Ben Huh, CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger, on Bravo's new show LOLWork (Bravo)

Ben Huh struck us as goofily affable when we met him at Bravo's Top Chef Kitchen restaurant three weeks ago. Sitting at a table with a Post reporter and a friend from Mashable, the CEO of the I Can Has Cheezburger network (which includes, among other properties, Know Your Meme, FailBlog and The Daily What) had a self-aware cockiness in his voice when he claimed he invented the phrase "internet culture." And though he was about to be rocketed into the world of Bravolebrities--the term Bravo applies to its various reality stars--he spent more time helping the table parse weird terminology than trying to sell himself.

We don't remember how the conversation got started, but at one point someone asked if you could call Furries (those people who dress in plush animal outfits at conventions, frequently with sex in mind) "anthropomorphic."

"No," Mr. Huh responded firmly. "That's when inanimate or inhuman objects take on human qualities." This, the star of Bravo's first attempt at a reality-sitcom told us, was "the opposite ... humans that want to be animals."

So what do we call them?

"Animorphs?" the guy from Mashable suggested, referring to the teen book series popular in the late ’90s.

"Animorphism," agreed Mr. Huh.

This was not the same character who greeted us last week at Rockefeller Center for lunch, a week after the premiere of  LOLWork. The "characters" on LOLWork are Mr. Huh's actual employees, who have  helped raise $32 million in funding with a knockout combination of cats and poor spelling. The show is a meta-subversion of The Office--an actual reality program self-consciously inspired by the latter's faux-documentary style. The first episode opens with employees sitting around at the company's Seattle headquarters, discussing whether or not it is appropriate to post a picture of a cat that appears to be dead.

"Okay, devil's advocate," begins Paul, a "Sideshow Bob" lookalike, according to Mr. Huh's gloss. "What if it's a dead cat, but we say it's sleeping? Is that okay?"

Will, Cheezburger's bearded content supervisor, fixes him with an icy blue stare. "I don't ever want to hear you say 'devil's advocate' ever again."

The moment is absurdly funny because it encapsulates how seriously these people take their jobs.

Mr. Huh was himself in serious form at Rock Center. Instead of regaling us with cat humor, he told The Observer how he had escaped Hurricane Sandy in order to make it to a conference on the West Coast. "I had only slept three hours in New York the night before, and suddenly all the airports were closing down. So I got a rental car and drove through New York, through New Jersey, through Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh. There is shit flying at the windows: panties, other people's windshields. I get to Pittsburgh, check into my hotel around 8, and find out that that flight has been canceled as well.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" he said, interrupting his own story by way of reliving the frustration. "So I book another rental car, and I drove to Columbus, Ohio. I get to Columbus at 5 a.m. I looked at a map, it turns out I had driven the entirety of the storm." Despite a delayed flight in Ohio because of snowfall, he made it in time to deliver a keynote address at the Seattle Interactive conference.

"Once I start a project, I just need to finish it," he said of his journey. "I refuse to get stuck."

That sort of insane gumption would make for a good Dwight Schrute-esque character on LOLWork, but Mr. Huh hangs back in the early episodes. He comes off as brusque and all business, while the rest of the cast slowly develop their roles. (The cute hipster art director Sarah has a crush on Forest, one of the site's editors, at least two of the characters are in the process of coming out of the closet, the site's editor in chief, Emily, happens to be Mr. Huh's wife, and Will stands in as the "I know this is all ridiculous" Jim-like persona, clocking the highest number of  eye-rolls to the camera.)

"The show is not about me, it's about the company," Mr. Huh said. "Our goal is to make people laugh at least five minutes of every day." But that's what the website does. Why gamble with that comedic reputation by showing how the LOLCat sausage gets made? Mr. Huh, who plays many roles, answered, not as a Bravolebrity or a meme-maker, but as an idealistic tech CEO.

"The answer is obvious," he said. "We wanted to be a transparent company."

LOLWork airs Wednesday nights on Bravo at 11 p.m. EST

Top Chef Kitchen (Bravo)

Bravo has always prided itself on its ability to foster a community for its fans. Unlike traditional television, a one-way medium, Bravo openly encourages viewers to become engaged, and it's most obvious in its mascotting of Andy Cohen (an executive who turned talent after his blog about the shows he was producing became popular and he was asked to host the first Housewives reunion) as the anti-Seacrest.

But there are other ways Bravo interacts with its fans: it has online forums and live chats with the stars of its shows, and unlike other reality programming--in which characters appear on the screen and nowhere else--Bravo essentially forces its reality stars to mingle with actual people. And it was with this concept that the Top Chef Kitchen was born.

On Tuesday evening, The Observer raced downtown, already late for our dinner at Bravo's pop-up restaurant on West Broadway. From mid-October to mid-November, the restaurant will rotate two Top Chef winners every week to design a menu for which anyone can book a reservation for a standard, four-course meal. It's $95, and that's without wine pairings. Or, as the website for the restaurant mentions, "for a super-foodie experience, there will also be a Chef's Table, which will boast an eight-course tasting menu with wine pairings and the chance to be up close and personal with the Chef’testants." (The network also tries to distinguish its stars from reality-show stereotypes by branding them with awkward titles like "Bravolebrities," "Chef-testants," and "Housewives.")

Entering into the red, glowing leviathan of the Tribeca restaurant, we couldn't help noting that the space has a TV history already--its last incarnation was Iron Chef Aarón Sanchez's Mexican eatery, Centrico.

"Oh, we had to totally gut the place, " one of Bravo's extremely BFF-friendly PR ladies told us, crinkling up her nose slighty at the thought. "It was a mess when we got it. We had to totally rip everything out, add new lighting, furniture, redecorate, redo the plumbing, the floors ... everything."

"So it cost a lot to redo the place as a Top Chef kichen?" we asked.

"Ha, you wouldn't believe."

"But the restaurant will only be open for four more weeks? And then what?"

She wasn't sure, but she had to go say hi to someone else now.

Every table occupied by the press (some regular people had made reservations as well) had a little Bravolebrity of its own. Our group, which consisted of a Page Six reporter, a writer for Mashable and his female friend, was headed up by Ben Huh, the creator of I Can Has Cheezeburger and its various meme sites, which raised $30 million in venture funding last April. He is the latest Bravolebrity, with a show about the Cheezeburger offices in Seattle, LOLWORK, premiering November 7.

"I was the first person to use the term 'internet culture,'" he told us.

"But mainly you make macro images of FAILS and cats," we said. "How do you make a show around that?"

Apparently the answer was that it would be a drama-free reality show, which makes about as much sense as pouring money into a restaurant whose purpose was to serve as a five-week synergistic branding of a popular TV series.

Our chefs that evening were Tiffany Derry and Paul Qui, who both came by the table to say hi, along with Mr. Bravo himself, Andy Cohen. Another PR rep had to explain to us that Mr. Qui, who had won Top Chef: Texas, wasn't a top chef of just Texas, but that the "cycles" moved from city to city.

"Like Real World?" we asked.

"Yeah, like Real World."

Except, of course, that Top Chef is a reality meritocracy, which means that it is ostensibly more highbrow than Housewives or Miss Advised or Gallery Girls, because the people involved are talented in some arena. And even though there were no cameras filming in the restaurant ("We considered it," our first PR bestie told us,) the chefs were still keeping "score" by tallying up how of their dishes were ordered throughout the evening:
(Click to enlarge)
Although we were allowed to mix-and-match our courses from both chefs, our waitress timidly informed us that Mr. Qui really thought it would be best that if you picked his menu, you ordered everything off of it, since every course represented another stage in the life of chicken soup, or something.

Since no one really wanted to do that at our table, we started with Mr. Qui's onions, then moved to Ms. Derry's snapper, then her pork belly dish and her banana pudding. Everything was very good (especially the onions and the pudding): A++ dining, would eat there again.

But unless we hustle, we might not have a chance to.