BURBANK, CALIFORNIA
July 18, 2025
STRANGER: Bennett Rea
LOCATION: Smoke House, 4420 W Lakeside Drive, Burbank, California
THEME: How a TikTok series on politicians’ favorite foods blends history with humor
“How do I find terrapin? Or possum? Or veal knuckles?” asks Bennett Rea, who casually adds that there’s two squirrels in his freezer.
He’s not unraveling. He’s just listing ingredients he’s actually hunted down for his online show Cookin’ With Congress. Launched in 2018, the series began as a blog with Bennett cooking bizarre recipes from presidents and other politicians. It evolved to videos and other types of diets, and has exploded in popularity on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
More than half a million people follow the show across the three platforms. The novel, engaging concept is such a hit that it became Bennett’s full-time job this year.
I’m learning this and other insights across the table from him at Smoke House, a restaurant near his home in Burbank, California. As we browse the menus, we both praise the place’s old school look. It’s like a Swiss chalet got a Hollywood makeover: bright red leather booths, wood-beamed ceilings and decades of handsome headshots watching you eat.
Bennett wouldn’t be out of place among the portraits lining the walls. Dressed in a stylish short-sleeve red shirt over a white tank, with silver-dusted hair, a charming smile, and a steady gaze, he fits seamlessly into the vintage glamour of the room.
“I love this place,” he says. “It feels like we’re old power brokers making a deal. It’s very 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, that’s my favorite time period in terms of stuff that I cook.”
And what he cooks each week for the show can be, to a viewer, sometimes stomach-churning, occasionally mouthwatering, and always intriguing.
Bennett takes his time researching and recreating the diets of famous politicos. He tries to find ingredients as close to the original dishes as possible, then makes them at home. Viewers watch him eat his way through the featured person’s typical day, sharing his verdict.
Some videos reveal that notable residents of Washington, D.C., had unhinged tastes. For example, the late Illinois Republican Rep. Leslie Arends’ Thanksgiving salad. The key ingredients? Whipped cream, pineapple, lime jello, nuts and pimento cream cheese, of course. Bennett makes it, takes a bite, ponders, and then with perfect deadpan says, “No, no I don’t like it. If I brought this to someone’s Thanksgiving, I would hurt people’s feelings.”
Or they build on fragments of knowledge people might have. Take his video eating like President William Taft. He’s the commander in chief so large it generated the myth he got stuck in a White House bath tub. In a video that has over 2 million views, Bennett makes and consumes breakfast of three buttermilk waffles with maple syrup, five cups of coffee and a 12 ounce steak – “the lightest meal of the day,” Bennett laughs in resignation on the video.
It’s followed by lunch of four lamp chops, turtle soup, Bermuda potatoes, more coffee, bonbons, raspberry jelly topped with whipped cream and salted almonds.
Then dinner: a vegetable salad with olives, hearts of palm, cucumber and asparagus, a lobster stew, roast turkey with potato salad and green peas, and 8 ounce steak with cabbage side salad, a filet of salmon and “the crown jewel” of possum with sweet potatoes. Dessert was a plate of fruit, coffee and four color cream fruit pie. “Full transparency, I could not finish everything,” he says after, noting the feast gave him “labored breathing . . . like a pug.”
@cookinwithcongress Okay I’ve teased enough — it’s William Taft time. Get ready. Gird your minds. Drink some water. Here we go with the most intense presidential diet of all time. Oh and also possum. I’m still full. #ushistory #foodreview ♬ National Anthem – The Ovation Chorale and Brass
The video is a masterclass in why Cookin’ With Congress is a hit: offbeat history, well-cooked meals, and Bennett’s solid sense of humor and affability. “I want to do some sort of part two follow-up about what happened the day after this diet,” he quips in the video.
It also explains why, over lunch, he casually listed possum as one of the many odd ingredients he’s had to source for the series. As he says in the video, and again between bites, his dad trapped and prepped the creature. “He makes his own bows and arrows out of trees and hunts and traps like he lives in the 1750s,” Bennett tells me proudly. “That connection helps. From him I have two squirrels and an opossum in the freezer now.”
Our lunch, mercifully, doesn’t require archery.
Bennett orders the prime rib sandwich, an open-faced slab of meat on sourdough, topped with crispy onions and paired with horseradish sauce.
I go for the New York steak sandwich on garlic bread, generously portioned, perfectly cooked, incredibly delicious, but too much dough to finish.
I wave the white flag at the rest. As I set down my fork, Bennett tells me turning woodland creatures into entrees wasn’t his original career plan.
“I feel like I’ve lived a hundred lives,” says Bennett. He has worked for environmental nonprofits, a distillery and a movie theater at various stages of his life, writing comedy and performing improv, and for a while even contemplating a potential job in politics.
Born and raised outside of Pittsburgh, “the second grayest city in the entire country,” he went to Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, getting his bachelor’s degree in political science and government, graduating a semester early. “What first got me interested in politics was reading a book on presidential history at six or seven years old. It was full of fun facts, and true history, and I just loved it. So I was hooked on presidential history, first and foremost.”
As he got older, this interest developed watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. “The way they approached it was so funny but also very humanistic, it had a real pathos to it.”
Bennett had always enjoyed writing, so he figured perhaps a campaign speechwriter might be a viable future occupation. But learning just how the political sausage is made was a turnoff. “I’m a very optimistic, hopeful person at heart. The true machinations of politics was kind of dark. I couldn’t stand it, it’s too cynical. My stomach was too weak for it,” he says, then pauses and laughs, “But not too weak to eat everything on Cookin’ With Congress.”
He graduated in 2010 into an ongoing recession, applying to hundreds of random jobs. Panera Bread said they’d hire him but only if he shaved his beard – he says that was a nonstarter. “So I ended up working in a movie theater, which was such a great, humbling experience. I came out of college arrogant, thinking I’d just waltz into a job. Didn’t happen. Sweeping up people’s popcorn, I needed it, I needed that ego check.”
Then he visited a friend in Los Angeles and immediately fell in love with the city, so much so that he teared up on the flight back to Pittsburgh knowing it would be the last time he’d fly back to the city as his home, because moving to the west coast was now essential.
Once in L.A. he spent roughly a decade working in the environmental nonprofit world, including social media and event planning for several organizations.
Other roles include being the communications and events director for a craft distillery. “That’s where I learned how to make cocktails really well,” he says. It also explains why the shelves in the background on Cookin’ With Congress feature a huge number of bitters.
He also took some improv and comedy writing classes, always keeping his creative spark going. And in 2018 that spark ignited with his initial idea for the politics and food series.
“I’ve always liked cooking,” Bennett says.
By this time in his life he was married, and one day his wife’s mother showed him the South Dakota Centennial Cookbook featuring good, bad and ugly recipes submitted by lawmakers. He had to try some. “Wine jelly was the first I made, it was so weird. It’s what happens if you take a soup broth and try to make it chewy. It was gross.”
Stomach-churning though it might have been, Bennett immediately realized he was on to something with recreating these obscure dishes. He started Cookin’ With Congress first as a blog, then expanded to video. Early attempts at recording were too convoluted, he says, running over five minutes and even at one point featuring a co-host with a dry wit.
“But it wasn’t right yet,” he says, so he put the project on the back burner (kitchen pun!) for a year. Then that same spark reignited, and he tried again, this time solo. He tinkered with the look and style of the show, and that work led to the runaway success it is today.
I ask what it’s like knowing that hundreds of thousands of people are watching him eat. “If I’d known that many were watching, I’d probably have painted the dining room a little better.”
Producing the series takes up two full days of his week, with at least a third of the time needed for each episode being the hunt for ingredients, so he’s at grocery stores constantly. He’s a one-man show filming, editing, narrating and uploading the videos.
Ideas are never in short supply thanks to people sending in recipes and countless books with odd dishes from politicos across decades, so he’s got enough lined up for at least the rest of the year. “Meal prep is a lot easier when you know exactly what you’re going to eat in like September right now.”
While many of the meals he makes can cause viewers to raise an eyebrow or trigger their gag reflex, some are decent and he’s made again off-screen for his family (Bennett and his wife have a five-and-a-half-year old daughter). Among them are Grace Coolidge’s croquettes and a spaghetti carbonara recipe by disgraced former Rep. George Santos (R-NY).
Santos saw the video and messaged Bennett, complaining that his take did not meet the lawmaker’s standards. “He’s very much a character, whether you like or hate his politics, whether you’re pro- or anti-fraud, I love that he got sassy with me. That fact I lived rent free in his head, even for a moment, that’s really fun for me. And it was a really good carbonara.”
The Santos situation shows how Cookin’ With Congress attempts to sidestep political controversy despite its title.
“I think there’s a really cool and strange audience that I’ve built across a very broad spectrum of people,” he says. “There are folks who are conservative who are really interested in it because they love history and love roasting politicians, and people on the left who really love it because they’re educators and they also love roasting politicians. I think there are somehow even politicians there’s a couple who love it because they think it’s fun and entertaining.”
Given his college studies, we have an inevitable discussion about the state of American politics. “Division pays, right? And hate and anger pays. But I see so much more kindness possible in life. I like building this broad coalition with educational aspects.”
So is there anyone he wouldn’t cover? Nobody jumps to mind, he says.
Anything he won’t eat? Carrots. “They would literally kill me. I carry an EpiPen for them.”
Since launching Cookin’ With Congress, Bennett has expanded the scope to segments on eating like a first lady, cooking weird family recipes viewers send him, and eating like America. The latter invites his subscribers to send in their standard breakfast, lunch and dinner routines, with the goal of covering all 435 Congressional districts.
“As an observational person, as a writer from a very young age, I just wanted to know what everyone else was up to. And so this is such a cool way to find out,” he says.
Given that he invites subscribers to send in their typical daily menus and then recreates them for videos, I ask what “eating like Bennett” for a day would actually look like.
He smiles. “That’s one of my most requested videos. That and drinking like Winston Churchill.” Viewers will eventually get to see what his off-screen diet looks like. He tells me the details, but I agree to keep them off the record. No spoilers here. I’ll just say this: his dessert option is one I consider grim (I told him so to his face!) but plenty people love.
We order coffees (lunch was so hefty we skip dessert), decaf for him, regular for me.
Before they arrive, a woman stops by our booth – not a server, but the in-house photographer offering posed souvenir shots. It’s a retro touch impossible to resist. I end up buying a copy for each of us, we look simply charming.
As our time together nears the end, we talk more about our lives. Bennett’s quizzed me plenty during our meal, underscoring his clear and earnest interest in other people.
It’s that curiosity that in part fuels his series, looking at the nexus between politics and food, and even returned to Juniata College to give a talk on the topic. He explains how a politician talks about or is seen with food can have a positive or negative impact on a campaign. “If you have someone who’s meant to be this tough candidate and they are seen daintily slurping on spaghetti – a bad photo op won’t lose you the presidency but it can lose you a district.”
He adds, “And food is political, politicians are so controlled in what they say they like to it, and it’s often based on where they go. It’s dangerous for them to interact with food.”
Judging by some of the entries in Bennett’s series, it’s dangerous for his digestive system to interact with food at time. “The cliche is that food brings connection and yes, 100%, but I also think disgust and finding things joyful and funny can bring connection,” he says, and that’s what his work does.
His rightly deserved pride in Cookin’ With Congress is clear. “All things considered, I want to do this for a long time. So I gave myself the leeway and runway to do it for at least 10 years.”
Bennett adds, “I am my own employer and it’s terrifying,” he says. But he had the confidence to do it with backing from his family. “My daughter came up to me the other day and she just said, out of nowhere, ‘I’m so proud of you because you’re doing stuff that’s fun and makes you happy.”
Even if it does cause him to gulp air like a pug sometimes.