Brooklyn Beckham Peltz fired back at critics with a GIF from *Friends* after his pasta video drew harsh comments online.
The model and aspiring chef, 25, posted a cooking clip to Instagram on October 10 showing his attempt at *spaghetti all’assassina*, a traditional dish from Bari in Italy’s Puglia region. The post racked up 100,000 likes in under 24 hours, but not everyone in the comments was sold on his technique.
One Instagram user wrote: “A tube of paste, a jar of sauce, ready prepped garlic….. That’s not real cooking oh and the spaghetti looks half cooked. No thanks.”
Another piled on: “This looks… in a word – vile. It’s not even cooked properly.”
A third commenter dismissed the dish as “Basically burnt pasta with jar sauce.”
Beckham Peltz didn’t type out a clapback. Instead, he dropped a GIF of Ross Geller from *Friends* making his signature fist-bump gesture — the one Ross and Monica invented as kids to secretly flip people off in front of their parents. The move turned his silent response into its own punchline.
The backlash overlooked what the dish actually is. *Spaghetti all’assassina* — literally “assassin’s spaghetti” — dates back to 1960s Bari, where cooks developed it as a way to repurpose leftover pasta. The name comes from the aggressive cooking method: raw spaghetti goes straight into a hot pan with olive oil, garlic, and chili, then gets toasted without stirring until crispy and charred while tomato purée and broth slowly get worked in. The charring is the point, not a mistake.
Some commenters rushed to Beckham Peltz’s defense with that context in hand. One wrote: “Those who don’t know, spaghetti all’ assessina is a typical plate in Puglia region of Italy, and this is a quite good representation of the recipe. So calm down everyone, it’s delicious.”
Another fan kept it simpler: “Not gonna lie Brooklyn, that looks damn tasty.”
Even viewers who cringed at the technique could admit the result appealed to them. “All the Italians offended it was a hard watch but it looks delicious,” one commenter added.
The divide over his cooking follows a familiar pattern for Beckham Peltz, who has faced skepticism since pivoting from photography to food content. His posts regularly draw scrutiny about whether his culinary career is genuine or riding on his famous last name — his father is soccer star David Beckham and his mother is fashion designer Victoria Beckham. The *Friends* GIF suggests he’s developed a thick skin about the noise, or at least a sense of humor for deflecting it.
The recipe that sparked the pile-on calls for spaghetti, tomato purée, tomato paste, garlic cloves, chili pepper, extra virgin olive oil, salt, and vegetable broth or hot water. The key step — toasting the raw pasta until it turns crispy and slightly charred — is what gives the dish its signature texture and what left so many casual viewers convinced he’d simply burned dinner.
Beckham Peltz has not posted another cooking video since the pasta clip, though his Instagram Stories remain active with other content.