How Ottawa’s “Cucumber Boy” became the star of TikTok

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Sometimes, you just need to eat an entire cucumber.

At least, that’s the now-famous opening line of Ottawa content creator Logan Moffitt, who has spent the last few months making viral videos about summer’s favourite vegetable. In the videos, Moffitt dresses sliced cucumbers in a variety of toppings — soy sauce, feta cheese and avocado are frequent pairings — and shakes them in plastic to-go containers to evenly coat each slice.

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Since early July, Moffitt’s cucumber videos have amassed well over 100 million views on TikTok, and food bloggers around the world have picked up the trend, crediting the 23-year-old with creating some of this year’s easiest (and most delicious) recipes. Even a handful of celebrities have made marinated cucumber videos of their own, including Emmy Award-winning chef Giada De Laurentiis, influencer Alix Earle and musician Dillon Francis. Mexican fast food chain Chipotle, too, amplified a cucumber video that featured the restaurant’s honey vinaigrette dressing, a “paid partnership” with Moffitt’s content that paid him handsomely for the product placement.

“I was just, I don’t know, filming a video about the cucumber,” Moffitt said in an interview, laughing at how quickly his idea took off. Simple recipes have been the content creator’s bread and butter for years — there wasn’t anything particularly revolutionary about the cucumbers, he revealed.

“I didn’t really plan it out,” he continued. “But a lot of people liked it, so I just decided to keep making these cucumber videos. It’s become a bigger trend than I ever could have expected.”

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Moffitt, who now boasts nearly five million followers on TikTok, is no stranger to social media. Born in Stittsville and raised in Barrhaven, the former University of Ottawa student started creating online cooking videos during the second year of his communications degree, which he completed this spring.

“I started posting for fun,” he said, “but then people started paying attention, because they could relate to the stuff I was posting. I was posting random stuff that I was making and eating, nothing too crazy.

“But I got consistent with it, and I kept doing it,” he continued, adding that he created a strict schedule for himself that included posting multiple videos to TikTok per day. “It’s coming up on three years that I’ve been doing this.”

Moffitt says the consistency with which he uploaded videos soon paid off — before long, he realized he could make a career out of the recipes he was posting online.

“I decided to take it a little bit more seriously, and really level up my content and make it better,” he said. “And that led to what’s happening now.”

Moffitt wasn’t always a culinary prodigy — he says he started making meals as a child out of necessity.

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“I was kind of not impressed with my parents’ cooking,” he said, laughing. Soon enough, he started meal-prepping and making dinner for his family, as well as developing a taste for Korean food.

Most of Moffitt’s cucumber recipes are inspired by Korean cuisine, which he says is his favourite to make in his home kitchen. Several of the cucumber videos require ingredients like sesame oil and MSG, the latter of which Moffitt insists enhances the umami flavour of the surrounding ingredients.

If you’re an Ottawa local looking to make seasoned cucumbers of your own, Moffitt recommends checking out OK Mart in Nepean and Seoul Mart downtown for a wide selection of Korean ingredients. He’s less forthcoming about his favourite Ottawa restaurants — “I don’t eat out,” he confessed. “Lots of people ask for my restaurant recommendations, and that’s hard for me. I do not eat out — I literally make all my food. If I want something, I order the ingredients and make it.”

If pressed to pick a favourite of his recent concoctions, Moffitt says the cucumber recipe featuring avocado, cream cheese, salmon and everything bagel seasoning would have to top his list. “It’s supposed to be like sliced avocado on a bagel,” he explained, adding that he hasn’t yet taken the time to name his creations.

Looking ahead, Moffitt’s excited about how the cucumber videos have increased his online presence; upped numbers can only help his influencer career in the long run, he says.

“There’s no cap on how well you can do,” he said. “You can always do better, and that’s really nice — I can do this over time, and continue to see variations of success.”

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