First food memory
My mom used to put me in her lap at the dinner table, and I could hear the wine going down her throat and smell the vinaigrette on her exhale. She’d peel tangerines at the table, releasing their fragrance, and then she’d squeeze the peels into the candle flames, their oils making these little sparkling fireworks.
On becoming a chef
I never wanted to be a chef and have always come to the project reluctantly. But I do love to cook and clean, and I’m naturally bossy. I am a little borderline OCD, so I have a tendency to put chaotic things into gentle order, and I love to throw a party, so when you put all those weirdnesses together, you can see that chef is an inevitability, almost. But, really, I would read and write all day and all night with a little delicious dinner for a few friends at home if I had to do it all over again.
Finding culinary inspiration
I have specific cravings and particular appetites, so I cook whatever I feel like eating and hope that other people will want to eat those particular, specific things too. I am lucky to have had many things to eat all over the world and to have accumulated a truckload of eating experiences that I can always call upon. It’s fun to find yourself very hungry and scan your brain for what you might like to eat and then to just go ahead and cook it.
Ideal last meal
Listen, I know I should probably grab a last chance at the luxuries, one last bite of caviar or Kobe beef, but my death-row meal would seriously be warm, buttered toast and soft scrambled eggs.
On working with partner, Ashley Merriman
Our greatest assets are that one of us is tall and the other is short and that one of us is fast and the other is slow. So when we work together, we can pick all the fruit the tree has to offer, metaphorically speaking. To mix (and butcher) this metaphor just a little longer, the tree thrives with such well-rounded attention and care. The greatest challenge is in the strange-but-true fact that both of us, incredibly, are tall and short and fast and slow, and so it can get tricky staying in your own lane and even trickier remembering if today is your day to water the roots of the tree or to be picking the fruit from the highest branches before the crows get them.
