Fancy_chef_2013 is legally blind and suing Walmart

Unpacking the mystery of Instagram's favorite celebrity chef.

Update Feb. 20, 2025: Fancy Chef and Walmart have reached a settlement agreement. Presumably, Fancy Chef made some money from this whole thing. God bless America.

For days I have been entranced by fancy_chef_2013, an Instagram-famous “celebrity chef” who is not very good at cooking. He blew up after a recent appearance on Tom Segura’s podcast, during which he created an inedible sauce consisting of a jar of pesto, tomatoes, two cartons of heavy cream, a bottle of red wine, and a bottle of champagne. Fancy Chef washes his chicken with vinegar and a toothbrush. He serves strawberries that are past their prime and boils the fuck out of cream sauce. Everything about the way that he interacts with the world suggests that he may be legally blind. Exhibit A:

fancy_chef_2013

A post shared by @fancy_chef_2013

His catchphrases are, “Book me, and book me now,” and, “Beautiful and nice.” His daughter, who seems lovely, makes occasional appearances. He seems to earn a decent living. But no one can decide if this is an elaborate prank or one man’s genuine attempt at bootstrapping his way to culinary success.

After combing through years of posts on Fancy Chef’s various social media accounts and reading hundreds of pages of publicly available court records, I can report that:

1. Fancy Chef is legally blind.

2. He has been banned from all Walmart and Sam’s Club locations.

3. He is suing Walmart for damages that he says he incurred during an arrest for trespassing relating to aforementioned banning. The trial of the century, Fancy Chef v. Walmart et al., is set to begin February 18, 2025.

Fancy Chef’s name is Christopher Nalls. This isn’t a secret; it’s right there on his chef’s jacket in every video he makes. He has publicly posted his home address and his phone number. He has also been quoted in a Hudson Valley newspaper saying that the judge who denied him custody of his daughter discriminates against fathers. Thinking that I might be able to find records of custody proceedings, I typed his name into the court records database in his home county. I found something much more interesting.

Fancy Chef was banned from all Walmart locations after allegedly attempting to use a counterfeit $100 bill in October 2021. (The case against him was dropped). Fancy Chef continued shopping at Sam’s Club, where he frequently got into arguments with staff. During one such argument, on July 27, 2022, employees called the police. Fancy Chef claims not to have known that Sam’s Club is owned by Walmart, so he was surprised when police officers told him that he had to leave the premises or be arrested for trespassing. Fancy Chef is now suing Walmart, alleging racism.

Some background on Fancy Chef: He grew up in New York City and attended a high school that had such poor performance that it was shuttered in 2007. He did six months at Rikers for assault and four years upstate for selling crack cocaine. He landed a job as a chef at Rockefeller Center Restaurant Associates, but he left when his vision started to decline. Since then, he has been living off of his disability payments and whatever money he can make through chef gigs.

Fancy Chef did not make life easy for the employees of the Sam’s Club in Kingston, New York. Here are some statements from workers:

Every time [Fancy Chef] came into the club he created issues with everyone around him, members and associates. He would accuse people of being racist for looking at him wrong or if anyone working asked if he needed help. He would yell and get in people’s faces frequently and would be very rude. I would try to avoid him to prevent conflict but would hear him and see him nearly weekly causing issues and making both associates and our shoppers uncomfortable.

I have had different encounters with Mr. [Fancy Chef]. One such time he tried to leave the entrance door a cart of merchandise and got into a verbal argument with the front door associate. I intervened to make sure the associate was ok and he started verbally attacking me until the manager showed up.

He has been confrontational multiple times with our general manager, screaming in her face aggressively due to not being allowed to exit the entrance door with a cart full of merchandise that he paid for when our policy is to exit through the exit door.

He was at the checkout. I was a team lead at the time, a front and team lead. Me and my co-lead went over to the cashier because he was having—he was becoming aggressive with my cashier. So naturally I step in to try to deescalate the situation, and he is upset about a price discrepancy on a product. We go, we check the price, it’s the correct price. He’s completely irate, threatens to sell me as well as my co-lead on the black market, in his own words, and then proceeds to say that he would get a good dollar for the Spanish one because my co-lead was Hispanic.

As I read all of this, I began to wonder how this was even a real lawsuit, requiring corporate lawyers and affidavits. Wouldn’t a judge just throw this out? But as I read Fancy Chef’s deposition, my position softened. There is no excuse for the way that Fancy Chef allegedly treated workers at a wholesale club. But the way he tells it in his deposition, Fancy Chef is simply a disabled man who was trying to buy groceries in an overwhelmingly hostile environment.

A lot of the friction between Fancy Chef and the Sam’s Club employees came from Fancy Chef’s repeated decision to exit through the entrance doors. You see, when Fancy Chef goes to Sam’s Club, he either gets there by taxi, by bus, or by catching a ride from someone he knows. He likes to get all of his shopping done at once, so he often has merchandise from nearby stores that he carries into Sam’s Club in a shopping cart. Sam’s Club does not permit customers to bring in outside merchandise. Fancy Chef had been instructed to leave his cart by the service desk, which is located near the store entrance. He can not leave through this entrance after he retrieves his cart. In other words, Sam’s Club’s policy is to forbid a blind man from carrying in merchandise that he has nowhere else to store, because he doesn’t have a car, and then to force him to double back to the exit instead of allowing him to leave through the doors that are closest to where he leaves his cart. (Google Street View suggests that the exit isn’t all that far from the entrance, but still).

Fancy Chef claims that, on one occasion, a Sam’s Club employee called him the N-word. There are no witnesses and no official documentation —at least none that has been submitted to the court. Still, Fancy Chef reports feeling that Sam’s Club workers were nicer to other customers than they were to him. He says that this has nothing to do with his history of verbal altercations with staff and everything to do with his race.

Fancy Chef feels that he was unfairly banned from Walmart in the first place. He says that he got the allegedly counterfeit bill at the bank, that he wouldn’t even be able to tell if it were counterfeit because of his visual impairment, and that he completed his transaction that day using other, non-counterfeit money. After his arrest that day, he signed a paper acknowledging that he was banned from Walmart. The defense states that his “Notification of Restriction from Property notably has a Sam’s Club logo next to the Walmart logo on the upper right-hand corner.” The defense somewhat smugly continues, “Regardless of whether [Fancy Chef] took note of that, he was informed of that fact at the store on the day of the subject incident.” As Fancy Chef later explained in his deposition, his vision impairment prevented him from reading the document at all.

The substance of Fancy Chef’s complaint seems to be lacking, but I do love living in a litigious country, where one man can take on the largest corporation in the country, leaving behind a trail of documents for nosy grad students to read when they should be grading papers. Very beautiful, very nice.

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