Babish Breaks Down His Tattoos

I have a pretty plain aesthetic. [laughing]

I dress in plain black usually.

My tattoos are how I show my personality.

They're different aspects of me at different times

in my life.

Some are just dumb.

That's me in a nutshell.

Like there's some meaning, but a lot of it's just stupid.

[light music]

This is the only joke that I've ever come up with in my life

and it only works as a tattoo.

The sort of infinity symbol that was so popular

when I was in college that said live, laugh, love,

I wanted to get one that said soup, salad, and breadsticks.

That's my little Olive Garden sorority sister mashup

that [laughing] nobody was asking for.

Whatever, I like Olive Garden, sorry. [laughing]

So this is a tiny whisk, which became sort of a character

on my show.

Oh, [beep] we got a tiny whisk.

People really liked it when I busted out this little whisk

to give things a tiny whiskin'.

Most chefs, it's kind of like a rite of passage.

Like there are very few naked arm chefs out there.

Carmy on The Bear, I don't know

how many of those are real,

but like he's the vision of a chef with tattoos.

Matty's tattoos are amazing.

So I think I kinda had to do it just to fit in, really.

People seem to get the biggest kick

outta the cilantro tattoo.

I have that gene that makes cilantro taste like soap.

Unlike any other food, which I used to hate seafood,

for example, and I taught myself to love seafood.

I can't do that with cilantro.

I have a genetic aversion.

So I got this tattoo as like, you know,

I want to understand my enemy.

Little nod to the fact that it tastes bad to me.

This is the food arm.

I have different themed arms here.

So this is the food arm.

This is sort of film, TV, movie arm.

This is the Seattle skyline

from the opening credits of Frasier.

I am asked maybe on a monthly basis if I'm from Seattle.

I got this before I'd ever been to Seattle,

so I would always say, I've never been to Seattle.

Why do you ask?

This is the switchblade from 12 Angry Men.

One of my favorite scenes in all of cinema

is when Henry Fonda, he's like,

You sure you've never seen a knife like this?

And he just stands up, takes one out,

sticks it in the table.

It's a really cool moment in one of my favorite movies.

I wasn't planning on getting it

going through my skin like that,

but I went to the shop in Brooklyn.

The guy did primarily sailor tattoos.

He was like, You gotta get it going through your skin.

Like you gotta have the blood and everything coming out,

and I'm really glad that he did.

This is a lens refraction diagram.

So basically, how light enters and exits a lens.

It goes down to a single point and it's inverted.

I just like the way that that looks,

and this was becoming my sort of film and TV arm.

This looks like an eject button, but really,

it's supposed to be a frame forward button.

I'm an editor,

and this is the symbol for going frame by frame.

So it'd sorta be like, you know, attention to detail,

attention to detail that I wasn't paying

when I realized that this would look like

an eject button sideways.

So this is specifically the fork and spaghetti

from the movie Chef, when he serves pasta aglio e olio

to Scarlett Johansson and she swoons and it's sexy.

I got this before I met Jon

because I was such a big fan of the movie

and also because it was at a time

when my career was really taking off.

And so many people were recreating the aglio e olio.

Luckily, a few months later, I met Jon Favreau,

who was kind enough to give me the actual fork

from the scene in the movie and let me keep it.

It was a really incredible moment for me.

So this really opened up an incredible experience for me.

This, I got the year that I found my favorite song

of all time.

It continues to be my favorite song.

It's called Whole of the Moon.

To this day, it still makes me tear up when I listen to it.

It's very special to me.

Over here, we have a ring that my mom made for my dad

back in the '90s before she passed away

that he gave to me when she died.

And I held onto it for many, many years,

and unfortunately, I put it in my toiletry bag.

The airline lost my luggage.

So I lost the ring.

Luckily, I had gotten this before it was gone,

so I still am able to kinda commemorate

that lovely thing that my dad gave me.

My first tattoo is this guy in here.

This is a very common spot to get your,

if you're looking to get your first tattoo,

I recommend to do it here.

This is a symbol from New Orleans.

After Hurricane Katrina, they would spray paint this symbol

on the houses.

And this is just information relevant

to me and my friends' trip there,

where we were gutting houses and we spent our summer

working there after Hurricane Katrina.

I think I was 22 when I got this tattoo.

It was well after I went to New Orleans.

So I took three years to make sure I really wanted it.

You know, that first one,

it's really hard to pull the trigger.

Eventually I finally did it,

and also like, the first one, you know,

it creates an itch that you can never fully scratch.

So as soon as you get your first one,

you want your next one.

So it didn't take long.

I would get one at a rate of about one to two a year.

Not with any sort of cadence or intention.

I have never made an appointment to get a tattoo.

Every single one of these, I got the day

that I decided I wanted to get it.

I might've had an idea, but I would just walk

into the nearest reputable shop,

look at somebody's work, and be like, Let's roll.

The next one I got after this guy was this guy.

This is the original Kodak logo from 1910 or 1911,

Eastman Kodak Company.

And this is kind of a hometown pride thing.

I'm from Rochester, home of Kodak,

and also a reminder to stay with the times.

I got a spork up here.

This, I got in solidarity with Josh Scherer,

who has a YouTube channel Mythical Kitchen.

We were both nominated for a Streamy Award,

and we made a bet that the loser would have to get a tattoo

of the winner's face on their person.

I won, [laughing] so he got a tattoo of my face

on his lower back.

And as a show of, I think, heroic solidarity,

his signature tattoo is a spork,

which he has on his inner arm,

and I got that up here on my bicep to show solidarity.

I have one more hidden tattoo that I forgot to show,

and it's in a no-no place.

So if you have young children or a weak constitution,

please leave the room.

[beep]

But it's down here in the bathing suit area.

You'll see it's a diamond, the letters DP.

It is the logo of a band.

Their name is Diarrhea Planet.

I got [laughing] that the night of their last ever show.

There's a video on YouTube,

you'll see me get up on stage,

the lead singer wave me over and have me sing

in the mic with him, and then I jump backwards

into the crowd.

It was my rockstar moment,

one of the best moments of my life,

and I had just gotten this right beforehand

and then I got to meet the band after,

show them my fresh tattoo that got beaten up

when I was crowd surfing.

I was like 30 at the time,

and that'll be the last time that I crowd surf.

This is a gavel.

People will either think that it looks like Thor's hammer

or a robot penis.

This is the gavel from The West Wing.

The character that is my namesake, Oliver Babish,

in his first scene, he slams a tape recorder with a gavel,

and this is that very gavel.

[gavel thumping]

I figured I should pay homage to the one

to whom I owe my name.

This is the Hot Ones one that I got

when I was on Hot Ones.

This is my most recent one.

This is wagon wheel pasta.

And I just got this because a friend of mine

was getting his first tattoo.

He wanted me to get a tattoo with him,

like you know, solidarity.

And I didn't know what to get, and I was like,

that my favorite pasta shape when I was a kid,

Let's get wagon wheel pasta.

Oh, this guy, this, we didn't do this guy.

There's a opera musical by Philip Glass

called Einstein on the Beach.

It's 5 1/2 hours long.

It ends with this soaring violin piece

and this loud statement of two young lovers

in love on a park bench.

It breaks my heart every time I listen to it,

and I wanted to get a tattoo that denotes impermanence,

that all things come to an end for better or worse.

I couldn't think of a better example

than Einstein on the Beach.

It ends in a way that was more beautiful

than you could possibly imagine.

So I wanted to get something that symbolizes that.

It's basically a fluorescent light tubing reflected

on a black floor.

So that's what I was trying to get here

is like the solid bar,

and it's sort of like trailing off.

Unfortunately, I was holding my neck like this

when she did it, and as a result,

now it kinda is like a curve, but. [laughing]

I haven't covered up any tattoos,

and I don't regret getting any of the tattoos.

Even though, like, I'm not happy

with the way this one looks.

It's kinda sloppy.

It faded very quickly.

And I got it because I was in a rush.

I was with somebody at the time

who really didn't like tattoos, and we were fighting.

Like, you know, I was like, I wanna get it,

and they were like, No.

And eventually, I got them to cave.

So I ran out to the first tattoo parlor

that would take me in Rochester

and got this one done way too fast, and it shows.

It is a reminder of where I was at that time in life.

So I don't want to get it covered up.

I don't regret it.

Every one of these in indicative of where I was at

at a certain point in my life.

There's a lot more I wanna get.

Particularly, I'd love to do something on my hands one day.

When I was growing up,

I was told you'll go to prison immediately

if you have a hand tattoo, but now it's like, [laughing]

you know, yeah, I can get that no problem.

If you have any ideas, leave a comment.

[laughing] I'd love to know what I should get right here.

Something.

Not all my tattoos have to have meaning,

but that feels like it should have some meaning

if it's gonna be out there like that.

[light music continues]