It’s time to get cooking with “Queer Eye” star Antoni Porowski as he joins the Sarasota-Manatee Campus Activities Board (CAB) Tuesday for a night of culinary Q&A.
The event will be held on Zoom March 2 at 7 p.m. Porowski will answer questions that audience members submitted when they signed up while doing a cooking demonstration that students are invited to follow along at home. He will be making a pan-seared maple dijon salmon with a garlicky broccoli rabe.
Porowski is being paid $15,000 for the event. The event will be moderated by Brittany Aburto, assistant director of the CAB.
Porowski is most famously known as a member of the “Fab Five” from Netflix’s show Queer Eye. He is the culinary expert on the show, and in each episode he helps a new person, or “hero” on the show, hone their cooking skills and learn new recipes that fit into their daily lives.
Despite his culinary prowess, Porowski is not a trained chef. He hoped to be a therapist at one time, so he studied psychology at Concordia University in Canada where he was born and raised. After college, Porowski moved to New York to become an actor. He studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and graduated in 2011.
Though none of his credits compare to his success on Queer Eye, Porowski did manage to book several roles over the course of his career. He was in the films “Blood Surf,” “Horror Time,” “Daddy’s Boy” and “The Diary,” among others. He also played the lead cop on a 2014 episode of NBC’s hit show “The Blacklist.”
When he wasn’t landing gigs, Porowski was working as a busboy at a small Polish restaurant. He was later employed at BondST, a sushi restaurant in New York, where he served as a busboy, waiter and eventually manager.
After bouncing between restaurants and acting jobs, he became a private cook for Ted Allen, who was the original food and wine expert on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” the show on which Netflix’s Queer Eye is based. Allen was Porowski’s neighbor and he encouraged Porowski to practice his cooking even more frequently. It was ultimately Allen who recommended that Porowski be a member of the new “Fab Five.”
Porowski was the last of the Queer Eye guys to be cast and the endorsem*nt by Allen ultimately landed him the role. Queer Eye released its fifth season in June 2020 and has been renewed for a sixth season which was delayed due to pandemic restrictions. It is set to be released sometime this year.
With his success on Queer Eye, Porowski released a cookbook in 2019 titled “Antoni in the Kitchen” which won a Goodread’s Choice Award for best cookbook. He is set to release another book in September which will be titled “Antoni: Let’s Do Dinner.”
Porowski is also the co-owner of a restaurant in New York called Village Den which boasts healthy options for fast and casual dining.
