we find funny when we’re editing," the team explained.

Of course, not all people are going to want to let two men they've never met before into their homes. Ed and Hal, who are cousins, explained that people's willingness to be on the show does vary quite a bit.

"We have had episodes where we went out and didn’t get in anywhere, we’ve had ones when we knock on 80 doors, and our most recent episode only took us about three or four," they explained. "We’re still trying to figure out the best time of the day and best day of the week to boost our chances, but it's impossible to predict."

And do they ever worry about going into the homes of people they've never met before?

"We made the show because we want to introduce people to interesting strangers that they wouldn’t have otherwise come across, so we have quite a bit of faith in people," they said. "But we do always let friends and family know before we’re shooting an episode and where we’re going as an extra precaution."

Although it started a year ago, Stranger Kitchens recently got a big boost in popularity courtesy of Reddit.

On Sunday, the fourth episode was shared on the very popular r/videos sub, where it was upvoted over 25,000 times.

At the time of writing, that video has been viewed over 166,000 times. That's over 150,000 times more than their second most popular video on YouTube.

The team shared the following message in the Reddit comments.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Sure enough, their latest episode went up on Sunday night. And it doesn't look like they'll be stopping anytime soon.

"For now, [the plan is] to get into the swing of uploading regularly, and also to bring some new video ideas to our channel," they said.

So there you have it. The next time two random people knock on your door, they might not actually want to sell you anything.

They might just want to make you a nice lunch.