How Viceland's Matty Matheson Does Breakfast, His Least Favorite Meal

When Matty Matheson filmed a tutorial on making hash for Munchies, the Canadian chef had one important disclaimer: “You can put whatever you want in a hash, and it’s yours. But this one’s mine, and now you get to know how to make it.”

It’s this open-minded, anyone-can-do-it attitude that drew Matheson to cooking. Following lackluster grades in school, he applied to culinary school—which he tells Extra Crispy “anyone can get accepted to”—so that he could move to his dream city, Toronto. “It was the first time I got good grades,” Matheson says. “It’s definitely something that I really, truly love. It’s part of who I am now, being a part of the industry.”

But Matheson, whose show It's Suppertime premieres November 30 on Viceland, isn’t quite so passionate about breakfast. Even people in the industry can have their own personal meal hierarchy, and Matheson isn’t shy about expressing his. Breakfast is square at the bottom as his “least favorite meal of the day.” In fact, one of his favorite breakfast foods isn’t a traditional Western breakfast food at all.

“If I could eat pho every morning for breakfast, I would,” he says. “My favorite pho place in Toronto opens at 10 a.m., and I often go there by myself and have a nice bowl of pho ga, and that’s pretty much it…. That’s something that I eat more than literally anything.”

His personal favorite breakfast to cook is still hash, which he calls a “fridge-cleaner.” There are only a few fundamentals you absolutely need: potatoes, eggs, and cheese. “Everything else is yours,” he says. “I love making a hash and topping it with a ton of fresh herbs, squeezes of lime... putting a fresh nice herb salad on top with radishes and shit.”

Beyond hash, he also enjoys what he calls “a play on a farmer’s or hunter’s breakfast” with cold slices of ham, hard-boiled eggs, mustard pickles, toast, and some boiled baby potatoes with butter and green onions. (Hm definitely seems like a breakfast guy to us.)

But despite Matheson’s lukewarm feelings on the first meal of the day, he does have one pet peeve, a mistake that he’s noticed even his fellow chefs making. “I find it really funny when people make pancakes that they don’t serve it with warm maple syrup,” he says. “Dude, bring it to a boil. Warm that up. Why are you putting something cold on something warm?”

However, Matheson doesn’t want to ever discourage anyone from cooking, because he earnestly believes anyone can do it if they just have confidence in themselves:

“[Cooking] becomes less of a chore when you start doing it often and you just have that confidence. The chore part of it is frustration: ‘I don’t know what to do.’ When people don’t know how to cook, I find it really funny because they always have the one thing they’re good at—spaghetti, french toast, breakfast burritos. Everyone has their one move. Well, you know how to cook that one thing, so take those things you’re doing and use those techniques to cook whatever you want!”