The Flirt Behind “Chicken Shop Date”

“Come on, we can own that it’s been vibey,” Garfield said.

“It’s been vibey to the point where you’ve been avoiding me for two years, because the vibes were too much for you to handle,” Dimoldenberg shot back, in undermining-girl-boss mode.

The ensuing ten-minute battle of wits had a screwball energy that Preston Sturges would have appreciated.

“I’m not going to be who you want me to be in this moment,” Dimoldenberg offered.

“I’m not asking you to be anything but what you are,” Garfield said, shifting around in his chair. “I’m just holding a mirror up.”

“Yeah, and I look good,” Dimoldenberg retorted.

Later, Garfield asked, “Do you think this”—he gestured toward the cameras and the mikes—“has fucked up the fact that we could actually have gone on a date at some point, maybe?”

“Yeah, because you’re afraid of it,” Dimoldenberg said, popping a French fry between perfectly glossed lips. The episode, which aired late last year, has been viewed more than ten million times.

In the decade since launching “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg has attempted to diversify her comic output. Among other things, she launched a YouTube show in which she cooked alongside guests—the gag being that she cannot cook. Most of her income now comes from sources other than “Chicken Shop Date,” including her red-carpet work and one-off appearances or videos. But none of these projects has had the resonance or the authenticity of her first show. Dimoldenberg, being in the happy position of owning the show outright, is writing and producing a romantic comedy set in what she describes as “the ‘Chicken Shop Date’ world.”

Each episode costs only about six thousand dollars to make, though Dimoldenberg now has three employees—a creative producer, a social-media manager, and a personal assistant—on her payroll. Because “Chicken Shop Date” appears just once a month or so, she is selective about her guests. “It has to be an organic fit,” Dimoldenberg told me. “I need to be a fan of them and their work. If I fancy them, it helps, too. It is a dating show, after all.”

“I recently found out that I like a Pinot Noir,” Dimoldenberg said the first time I met her, as she settled into a low armchair at the Dean Street Townhouse, a restaurant in London’s Soho neighborhood. It was a week into the New Year, and Dimoldenberg was not observing Dry January, but she had plans for a first date the following evening with someone who was. She explained, “I was Googling ‘Things to do when you’re sober,’ and I found it so funny. It was, like, ‘An escape room.’ ‘A horse-drawn carriage around the park.’ ‘Indoor rock climbing.’ ”

So what plan had they settled on? “We’re going to go to the pub, obviously, and have Diet Cokes.”

For “Chicken Shop Date,” Dimoldenberg likes to dress up, usually in an outfit that has some interest around the neckline or the arms, given that she and her guest are seen only from the rib cage up. This evening, she was dressed less flamboyantly, in chic black pants and a black top. She ordered roast chicken—it’s actually her favorite meal, she said, not just an on-brand choice. “But I have to ask what part of the chicken it is, because I only like breast,” she told me. (On “Chicken Shop Date,” she eats only nuggets and cringes at wings.) When the waitress came, Dimoldenberg politely asked to have the chicken leg left off the plate, though not before asking me if I would like it. “I’m not going to eat the leg, so I’d rather give it to someone else,” she said.

Dimoldenberg’s onscreen character is in many ways formed in the editing process, which she supervises. Moments of standoffishness or awkwardness are emphasized with jump cuts to her face, the camera lingering on her expressive, quizzical features. In person, though, Dimoldenberg is warm, open, and relaxed. “My character is equal parts desperate and uninterested,” she told me. In the earliest iteration of the show, the comedy lay in part in the rap-world interviewees’ amusement at being asked deadpan, rapid-fire questions by a scrupulously prepared but apparently clueless girl eating fries across the table. (“You have another name, Murkle Man,” she said to Jammer, a grime artist who was the fourth guest on her show. “Does that have anything to do with Angela Merkel?”) Dimoldenberg told me, “I talk more now—I’m leading the conversation now. Before, it had more staccato energy, and now it’s quite fluid.” These days, Dimoldenberg is well known enough not just to perform celebrity interviews but to be the object of them. Last year, she ate chicken with Drew Barrymore on Barrymore’s talk show, and appeared on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” where she explained the British art of banter: “British people, they flirt like they don’t like you. Make someone think that maybe they actually hate you, and I feel like that’s how you fall in love.” Having become a public figure in her own right, she plays with the equilibrium of mutual celebrity for comic ends. On a recent episode, the actor Paul Mescal asked what kinds of movies she liked. “I think I’ve seen all yours,” she told him, then added, condescendingly, “You’ve not done loads.”

David Letterman, who began subverting the celebrity interview more than forty years ago, is among Dimoldenberg’s obvious precursors. But her closest contemporary peers are not the hosts of network television shows but, rather, YouTube and TikTok interviewers such as Nardwuar—a character created by the Canadian journalist John Ruskin—who stuns rappers and other musicians with his prodigious research into their early lives, and the New York-based comedian Kareem Rahma, who, on his online show “Subway Takes,” invites comedians, influencers, or actors to offer miscellaneous critiques of social mores while riding mass transit. (Jeremy O. Harris: “We should have gatekept being woke a little bit longer.” Cat Cohen: “You can’t text someone just ‘hey’ and say nothing else.”) Like these interviewers, Dimoldenberg permits the interviewee to be in on the joke.

But if part of the joke of “Chicken Shop Date” is Dimoldenberg’s insistence that every episode really is a date, and not just another stop on a publicity tour, part of the show’s success is the degree to which the encounters generate genuine chemistry. “I don’t know why I wouldn’t be able to meet someone on the show—like, that’s how we meet, right?” she told me. “But I also know that it’s not real, and that the person I’m meeting is not going to think that it is.” Although Dimoldenberg has had one long-term relationship in the decade of making “Chicken Shop Date,” she is currently single. (Of her sparks with Andrew Garfield, she said, briskly, “I don’t think it’s going to happen, otherwise I would be going out with him already, wouldn’t I?”) She told me, “Part of me thinks that the reason I’ve been single for so long is because I have this dating show, and it’s easier for me that I’m single, because I’m living the character.” In her private life, Dimoldenberg goes on the apps and has friends set her up, with varying degrees of success. “I go through waves of finding it really hard to meet people, and then my first thought is ‘I’m so unattractive,’ ” she told me. “When I’m super single, I just go into this place where I convince myself not that I’m unattractive—like, I know that I’m not—but more, like, ‘Every single person thinks I’m ugly, but they’re wrong.’ ” Sounding like a more self-knowing version of her “Chicken Shop Date” identity, she added, “I do have good self-confidence, but it just manifests in a different way, where I just think people are out to get me.”

Most of Dimoldenberg’s guests are familiar in advance with the show’s format, though there are exceptions, such as Cher, who made an appearance in early 2024. “She was told to do it by her godson, and she nailed it,” Dimoldenberg said. (In the episode, Dimoldenberg confided that she once had a terrible kiss with a man who didn’t open his mouth. “English?” Cher asked, with a knowing shrug.) When Shania Twain came on, Dimoldenberg arrived at the restaurant swathed in leopard-print pants and a matching top with a draped hood—an outfit impressively similar to the one that Twain wore in the video for her 1997 hit “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Twain wrote to me in an e-mail that she was “not at all prepared for it, in a chicken shop of all places.” They got along beautifully, and by the episode’s end the singer was tossing chicken nuggets across the table and Dimoldenberg was attempting to catch them in her mouth. Twain told me, “I’m not sure how the nugget-tossing began. With Amelia, these things just happen.”