Celebrity chef Iain Hewitson doesn’t have a phone, doesn’t drive, and has no idea how to use an answering machine.
“I’m not very okay with the modern world,” says the man who brought simple-to-prepare recipes to our television screens through Healthy,
Wealthy and Wise and Good Morning Australia with Bert Newton, Huey’s Cooking Adventures and Huey’s Kitchen.
While the 75-year-old might not have a clue about social media, he’s creating a sensation on TikTok with the help of daughter Charlotte.
“I’ve been doing YouTube for a couple of years, which goes quite well, but it’s still not in the vein of TikTok,” Iain says.
“Charlotte came to me and said, ‘why don’t you give TikTok a try? Nobody will know you’re that bad, because it’s a young person’s avenue. We’ll just film it at home.’
“And she does, she films it on her phone and she does the editing. But the first thing that we did, which was basically me sitting at the kitchen bench and saying, now I’m on TikTok, within a week or so we had a million hits.
“It was certainly not what either she or I had expected, but it was quite amazing because a lot of the hits were people who said, we watched you when we were kids. And we used to come home from school and watch one of your shows.
“There also were quite a few people who said they thought I was dead. One lady even said that she had been to my state funeral, which I thought was wonderful.
“It turned out to be Kevin McQuay, remember Big Kev, the guy who sold cleaning stuff on television? It was his state funeral. I didn’t mind being put in the same basket as Big Kev.”
Iain has only been making the TikTok videos for a few months and he says Charlotte insists they are kept simple which has obviously worked.
“I’m giving them hints on pretty basic things, but surprisingly, one of the most popular recipes I’ve done on the show, was just scrambled eggs.
“By the way, the intention at the beginning was not to do a lot of recipes, but certainly it’s been what they wanted. You have to listen to the audience.
“They wanted simple recipes. It’s obvious that people don’t know how to cook the basics. Yes, they can do a stir fry, because they’ve seen a million recipes for those. They can do something on the barbecue, but when it comes to the basics that maybe in the old days their mother would have taught them, they don’t really know.
“It’s the real basic recipes are the ones that are the hits and the ones that work, although I have to say, there’s no rhyme nor reason for it.
“You put up a recipe and you say, ‘oh, that’s going to be a huge hit’ and there’s very little interest. And then you put up something and you think, ‘oh, I don’t know why I did that’. And you get a lot of hits. I would love to be able to tell you what the answer is. But the main thing about it is simple, fast, and a bit of fun.”
While cooking shows on television these days are for more accomplished cooks and more about the competition, Iain says his own style of cooking hasn’t changed.

“I was always about warts and all, and it was all about simple food. But shows like MasterChef is more of a game show than it is a cooking show. That is aspirational cooking; it’s not suitable for basic cooks, it is geared to people with some real cooking skills.
“That’s not what I do. I do stuff that actually somebody in the kitchen can come out with a half-decent result. That’s what I’ve always done, that’s what I did on Healthy Wealthy and Wise when I started in ‘91. I can tell a story about that because the first recipe I ever did on the show was warm chicken salad, which was way before warm salads became in vogue. And it was a huge hit. We got so many requests for the recipe.
“So the next week I thought, ‘oh, how easy is this?’ And I did a more complicated restaurant-type dish. It was navarin of lamb. I got only two requests for that. That taught me that people want things that they actually can cook. And they don’t have to have a pantry full of first run truffle oil and things like that.
“Also they don’t need huge amounts of equipment.”
Iain’s TikTok adventures have earned him a spot as one of five finalists for the TikTok Awards for the Food Creator.
“I won’t win it; it’s myself and four very young groovy kids. One of the groovy kids will win it for sure, which is fine by me. It was an honour to be included in the fight. I’m not going to be one of the five, whether I win or not.”
Win or lose it’s unlikely Iain will pick up on an earlier career. Before he turned to restaurants and cooking he dabbled in music.
“Yeah, I used to play a bit of music in the old days. Actually, when I first came to Australia, I had an intention of continuing. We’d won a couple of New Zealand Battle of the Bands, and we weren’t bad, I suppose.
“I wasn’t terribly talented, I don’t think, but I always remember I went to a concert at the Melbourne Town Hall when I first arrived, and the three bands were Chain, which of course was a Western Australian band, MetaLights and Daddy Cool.
“And they were absolutely brilliant, but Daddy Cool just blew my mind. They were so talented and they were so innovative and daring and just different. Anyway, it sort of turned me off, even thinking of continuing my musical career.
“As my wife at the time said to me, as a guitarist I made a very fine cook. She was pretty right. Anyway, because I’m doing a memoir at the moment, I’m just finishing it off, and I wrote to Ross Wilson, who was the lead singer of Daddy Cool, asking for a photograph from that day and told him the story.
“And he sent back a note saying, so it’s Daddy Cool’s fault that you made such a successful career in cooking. I thought that was great. But it’s very funny.”
Iain has been putting a book together for the past couple of years. The book’s called Who Called the Cook a Bastard? It is due out around March.
“It’s just gone off to the editor as we speak and it’s got a lot of photos in it. It’s different than most people’s memoirs in the sense that I think it’s quite funny. But then again I always think my jokes are funny. It covers mainly Melbourne and Sydney, but it covers a lot of those days when Australia’s food culture was just really getting started,” he said.