What 🍳 means
🍳 is the cooking emoji, filed under Food & Drink in the food-prepared subgroup of the Unicode emoji index.
It was added in Emoji 0.6 (2010) and the underlying characters entered Unicode in version 6.0 (2010).
How it is encoded
🍳 is a single code point, U+1F373.
It is RGI (recommended for general interchange), so every major platform ships artwork for it.
Casual and food-focused: at home in breakfast chats and recipe captions.
🍳 alone doesn't say whether food is ready. Add words if someone is waiting to eat.
What it means when someone sends it to you
3 readingsAfter “Making breakfast”
Food is being prepared right now.
Reply to “What did you eat?”
An egg-based meal.
Beside a recipe instruction
The cooking or pan-frying step.
Combination ideas
2A suggestion for eggs and bacon.
A suggestion for a breakfast update: eggs, bread, coffee.
Worth knowing
- 🍳 came into Unicode from Japanese mobile-carrier emoji. One carrier labelled it a frying pan with a fried egg, another “cooking (egg)”; Unicode chose the broader name cooking.
Questions people ask
1Why does 🍳 look different on my phone?
Artwork varies by platform and era. An early Apple design showed broken eggshells without a skillet; later artwork used the familiar egg-in-a-pan scene.
How to type 🍳
Windows
Win+.Open the emoji picker and search “cooking”.
macOS
Control+Command+Spaceopens the character viewer.
iOS / Android
Emoji keyboard → search “cooking”.
Chat apps
:fried_egg:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.HTML
🍳Codes and encoding1 code points
HTML decimal
🍳
HTML hex
🍳
CSS content
content: "\1F373";
Each escape is closed by the next backslash; a trailing space is needed before a literal hex digit.
URL encoded
%F0%9F%8D%B3
1
On screen
1
Code points
2
JS .length
4
UTF-8 bytes
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.