Rosie Kellett (The Late Plate) on book deals, going viral overnight, and early thirties change of direction, and warehouse life

Image: Morgan De Laporte

As I chat to Rosie Kellett, she’s sat in what looks like a small kitchen nook with books on the shelf and background noise of life in the warehouse that became part of her rise to prominence, documenting cooking for her community, whether they be the residents of the warehouse or supper club guests.

It turns out that the noise is actually the local Fire Brigade surveying that the building is safe. I’m usually checking the clock as I chat to people to make sure that I’m not going over time too much but chatting to Rosie there’s the imminent threat of a screaming fire alarm. All the same we cover a lot of ground in these 3000 words, including going viral overnight (for better or for worse), writing The Late Plate on Substack, scoring a book deal and navigating the business side of publishing.

In For Dinner is out next year but available to preorder, the title a question asked on the warehouse group chat. “Whoever is scheduled to cook that night will message to ask Who’s in for dinner? so they know how many to cook for,” says Rosie. “It’s a question I hear or ask every single day and one that’s always on my mind. I spend most of my day thinking about what I will cook or eat for dinner and it is the linchpin that holds our house and community together.”

I think a lot of people have a rose-tinted view of how you get a book deal, how you write a book, how you transition into food writing and media generally. One of my comments to Rosie was that it was good to hear her thought process on some of the nuts and bolts. To quote myself, “not to burst anyone’s bubble but the reality is, there’s a lot of fucking work involved.”

Rosie is unflinchingly honest throughout our chat. There’s an early thirties gear shift from acting and writing into food (albeit there’s quite the origin story), and also moments of life in a big city, communal living, and loneliness.

You’ve described previously on Substack that “everything changed overnight,” as a social post went viral. Seemingly describing life in the warehouse was polarising. Do you look back and ever wish it was more of gradual rise, or are you just thankful for the fact it happened?

I'd just turned 30 and I felt like a complete and utter failure. I was just kind of resigned to my life amounting to nothing. I put a lot of pressure on myself, it's in my personality, and it probably wasn't very useful. But I was kind of like, cool, alright, you gave it a good shot, you didn't do anything, you'll fade into insignificance. I was feeling deeply, deeply anxious and depressed about what the future held.

Happening so rapidly, on the one hand, it was absolutely fucking awful, because I was trolled and had loads of hate on the internet. That was a really weird thing to deal with and it was a very unexpected and quite all-consuming period of time where I couldn't sleep and I couldn’t eat. I was like, up at 5am replying to horrible comments on TikTok, and that first month was not enjoyable.

However, I think because it happened so quickly and it led to a book deal within two months - something I was working towards and was a big, big, big goal – then in many ways it happening that quickly was absolutely fucking phenomenal. It was in the  year I turned 30 and I was like, okay, I have a second chance at life, which is dramatic, but it is how I felt. So, in that sense it was wonderful.

There are always two sides of the coin, like the adrenaline, and I had this mentality of, okay this is your fucking chance. take every opportunity, do every interview, do every appearance, every event. And that ran me ragged. I was burnt out by the end of the year. But it built this momentum and it was very exciting and very thrilling. I felt like I had been given another chance. So that was really beautiful, and I think if it happened very, very gradually it still would have been good, but I think because of the age I'm at and the societal pressure to achieve a lot before you reach your forties or whatever, it felt good that it was happening quickly, because I was making up for lost time in a way.

Were there people telling you that you needed to take every opportunity or more a case of you telling yourself that?

No, it was every voice in the room. Like my dad was messaging me every day, updating me on how many followers I had. I was like, yeah, I'm aware. He was fascinated by it and was trying to work out the rate of new followers per hour and he was in my ear being like, make hay while the sun shines, go go go.

A lot of literary agents were contacting me and also publishers, and almost in the naivety of the beginning, I almost got fucked over. I had a publisher directly contact me, got me in for a meeting, and they were like, well wonderful, you just bring us your proposal, we'll get this wrapped up in a couple of months. And, you know, I would have sold it for way less if I'd have done that. But then I met with twelve literary agents in a week and signed with one by the end of it.

I didn't know what the Frankfurt Book Fair was, I was so green about the industry. But my agent was like, look, in an ideal world, I need a proposal from you within two weeks because we want to try and sell it before Frankfurt because that's just better for you. So, then I ended up having to write the whole [proposal] in two weeks and we did a day here at the warehouse shooting. We shot twelve recipes. I'd never really shot food properly for print and my housemates, Virginia and Bea, took the pictures and the other prop styled it, and they also had never worked on a cookbook.  So we were all kind of throwing shit at the wall, doing our best. There was this pressure to just kind of get it done, so that all the good things could flow.