My fiancé and I got the flu on Wednesday night. By Thursday afternoon, I was feeling hungry enough to gather up a few basic ingredients and hazily make this soup. It’s a variation on what my mom used to make when I was a little girl, minus all her flair and all the dairy.

If we had had bacon in the fridge, I would have put some on top, but it really doesn’t need it. You could also use leeks or spring onions. I’ve definitely made this in the past with cheese and broccoli. As it is, it’s a delicious vegan potato soup that’s slurp-worthy, unfussy, and warms up easily when you’re under the weather.

Friends are the people you feed and that feed you. – Corey Caitlin

I realized recently that when it comes to cooking, I have a privileged background—at least, compared to most of my friends.

When a Twitter buddy mentioned that he’d never cooked a meal in his apartment, making do with restaurant food or microwaved supermarket meals, I was shocked. People live like that?

And then I remembered all the interactions I’ve had with friends over the years about cooking, normally after they’d had dinner at our place. Friends who’re afraid to reciprocate an invitation because they “can’t cook as well” as us. Arriving for dinner at our friends’ house to learn that we’re going to a restaurant instead, among signs of anxiety: “We’ll pay. You’ve come all this way.” Friends (men and women) who reveal they’ve never cooked a meal in their lives, because at home their mother always did the cooking. What’s going on?

To cook for someone is to open a relationship with them, to be vulnerable, to risk rejection. We’re offering the most basic type of gift, and it’s the basicness of it that makes us hold back, by triggering our fear of being ordinary.

I learned about this concept in Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly. She talks about our fear of being ordinary in this interview on emotional intimacy:

The overwhelming message in our culture today is that an ordinary life is a meaningless life… I use the shame-based fear of being ordinary as my definition for narcissism… No matter how happy and fulfilling [our] small, quiet life is, [we] feel it must not mean very much, because it’s not the way people are measuring success.

We’re afraid to cook for friends, because unless what we cook is extraordinary, remarkable, and celebrity-worthy, we fear we’ll be found out. And once people realize we’re ordinary—so the voice of shame tells us—they’ll reject us and our food too, and we’ll be worthless. No wonder driving to the restaurant seems like an easy way out.

Take our addiction to recipe books, which we use to shield ourselves from the vulnerability of making intuitive choices. Or the “30 minute meal” with its implication that we’re too busy to cook, and that spending an hour cooking is below us or too ordinary. Then there’s the “convenience”—read, protection from vulnerability—of supermarket ready-meals and fast food “restaurants”. All this effort to protect ourselves, and yet if we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we’ll never truly connect with others. Providing sustenance to the people we love is essential to our relationships.

I’ve been cooking for as long as I can remember.

Before we were tall enough to reach the kitchen counter, I remember standing on chairs with my brother, helping Dad cook dinner. We used grown-up “sharp” knives (paring knives), which freaked Mum out at first, to chop ingredients. We were part of the team. And when we stayed at my grandpa’s house in Manchester, I stood on chairs early in the morning making bagels: exciting because we formed them ourselves. Grandpa would give you a hunk of dough, which you’d roll into a sausage and then join the ends to make a bagel. During brunch (bagels, smoked salmon, proper cream cheese), I remember pointing out the bagels I made—what a proud moment!

My parents taught me that cooking is something that everybody does. They also taught me that the only way to develop is to work it out, to keep on trying. When I was a teenager, I’d cook dinner for the whole family: chicken and carrots with basmati rice.

I remember a couple of instances where I stopped, found Dad and asked for advice: how long to cook something, how much of an ingredient to add. He refused to answer, telling me to go back to the kitchen and work it out. It wasn’t long before I gave up asking, and I’m still grateful for what he taught me: don’t worry about getting it right, just try it out and see what works.

While we run away from cooking because we fear being ordinary, ordinary is exactly what our friends want us to be. They don’t want fancy, they don’t need elaborate, and they dislike pretentious. Our friends want us to be ourselves, to be real, to be vulnerable: and if that means a simple spaghetti bolognese, roast chicken, or dahl, prepared with love by us, they’ll love it, and they’ll love us more for making it.

If you want to make cooking for friends a bigger part of your life, here are some ideas to get started.

1. Invite your friends around to dinner regularly.
2. Learn about the ingredients you love to eat. If you love butternut squash, look for seasonal squashes in your supermarket or try the farmer’s market. If you like curries, see what spices your local ethnic store carries. If you’re into meat, find a specialist butcher and ask them to recommend cuts you haven’t tried before. (Meat-eating Londoners, don’t miss The Ginger Pig.)
3. Use recipe books and websites as an inspiration rather than an instruction manual. Try combining elements from several recipes and substituting ingredients that are in season or readily available.
4. Trust your intuition and taste over measurements and timings. Improvise.
5. Try out new ideas or recipes with your significant other or a close friend. A dinner party is the wrong time to try out new stuff, so practice it first.
6. Don’t be afraid to cook the same dish for the same person twice. Originality is overrated.

If we all spend a little more time cooking for each other, our lives will be richer for it.◘

Food has a funny history in my family, or families, I should say. My dad is a steak and potatoes kind of guy. He can and will eat anything. But I grew up with my mom. Our eating likes, dislikes, and allergies make for a more interesting endeavor at a meal. Lucky for me, my mom has always been a good, adventurous cook.

Mom eats meat. I stopped at 13. She won’t eat fish, so I never did. Call it a texture thing; I’m weird about segmented foods. Sis came along when I was nine and a half. When she started gnawing on teething biscuits, mom realized they were both allergic to gluten. We’re all okay with eggs, but I only accept them in baked goods. More recently, I’ve realized I’m allergic to dairy.

When we get together, we eat a lot of rice, avocado, corn, and beans. Mexican food is a forever favorite. We can all agree on chocolate, but it doesn’t exactly make a meal.

One of my favorite experiments from the early years was mom’s rice cake pizza, which later morphed into polenta pizza. A few years back, she topped herself with this recipe. You can make it plain or add toppings to it like any focaccia. If you eat cheese, tuck some of your favorite shreds or slices into this deliciousness before you pop it in the oven. Mom and sis chomp it that way. And holy moly, if you have Maldon salt, use it.

Earlier this month, my friend Corey and I met up for tea. It was a nice night for a walk in San Francisco; I only needed a coat.

We ate a bit. We sipped our drinks. And we talked about all the things worth loving like cities, books, men… and food. She gave me good advice and I left brimming with hope.

I keep revisiting something Corey said in particular. She told me, “Friends are the people you feed and that feed you.” The trueness of it picked me up and carried me back to unforgettable meals I managed to forget.

Feed is an Old English word with roots in Latin. The list of synonyms goes on longer than my attention span, but here are a few to give you the gist.

To feed is to nourish, maintain, support, encourage, channel, attend, cultivate, let grow, supply, delight, feast, and gratify, among other things. These are some beautiful verbs, don’t you think?

In her advice column as Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed feeds us wisdom she’d give her younger self. This one. This one on repeat with audio:

Stop worrying about whether you’re fat. You’re not fat. Or rather, you’re sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.

My mind wanders, weaving different conversations, faces, paragraphs, and questions.

What does it mean to feed someone?
How can we best serve the people we love? Can we feed ourselves in the same way?

Can we savor the time we have? Can we nourish, encourage, and delight in each other every day, every meal—instead of making time for those verbs on special occasions?

Love in a Dish is a sweet little sampling of M.F.K. Fisher’s stories. It’s short and fresh and wonderful.

In the foreword, Anne Zimmerman writes: “M.F.K. Fisher’s hungers were real; she wanted both food and love, and seemed to realize that the two were undeniably linked.”

How fantastic is it that we can fill ourselves by filling our bellies?

Friends are the people you feed and that feed you.

Just by saying that, Corey filled me with ideas about what it means to be a true friend. A giver. A feeder. A nourishing force of life. A person that treats others how they want to be treated. And a person that is humble enough to let others serve them too.

It was a great heart-talk, as she called it. The best kind of talk there is.◘

Although I’d like to say I fell madly and deeply in love with rhubarb right around the time I fell for friendlier fruits like blueberries and strawberries, I didn’t.

I fell in love with rhubarb about a year ago as my palate matured, when I started enjoying swiss chard and brussel sprouts. But unlike swiss chard and brussel sprouts, this tough, celery-like stalk does not improve with a little fresh garlic and olive oil. You have to play with rhubarb, coax it into submission, and draw out its sweet subtleties. This process finally came to fruition after about a year of dabbling in rhubarb muffins and upside down cakes. Although delicious, the flavors didn’t meld well. It was either undercooked, syrupy sweet, or just plain acerbic.

Photos by Colin Price

Finding myself alone in the kitchen on a gray Saturday afternoon, I desperately diced, sprinkled, stirred, and taste tested, hoping for something warm, charming, and edible. Something I could store in mason jars, and for the next five Christmases, hand them out to family and friends amid “oohs,” “aaaahs,” and “just what I hoped fors.” And after about 25 minutes of stirring, adding, and breaking down, it happened.

At first, I burned my tongue and had a moment, but there it was: the perfect mix of soft fruit and warm syrup sitting on my little stovetop. I felt victorious, elated, and hungry. After years of enjoying others’ rhubarb pies, I had finally discovered the potential of this funny looking vegetable—and yes, it is a vegetable. I drizzled it over a slice of olive oil lemon cake, added some yogurt, was content, and promptly fell asleep on the couch.

I’m certain that I’ll never be able to recreate that flawlessness again. I have the memory of that day I was the executive chef for myself, a world explorer in my modest kitchen. I’d like to think that I learned a lesson: sticking with something that is bitter and coarse long enough, enveloping it with sweetness and warmth, and just waiting might draw out the comfort you’ve been looking for all along.

I came around to her apartment, laden with a bottle of wine. It was late spring, and the air was heavy with the scent of flowers. Dust swirled on the road, left behind by passing traffic, but the weather was warm, pleasant, and dry.

Having just moved in, she had only one plant in the whole apartment: a large rosemary, sitting on her kitchen bench, leaves raking the sky. “I don’t think you’re supposed to let it get ‘woody,’” she said, fingering its fragrant leaves. I said I didn’t know. Many years later I realised that it didn’t matter, because you would just pick from the part of the plant you needed — peel leaves from any stalk or snip off younger shoots if you wanted whole stems.

We were two people a long way from home — I was in my third country, while she had just moved to her fourth and wasn’t entirely happy with the arrangement. Our trajectories have covered completely different sides of the earth and somehow ended up crossing here, in a city of temporary people.

We stood in the kitchen, exchanging stories, wine glasses within reach. She started to mince some garlic. Quite a lot of garlic.

“I have a theory,” she said, without glancing up from her chopping board, “that people who don’t chop their garlic are wimps. I’m absolutely not convinced that you get any flavour from crushing garlic with one of those gadgets. Isn’t it about how much surface area you expose to the oil?”

I laughed, because I had often thought the same, whether it was true or not. My mother’s cooking at home had always used finely chopped garlic. Later on, I learned the pleasure of slicing it thin, so that when the garlic is fried in oil just enough, there would a tiny crisp of ring on the outside. And on the inside, soft, sumptuous, pale-gold earthiness that melts in your mouth. It makes anything taste good.

The spaghetti was cooking in a pot of salted water. She fried the garlic over medium heat with a generous amount of oil and dried chilli, until we could just smell it. She didn’t time it quite right so we had to wait for the pasta to cook a little longer, but it was close enough.

“Still getting used to this electric stove,” she muttered.

The moment the pasta was done and drained, she reheated the frying pan and poured in the spaghetti, combining it with the garlic, chilli and oil. She opened a can of marinated oysters and poured the contents on top, giving everything a resolute stir. Dishing it out onto two big plates, I watched as she made sure each dish had a good share of oysters and garlic. They had a habit of falling back into the pan.

“He won me over with this dish,” she began, stars suddenly appearing in her eyes, and went on to tell me about the boy she had to leave behind in Rome. Then there was the story of a visit to her old Italian landlady, who picked a big fresh tomato from her garden and proceeded to make her a meal.

A lightbulb went off in my head. From that day on, I stopped buying tomato-based pasta sauce in jars or bottles: what was the point? They were just supposed to be tomatoes, right? Instead, I just made sure I was always well stocked with fresh tomatoes, including growing my own when weather permitted. A bit of garlic in good olive oil, a smattering of sliced baby tomatoes, and maybe a few fresh basil leaves from the garden. A sauce made with baby tomatoes is so tasty I’ve never found the need to add salt. Some oregano, fresh, if you feel brave. Dried mushrooms for that earthy-woody flavour, or just cooked for a crisp but spongy texture. A few slivers of marinated anchovies. Knife-shaved parmesan. Chopped flat-leaf parsley. A small clatter of freshly cracked black pepper. The combinations of good things are endless, and why should a pasta sauce be any more complicated?

We took our plates and wine glasses out to the balcony that overlooked the backstreet. The early evening sun was still high, coating everything in gold, gradually deepening the shadows with its slow descent. I pointed at a very green garden a few doors down, obviously grown to be eaten, and she acknowledged with a nod. Backstreets tell real life stories. Broken down chairs, abandoned bicycles, forgotten toys, bedsheets hung out to dry. I made a mental note to bring my camera with me the next time I dropped by.

She ladled a generous amount of grated parmesan onto her pasta and pushed a small glass jar of dried chilli towards me, grinning. “Just in case you wanted a top-up.” Already, we shared an understanding that could only belong to two travellers who truly knew how to withstand the heat of spice.

But summer would soon give way to winter; here, fall never seems to last more than a week. And fleeting friendships leave a strange, empty echo in the aftermath, a twinge of bittersweet on the tongue.◘

Photos by Colin Price

The quiet hours on Sundays between dawn and ten are my favorite. The boys sleep in, worn out from the week before. And I have time to catch up on things I meant to read, hoped to write, or wanted to mull over making with the few free minutes I have each week.

We’re all busy at all times, it feels like. I am often so winded and tired at my core that I forget to breathe. But I’m learning how to sit with myself on Sunday mornings and linger until the afternoon crawls in—baking, munching, and soaking up the stillness.

I’m working my way through breakfast. At a Sunday’s pace, I have food on the table around noon. For the last two weekends, I made these amazing scones from the Tartine pastry book. We’re in love. The butter, oh the butter. And with a nice, fruity jam… So good.

I don’t have enough time to bake today, so I’m making steel cut oats with pecans and nectarines. Sometimes I just make smoothies or slice a grapefruit. Whatever it is, I love breakfast because of how simple it can be.

It’s hard to say what a simple thing is. It’s the way fruit looks on our sunny table. It’s fresh chai. Or butter, puffed up in a crust. It’s jam on toast. It’s just beautiful enough to take time to enjoy.

I love the lasting, pretty, plain things. They give me pause. They let me start the week with something good.◘

“You?!” exclaimed my wife in utter disbelief when I told her I’d been invited to write an article for Born Hungry.

No point being offended by the truth. In the kitchen, I’m often as useful as this guy probably is to world peace. But that’s not why my wife started muttering obscenities after my announcement. Her bewilderment was rooted in something else that only she knows about me (until now): I can be a bit of a hater when it comes to food.

I hate cooking. I hate eating. I hate cleaning. I really hate cleaning. Sometimes, I think the infinite cycle of preparing and consuming food is one massive time-consuming evolutionary inefficiency—a stark reminder that we’re mere mortals, brutes even, hiding behind shabby rationalizations like stand-up mixers and words like “gourmet.” To make matters worse, I often transform into Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm when you take me to a fancy restaurant. Speaking of, why is it that the fancier the restaurant, the more cryptic their menu? I’m looking at you, French establishments.

This is not to say that I don’t enjoy a good meal or crave certain foods. I love bread. Pizza. Paneer tikka masala. Steamed dumplings. Steak. Tacos. Fried okra. Blueberries. Popcorn. Chocolate cake. I love chocolate cake. Pretty much anything with sugar in it. To be honest, I’m not picky. You can pretty much hand me anything and I’ll eat it.

So, why have we wasted precious space on my words? What in the name of a thousand cute Weimaraner puppies possessed someone to invite me to write a post on this lovely site? The clue to the answer, a Google search away, is Internet fame. If you search for “chai recipe” (quite possibly the exact keywords anyone would type if they want to make a decent cup of chai), you’ll see my blog post, The Perfect Chai Recipe, near the top of the results. And this brings us to the next, and most puzzling question yet: Wat?

Over the last few years, I’ve invested in learning enough recipes to sustain me if I were looking to avoid takeout for a few days and my wife were out of town. Every recipe in my repertoire meets non-negotiable efficiency standards: flavors must be repeatable, prep time must be minimal, and cleanup must be quick. It’s a mostly typical assortment. Turkey wraps and sandwiches. Chicken stir-fry. Minute rice (though, I’ve been forbidden to bring any into the house for the last couple of years, so I’ve been feeling kinda screwed in that department). Snacks of raw fruit and cheese. Salads. Eggs—scrambled, omelets, fried eggs. And finally, atypically so, chai.

My wife taught me how to prepare chai one afternoon in our home in rainy Kirkland, WA. It took us around 15 minutes to prepare it the first time around—far longer than the 10ish-minute max requirement to be included in my repertoire—but I quickly realized it was because of the lack of operational efficiency. Did we really need a measuring cup for water and milk (it’s just as easy to use the teacup that you’re going to drink out of when you’re dealing with measurements with fairly constant ratios)? What about a cutting board? Why was that needed? And sliced ginger? Was it necessary to boil the water only with loose leaf tea before adding the spices for another round of boiling?

With a little experimentation, I was able to shave 7 minutes off the average cooking time and chai joined my repertoire. Soon enough, I earned the esteemed privilege of becoming my household’s chai wallah, a role I take very seriously, particularly on the “repeatability of flavor” front. One afternoon, I thought to myself that if someone admittedly culinary-challenged like me can make such a great cup of chai, surely anyone could. So on a whim, I wrote The Perfect Chai Recipe.

And that’s how I met Nicole, the founder of this magazine. Actually, I’ve met quite a few people around the world because of the post. Some leave a comment on my blog. Others link to it from their own blogs. And then there are those who email me their gratitude. But it’s not true Internet fame until you’ve been flamed. My favorite was the guy who was offended that I had the audacity to use the word “perfect.” “You’re using tea powder,” he objected (but this is what they call loose leaf tea in India), “so it’s ridiculous to call it perfect. If you want to get technical, this isn’t even chai. You’re a fraud!” I thought better than to start a debate about our evolutionary propensity to be deceptive: how we’re all frauds.

Irrespective of Internet fame and charges of fraudulent behavior, the real story here is that maybe my contributing this piece is not such an outlandish idea. Maybe there’s an argument that suggests that I am, in fact, the poster child for contributing to Born Hungry. After all, I am an impeccably strong representative for culinary-challenged individuals out there: a group whose likely total population is sizeable and certainly warrants representation.

But, at a slightly deeper level, my ability to prepare chai and rise to Bieberish ranks on the Internet (so I’m embellishing a little) for my recipe (one that’s not really mine, but has existed for hundreds of years; does someone smell a fraud in the room?), is a testament to the keystone characteristic of the human spirit: curiosity. Not your average, lazy curiosity, rather the kind that drives us to overcome our own limitations to achieve previously unreachable goals, making us more complex human beings, and in the process, giving us a sense of Flow. And, if you really want to get technical about it, what drives our curiosity—whether it be the quest for fame or the need to survive—is mostly irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that, figuratively speaking, we’re born hungry.◘

Samin Nosrat is a writer, chef, and teacher. She learned to cook at Chez Panisse after studying at UC Berkeley. Inspired by her many teachers, Samin shares her smarts in Home Ec—a series of hands-on cooking classes in the Bay Area. She also runs Tartine Afterhours once a month.

I had the privilege of taking Samin’s class at 18 Reasons earlier this year. She was nice enough to swing by and chat with me about food culture, learning to improvise in the kitchen, and getting into a rhythm of making meals at home.

Where do you think your passion for food comes from?

I grew up in a family where we all love to eat. For me, to be a good cook, you have to love to eat, and my mom was a really good cook and both my grandmothers were great cooks. My mom’s mom cultivates an orchard and a farm in the north of Iran, and my mom spent her summers there. There was definitely always an interest in finding the most delicious things to eat. There’s something that happens—I thought it was just my family at first, and then I thought it was just Iranian people—but I think it’s an immigrant thing where when someone leaves their country, and can’t go back or doesn’t go back, this desire rises in them to search for the flavors of their childhood or their past with this great intensity.

I think everything in Iran more or less was quote-unquote organic when my mom was growing up. There wasn’t really a lot of pesticide and fertilizer. And every land has its own flavor that it imbues in the food. My mom, my dad, my grandparents, and everyone who was with us in San Diego spent so much energy trying to find those flavors of their past. And there was so much talking whenever we would find a particularly good tangerine or something, wow, this tastes just like Iran. And there was a lot of that, where I never knew what Iran tasted like, because I was born in San Diego. It was just this hunt for the most delicious thing or the most authentic thing in a completely foreign place. And since I’ve left San Diego and now I work in food, and I’ve met so many people from different parts of the world and I’ve definitely witnessed that it is something where you’re always searching for that flavor.

I wasn’t even born in Iran, but when I’ve gone to Iran, I got it. And when I was in Italy and I was eating the original foods that the foods that we cooked at Chez Panisse were modeled on, I got it. It’s this thing where you’re like, oh, I get it: I’ve spent all this time cooking and eating something that is a nod to something else. And when you get to eat that original thing, it’s really powerful. I think there’s some level of that “immigrance” even though I’m not the immigrant myself; I have in me a desire to find the true flavor.

How do you think your environment inspires the food you cook? Do you feel like it’s changed since you moved to SF?

Totally. So, I moved to Berkeley in 1997 to go to college and I wasn’t really cooking before that. I was just mostly eating my mom’s food. Shortly after that, I started working at Chez Panisse, and that was where my true formal (or informal) culinary education began, and you know what that philosophy is so I’m not going to need to restate it.

There are so many different takes on it, and there are so many different places where it goes. And there are the people who are the total purists and the total, ultimate locavores who will only eat the thing from the 25-mile radius and then there are people who completely eschew eating locally as an important thing at all. And there are people who fall in between those two things for different reasons. And for me, partly because I have this other heritage and that’s something that I connect to, but also I think I’m just an old person trapped in a young person’s body. I’ve always had an old soul and a desire to reconnect with the old and authentic and true thing. And I have this really inquisitive mind where I want to find the source of the thing, so when I started learning about food and reading old cookbooks and understanding the history of the things that we made at Chez Panisse and why we were braising things in this way and what the difference was between that and a true, traditional braise or whatever. I always think, how do I follow this back to the source? How do I follow this back to most traditional version of the thing? And then, once I knew that thing or was familiar with the history of it, only then did I feel I could make riffs on it and change different aspects of it.

You know, here we’re so lucky [in the Bay Area]. We’re geographically extremely lucky, and it would be foolish to not take advantage of that. A big part of my belief about food and cooking and capitalism and economics and the way the world is and politics, is it’s important to support people who do really amazing work. And so, I want to eat the balsamic vinegar that comes from Luigi Sereni in Modena. And I want to eat the parmesan cheese that’s from Emilia-Romagna and I want to eat the true jamón serrano. People have been doing those things for hundreds or thousands of years in a certain place, and that food carries with it the flavor of that place. And if it has to be shipped across the world for me to shave a little bit of it onto my pasta, I’m okay with that even though it’s not the total geographical-local thing, because it’s supporting somebody’s incredible work. That’s at the heart of how I cook and how I want to eat.

I think there are a lot of people who try to improvise without understanding what the original thing is, and it doesn’t always work, because how can you make something better if you don’t know what the original thing is? That’s like all the jazz musicians. They know the music really, really well and then they go off on their riffs or whatever. It makes me sad there are a lot of cooks now who don’t, and also the pace of life and the pace of the internet and the pace of everything doesn’t really foster that traditional education anymore, so then people are making decisions that aren’t rooted in something.

What was the last thing you cooked at home for yourself?

On Tuesday, I made this dish called kuku sabzi and I’ve been eating it all week. It’s a Persian frittata that is sort of the opposite proportion of what a European frittata is. Where a European frittata might be mostly egg with whatever else—maybe some chard folded in—the kuku is mostly greens and herbs, and I put green garlic, leeks, and spring onions in there, and it’s just barely bound together with egg, so it’s like eating a mouthful of greens. And it’s super delicious.

It’s a lot of work. I bought probably seven bunches of spinach and four bunches of green garlic, and everything cooks down into one frittata, but it’s really good. I’ve just been eating on that. I ate it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days with mayonnaise and hot sauce. So good!

Sounds tasty. You mentioned some of this: how would you describe your style of cooking?

If I had to associate with a cuisine, it would be Italian cuisine, just because that is what I studied and was obsessed with and I lived in Italy for two years. Maybe a mashup of Italian and Californian food. I love the flavors of different cultures too. And so even when I cook Persian food, or even when I cook Mexican food, or Indian food, or Thai food, it always comes with that sort of French-Californian and Italian background and I just go toward the flavors.

In a lot of ways, I’m just a really lazy seasonal cook. I try to make the simplest, most delicious thing with what’s at hand and what’s available in the moment at the market. I’m pretty lazy though. [Laughs.]

When I took your class, you talked about cookbooks as inspiration rather than teaching or instruction. Which ones do you think are essential?

Oh my god, Nigel Slater. I am obsessed with Nigel Slater. And David Tanis.

I love this certain generation of crabby British women like Jane Grigson. Well, M.F.K. Fisher was American. Elizabeth David. Patience Gray. They wrote about food in this amazing, no-nonsense way that wasn’t indulgent, but was super honest. Most of them were Brits discovering European traditions and were along for the ride with their husbands who had jobs that brought them to the mainland. In a lot ways, they were 60 years ahead of us, or however many. But they were going through a lot of the same sort of awakenings that so many of us are going through now. It’s super inspiring. They were really amazing.

Judy Rogers’s cookbook is really beautiful and useful. I love the Canal House books. What else. I love Sunday Suppers at Lucques. I think that’s a really beautiful and excellent one. Pretty much any really pretty book. Yesterday, my friend Cal and I were talking about what we would theoretically put in our own cookbooks and how both of us pretty much just look at books for the photos. You let the photo inspire you and make you think of what you want to make.

How do you think a home cook would know when they can improvise on that?

Gosh, okay, that’s a good question. It’s not like: once you’re ready, then you can be an improvisor! Even for a person like me, every situation is unique.

For example, on Thanksgiving, I was going over to my friend’s house and a bunch of cooks were coming over. And so we all divided things. They asked me to make pie, and I thought, okay, I’ll make pie. I was going to make apple pie, but they said, actually we don’t like any of those regular Thanksgiving pies, so can you please make chocolate pie?

So then I was trying to figure out what would be the most excellent version of chocolate pie to make and I realized it would have a cookie crust filled with chocolate cream, like a chocolate cream pie. I kept looking for recipes that I could trust and that I could feel really good about, and I didn’t really find one, so then I thought, well, what if I just took the crust from this recipe and used Tartine’s chocolate pudding recipe as the filling? I’ve made that pudding many times, and it has a lot of corn starch, and so I decided, well, to make it a little more elegant, I’ll reduce the corn starch and make it a little bit less stiff. So I just randomly decided to put less corn starch.

I made this chocolate cream pie—and I was improvising and I shouldn’t have been—and the pudding never set. It was so runny. I had to run the pie to my friend’s house. I literally ran it over there, and there was a trail of pudding on the sidewalk. And so I told myself, okay, next time just follow the recipe. I wasn’t skilled enough with that particular thing to improvise and I learned my lesson and I will never forget that particular lesson.

But there are other times where I do have a level of comfort. I’ve cooked certain vegetables a million times, so I feel pretty comfortable now. After having roasted them, and braised them, and boiled them, and sautéed them, and cooked them every different way, now I know what a cauliflower needs and which preparation will work best in the circumstances.

I think it just comes with practice. And you’ll know, and you’ll make mistakes, and we all do, and hopefully you’ll learn from your mistakes, and hopefully next time you’ll put all the corn starch in or whatever. It really just comes with practice, and sometimes you don’t even have to practice that many times. You only have to caramelize onions once according to a recipe, and then next time, you can be a little more relaxed about it. I think every situation requires its own judgement.

What do you like to eat when you’re completely wiped out, but you have to make something since you’re starving?

I’ll fry an egg. I eat a lot of fried or poached eggs on toast. I have the blessing of almost always having one of Chad’s loaves of bread at my house, so that’s good.

And then carrots. I eat a lot of carrot pickles. I’ll make a batch of pickles and have that around. I eat a lot of peanut butter and bananas. And what other funny things. Almonds. But I go through phases, so there were a couple of years where I was definitely in a bean and cheese burrito phase. Grilled cheese sandwich phase. I try to eat less melted cheese items now, but that was a really good phase.

Reading Tamar’s book, An Everlasting Meal, has been super motivating and inspiring. And I’ve become more comfortable as a regular home cook, because I’m not in restaurant kitchens anymore, so I do a lot more of the “cook a big batch of beans” and then eat that for five days. As long as I have the condiments in my house, which I always have hot sauce and mayonnaise around, I pretty much can eat some version of a bowl of vegetables with something. Yeah, it’s not that exciting.

What would you say to someone who thinks that it’s impossibly expensive to cook at home? I have a lot of friends who say they love cooking, but they don’t ever do it.

I think that you have to reduce your expectations and reduce your idea of what makes dinner or what makes a meal. When you can connect to something super simple and look at a plate of beans with a poached egg, or look at some roasted vegetables with a little half of a sausage, or when you can look at something that maybe before seemed too humble and see a meal, then I think it will become more approachable.

The problem when you’re either working or eating in restaurants too much is that the platonic ideal of a meal becomes this three-course thing. That is really too hard for most people to cook at home, and that’s too hard for me to cook at home on a regular basis.

When I shifted gears a little bit and I could look at a pot of beans and see five days of eating, or I could make a frittata and eat it for four days, and when I could understand that certain foods could be the ingredients for a larger palette of dishes, then it didn’t seem as intimidating to actually eat healthy, simple, and inexpensive foods at home.

For me, I went through that same thing, because I was so used to being in restaurants that on my day off, the last thing I wanted to do was cook at home. And then when I suddenly shifted gears and I was at home all of the time, I didn’t really have a foundation for cooking at home. Only when I reached a point of major financial stress, and also I just didn’t feel good, because I was eating out so much.

I would do this horrible thing, which I have a feeling a lot of people do, which is to go to the farmer’s market and be really excited and buy all this stuff and then come home and let it rot, because I thought, I’m just one person and it’s not worth it to cook it. Or I can’t even bear to look at that today—I’ll just eat another bean and cheese burrito.

You have to get into a little bit of a rhythm. It’s like going to yoga practice or doing anything, where you just have to get into a rhythm and you have to reduce your expectations and be able to find pleasure out of super simple things. And then I think it can be really easy and not that expensive and really delicious.

I also now try to make the most of my time in my home kitchen. If I’m making something and the stove is on and I have other vegetables, I’ll just turn the oven on and roast them too while I make something else. Or if I’m home writing, I’ll just put the beans on in the pot. I try to do the cooking when I’m not actually cooking.

What do you think is your future? Do you ever want to have a restaurant?

Oh god no. No, no. [Laughs.] I sort of accidentally took a detour into the kitchen. It wasn’t ever a place that I was aiming to land. I wanted to be a writer. I thought I could graduate college and be a writer, whatever that meant, I don’t know.

Only when I realized that that wasn’t possible, I thought, maybe I should invest in another skill. But I didn’t realize that cooking was just about the other perfectly most useless, least marketable skill there is. I was hesitant even when I was starting to cook, and even as I was realizing what a huge commitment it was, I was hesitant to let go of my more intellectual and academic aspirations.

Throughout the entire time I’ve cooked, I’ve tried to weave things in. I applied for a Fulbright Grant to study traditional Italian foodmaking methods, and when I didn’t get it, I still went to Italy and I still did a lot of that research. I’ve tried to write. I’ve taken classes at the journalism school, and I’ve tried to keep writing and now I’m working on this book.

For me, there is something really important to being able to use both parts of my brain in that way and be somebody who really is making and doing and having that immediate gratification and being able to serve someone or eat it myself, and then also be able to use this other part of my brain where I go deep into myself and produce something that someone may never see or enjoy.

And being in a restaurant doesn’t allow that. Also, I’m not that happy or that nice when I work in a restaurant. It’s really demanding and you have to be a certain type of animal and I can be that animal under great pressure, but I don’t like being that animal. I have great respect for the people who do it, and there are some people who are really brought to life by that type of stress and that type of work, but for me it was too emotionally and physically grueling and I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m lucky enough that I have enough people in restaurants around me that I can sort of stop in and help out, but I don’t think that’s a place that I ever really want to go.

I’m working on the book proposal now, and I think all of my work sort of meets at this place of inspiring and teaching people how to cook, be it through the classes or eventually this book, and also just by feeding people in the humblest of circumstances, and encouraging them to go do their own things through bake sales and that kind of stuff. My dream is to find some way where I can make a living and have a sustainable lifestyle, do this kind of work, and be a resource for people.◘

Let me preface this by saying that I think vegetarians are superior humans. I hope to quit meat one day, but until then, I’ll be wrapping anything edible in bacon and making juicy ass steaks like The Butter Steak.

My roommate’s girlfriend introduced me to The Butter Steak. I came home from work one evening and smelled beef. I walked to the kitchen and found her and my roommate standing over the stove. They were holding a ribeye steak upright in a skillet and cooking only the sides. I saw a stick of butter next to the stove. I watched them for a moment, then went to my room for a nap. I always take a nap after work. Naps are very important to me.

I tried to sleep, but the smell of meat and melted butter made my mouth water. There’s something primal and comforting about the aroma, as if a Darwinian voice deep in my unconscious mind says, “We’re all gonna be okay.” The aroma is so powerful it can awaken humans from REM sleep. You may remember when the “internet WTF of the day” was an alarm clock that cooks bacon. I stared at the ceiling and imagined owning this alarm clock, while my body tried to decide whether it wanted to rest or consume meat. I imagined sleeping through the alarm and my room catching on fire.

At that point, I thought “I need to eat” and reflexively got out of bed. I walked to the kitchen and there I saw half a ribeye on a plate. It was thick, lightly red, and glistening. I thought, “That is a juicy ass steak.” I heard my roommate say from the other room, presumably with a mouthful of meat, “Go ahead and git’yer self a piece of that steak!” I mumbled a “Thanks” and picked up a knife. The meat hit my tongue and I had one of those “oh my god” moments. I said, “Oh my god,” to my roommate and cut another piece.

My roommate’s girlfriend later explained the way restaurants cook steaks so quickly is by cooking the sides, then basting the steak with butter as it cooks flat in a skillet. The next night, I decided to cook The Butter Steak. I figured I’d add garlic, which is never a bad idea, unless you’re making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and even then, who knows?

Photos by Colin Price

Do you remember certain dishes from childhood that you can never get enough of? Born into a foodie family, I have many such memories, but there’s one particular dish that stands out: a humble soup made with stuffed bitter gourd and pickled mustard greens. It is not a very pretty-looking dish. In fact, everything about it looks a deep greenish-grey, but the flavours are so delicate and complex, there’s nothing else quite like it.

It’s hard to talk about food without alluding to where I was born. The flavours I grew up with are a unique mix brought by the ethnic Chinese who immigrated to Nanyang—south of the ocean—then evolved with local Malay and Indian cuisine. The bitter gourd is a strange vegetable, and the taste for it is definitely acquired: its bitterness is not for the faint-hearted. The Hokkien folk would typically slice it thin and flash-fry it with plenty of oil, garlic and egg, maybe a hint of soy sauce, and serve this up as a non-meat fare. The immigrant Chinese to South East Asia took the language of food seriously: to be able to “eat bitterness” means being able to withstand hardship, and as a child, this is considered an essential lesson you must learn, growing up in a foreign land.

I have spent nearly two thirds of my life away from my childhood home. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. One day, in the depths of a snowy Canadian winter, I wondered how hard it would be to recreate this soup. In some ways, I think you have to live away from the food you grew up with to truly appreciate it. So, I called my mother, who not only is an excellent cook, but also possesses an amazing memory. Problem was, she tended to recount recipes almost as if she was recalling poems. She would pack a lot of steps in a couple of sentences, so it often took time to decipher any dish. Eventually, I got over the fear of not trying, and set about recreating one of the most distinctive tastes I remembered and loved.

First, I had to see if I could acquire the ingredients. Bitter gourd and mustard greens are often available in Asian supermarkets, so my first stop was Chinatown. If you have never seen it before—though it’s more likely that you’ve seen it and not known the name—the bitter gourd is that funny, crinkly-looking melon that looks as if someone has taken a cucumber, bleached it slightly and blown bubbles into its skin. Mustard greens can be a little harder to identify because they are often sold when young as well as when they have grown more mature. For pickling, we want the mature version that looks more cabbagey, with big fat stems. If you’re still not sure, the Chinese label looks like this: 芥 菜. While you’re there, pick up some dried shrimp, we’ll need it later.

Now, it’s entirely possible to buy imported, pickled mustard greens. But every single packet I’ve picked up contains food colouring, and I don’t understand why we can’t accept pickles for the colour they are, so I’ve set about making my own.

A clever pickle

My mother’s minimalist instructions were: “Buy the mustard greens, cut them up into small pieces, and stick them in a jar with salt water. If you want it to be slightly sour, use the water from washing rice.”

How much salt? The first time I made this pickle I used a saturated salt solution: I boiled some water and stirred in as much salt as it would hold. This is, of course, technically brine. I took one of my airtight jars, rinsed it thoroughly in freshly boiled hot water, piled in the coarsely chopped mustard greens and filled it up with the salt solution, making sure the water covered the greens completely. Then I waited about a week. I actually liked it much better after about three weeks. By that time, the vegetables have started to turn somewhat grey, several shades away from its former bright green glory, but it was perfectly tasty: salty and just a spicy hint of mustard.

Much later on, I found another way to give this humble pickle a little more zing. After boiling about two cups of water, a good amount of salt, a bit of sugar and a quarter cup rice vinegar together, I’d pour it over the mustard greens tucked into the pickling jar. The heat gives it a nice seal.

In an age of instant gratification, it is strangely satisfying to be made to wait, because a pickle just needs to take the time it takes.

There’s something immensely rewarding about making pickles. In an age of instant gratification, it is strangely satisfying to be made to wait, because a pickle just needs to take the time it takes.

A fishy secret

The stuffing for the bitter gourd is a combination of minced pork and fish paste, which gives the stuffing its zeal. Fish paste? It sounds exactly like what it is: fish meat mashed into a paste. I had no idea where to find this, but it occurred to me that I could learn to make it, so it was another phone call to Mother.

Apparently, mackerel works best. Having made my own fish paste now on two different continents, it seems fairly easy to acquire, and most of all: cheap. Mother said, “You can slice off the head and remove the main bones and keep it for a soup.” I’m too squeamish for this, so I asked the poissonière to fillet the fish for me.

Once at home, I mixed some salt with hot water. Roughly three tablespoons of hot water can hold one teaspoon of salt. While letting the water cool to room temperature, I scraped the meat off the fillets with a spoon. Then, dribbling a bit of salt water over the fish, I tenderised it with the back edge of my cook’s knife. This is a very repetitive thing to do: I’d knock the back of the knife several times all over the fish, spooned more salt water over it, used the sharp edge of the knife to fold the fish over itself, then more knocking, more salt water, fold, et cetera.

When the fish starts to look more like paste than fish, you’re done. It always takes less time than it appears. I would usually pop it into the freezer in a clean Ziploc; it is surprisingly compact and freezes well. This is because I can never seem to acquire fresh mackerel and healthy-looking bitter gourd at the same time. I’ve taken to preparing the fish paste whenever I can get hold of mackerel, so when it comes time to make the stuffing, it’s a matter of allowing the fish paste to defrost overnight.

Cooking day

Prepare the stuffing

Mother said, “For the stuffing, use one part fish paste to four parts minced pork. Make sure it’s not too lean, or it won’t be nice. Fry dried shrimp and shallots. Season the pork the normal way, mix everything together. Stuff the gourds and panfry both sides.”

To season the “normal way” is to use one of my mother’s seasoning mixes that works for just about everything: light soy sauce, salt, pepper (white is best, if you can get it), a generous pinch of corn flour, and a touch of sugar. It’s difficult to describe the proportions, but it’s somewhere between enough to flavour it but not enough to drown it. Whisk it together first or stir it straight into the meat, it doesn’t really matter, but I would let the meat sit for at least an hour before mixing it with everything else.

As for the dried shrimp, I soaked them in hot water for a couple of hours ahead of time to soften them and to remove some of the saltiness. Once drained, I pounded the shrimp with a pestle and mortar until they flaked and became almost fluffy.

I shook a generous glug of canola or sunflower oil into a frying pan and turned up the heat. Use a wok if you fancy, but a frying pan is just fine. Olive oil wouldn’t do as it would start to smoke at a temperature too low for what I needed. I then tossed in some finely chopped shallots and softened them. Into the frying pan went the shrimp. Now might be a good time to open a window or turn on the cooker hood. It’s not easy to tell when the shrimp is cooked enough, so I tend to trust my nose. Generally the shrimp and the shallots will look much the same when cooked that you can’t tell one from the other: a delicious, fragrant, golden mess. I set it aside and let it cool a little.

I mixed the minced pork, already seasoned, with the fish paste, followed by the shallots and shrimp. Now for the actual stuffing!

Fill it up

After rinsing the gourd (skin and all) under cold water, I sliced it into pieces about an inch thick. Using the back tip of a teaspoon, I gently cored out the white, fluffy insides, as well as any seeds, so that I was left with green rings of gourd. It’s important not to damage the structure of each ring as you go, otherwise it would be difficult to fill later.

It’s important not to damage the structure of each ring as you go, otherwise it would be difficult to fill later.

Then, the dirty work. Picking up a rough ball of stuffing with clean fingers, I pushed it into a gourd ring. By pressing both palms together on either side of the stuffed gourd in the middle of my hands, I was able to make the stuffing sit evenly in the gourd ring and ensure that it was nicely compact. After all the gourd slices were filled, I coated both sides of each slice with flour. Then I lightly fried them in the pan, tapping off any excess flour beforehand so it would smoke less. It helps the stuffing stay stuffed, if you get my meaning.

A whole world in a soup

And then, finally, the stuffed bitter gourd slices and a generous handful of pickled mustard greens go into a pot of water, brought to the boil, and lowered to a simmer for some time. How much water? For how long? Mother didn’t tell me, and I forgot to ask. It seemed logical that there needed to be enough water to cover everything and a little more, so that was what I did. As for how long? When the bitter gourd slices are thoroughly cooked through, the gourd rings turn a deep grey-green, not unlike the pickles. The mustard greens get to a point where they melt in your mouth in a soft, hot explosion.

I like to imagine that all the colour must have disappeared into making the soup taste so good: the earthiness of the shallots, the salt of the shrimp, the sweet-richness of the pork, the sea-tinged freshness of the fish mingled with a deep-green bitterness of the gourd, all lifted with a slight, tangy sourness from the pickled mustard greens. Never mind that it looks mostly grey, never mind at all.

At this point, I would typically distract myself from the wait and mix some fresh chopped chilli or some sambal oelek, a splash of soy sauce and a small pinch of sugar in a little bowl. A little spice works very well with the stuffed bitter gourd.

Then I would wait an hour, or two, or a little more. You know the point when a good soup starts to taste divine? That’s how long it takes.◘

Photo by Jesse Friedman

The chef-owner of Hapa Ramen talks about his approach to cooking, how he stays motivated, and how to hone your skills.

How did you get into cooking?

My grandfather’s a chef on my dad’s side and my grandparents had a garden at their house. We we’re always eating good, fresh food, but we didn’t come from a family where I was in the kitchen cooking with mom or anything like super important Sunday supper, but we did eat dinner together as a family every night.

As I got older, I started working in restaurants and got more interested in cooking. I was working as a waiter and a bartender. And then I started cooking more on my own. My mom taught me all the stuff that she knew, and my dad would teach me what he knew. And then I would try to cook stuff out of books.

And then, it’s really an unromantic story. A friend of mine told me she was going to culinary school. And I got really annoyed, because I knew I was a better cook than she was. And I thought that culinary school was really hard to get into like Harvard or something. So I was like, well, if she can get in, I can get in too, so I’m going to go take a tour. I ended up going to school there, loved it, and then started cooking professionally.

I guess it just comes from my family. Food wasn’t the most important thing, but it was an everyday thing. They didn’t make a big deal about it, but it was a big part of our family.

So it was kind of competitive at that point?

Yeah, which actually set me up well to go to school and be competitive with students. I just remember, she told me she was going, and I was like, you don’t even cook. You don’t even like to cook. I didn’t get it, which I think is what a lot of kids do. They just go to culinary school, because they don’t know what else to do.

I was cooking for my friends once a week. I want to say it was on Monday nights, we would all get together and I would cook something. They would come over at six or seven, and we wouldn’t eat until ten, because I had no idea what I was doing. I would cook way outside of my skill level. Really, I think the reason I was cooking so much then was just because I couldn’t afford to go to restaurants and I was sick of eating take-out food. My friend was working at Whole Foods, so we got a discount on groceries, so that’s how it started out.

Do you feel like cooking school was helpful for you?

Yeah, I do. I wouldn’t tell anyone to go; I would tell people not to go and try to give them a path to succeed in the industry anyway, but for me it was really good. It doesn’t teach you how to cook; it teaches you vocabulary words, basically. And it teaches you how to conduct yourself in a kitchen. But you don’t learn anything about actually cooking.

But for me, it was really helpful. And I think that many kids that I went to school with that ended up succeeding in the industry feel that way also. But I think they’re all also kind of anti-culinary school, because they see the other end of it, like kids that go and don’t get anything out of it and wind up suffering within the industry and making the industry suffer because of that also.

What is the alternate path you were suggesting?

If you want to get into cooking and you don’t want to go to school, there are certain books you should read. Go pick up all the textbooks you would get if you were going to go to culinary school. Read all of them. And try to cook out of them.

And then go to a restaurant you like and be prepared to work three months for free, and say: “I’ll come in here. I’ll wash dishes. I’ll sweep the floors. I’ll peel garlic. I’ll peel onions. Whatever you want me to do, just tell me, and I’ll do it. For free. And I’ll come in as much as you want.” And you have to be super willing to sacrifice time and be treated like shit.

If a cook can do that—learn the basics on your own, and be motivated enough to do that—and then go in a restaurant and show them you’re committed to the craft, to learning, and you’re willing to do anything, chefs will recognize that. And then they’ll be willing to teach, and say, “Okay, why don’t we try you on prep,” and you’ll get to move up. And then, just don’t stay at that restaurant once you get comfortable. Challenge yourself and move on to another place. Do it all over again. That’s generally what I tell young cooks to do.

What inspired you to start Hapa Ramen?

I was cooking a lot of Asian food when I worked for Va de Vi and Pres a Vi. And before that, I was at Sushi Ran, so it was all Asian there too. When I left to go to Nopa, I was over it. I didn’t want to see soy sauce ever again.

At Nopa, I learned about ingredients, seasonality, and simplicity. And about the importance of feeding people instead of trying to blow their mind with some new technique or something like that. And then as I was coming to the end of my run at Nopa, I was eating a lot of ramen. People talk shit on ramen in San Francisco, but I think there’s a lot of good places to go. Even the kind of bad MSG places, I sort of like in a weird way. But I felt like if I wanted to go out and eat it on a regular basis, I would want to have something that has better ingredients and a different approach to the food. So I started cooking a lot of ramen at home. And it turned out well.

I got offered a job in NYC and it paid an insane amount of money, and I would have had a rad apartment in Manhattan and all this stuff. But my wife was pregnant then—like just became pregnant—and we decided that it would be too crazy to move out there and do that, and if we were going to stay here, we should start our own business. Looking back on it now, I’m really glad I made the decision, but it was so dumb that we did that. And so that’s how it happened.

I got really focused on getting the recipe down and talked to my friends who were down here at the market and had their own thing going on like Ryan at 4505, or the Namu guys, and got advice from them. I didn’t have the money to open a restaurant. I didn’t have a product that I could even show anyone, and I didn’t have enough background to open a restaurant. I just decided to try to do it this way. So I’d say the inspiration came from eating a lot of ramen and wanting to give that to people, but incorporate the good intention and the good ingredients.

Do you have any advice for home cooks?

I think it’s like becoming a professional cook. You have to pick out foods that you really like to cook. For home cooks, sometimes they’ll do some crazy shit and pick out some weird Thai or Vietnamese recipe, because they saw it on a show or they saw it on the web. And they’ll try to cook something without even thinking, do I even like that kind of food? You have to start with food that you like to eat.

If you pick one style, like Italian, Mexican, or whatever it is, there’s such a vast world of recipes to draw from. And you should just cook that stuff. And when you get sick of it, by then you’ve probably built up enough skill, knowledge, know-how, and comfort in the kitchen to move onto something else.

So I think it’s just cooking the food you want to cook and being confident in yourself. Anytime I’ve seen a cook struggle it’s because they don’t believe in themselves in terms of the skill and they freak out about it, or they think the world’s going to end if they mess up their pie dough or something. You have to be willing to make mistakes and learn from that, and just come back and keep going at it.

What is your favorite meal to make at home?

Any breakfast thing is my favorite thing to make, because I don’t actually cook at home very much. The thing I probably eat at home the most is cereal, because I get home from work and I’m tired. But I always make breakfast on Sundays. So, anything with eggs, meat, or really good bread is my thing.

But I wouldn’t say I have one dish that’s really a go-to thing. It used to be beef bourguignon. I got really obsessed with trying to make the best beef bourguignon in the whole world. And I tried it from so many different approaches, like classical French technique, and then I tried doing sous vide beef bourguignon. But it’s kind of the same thing no matter what you do; it’s all beef braised in red wine.

Breakfast is the big thing. I want to open a breakfast restaurant one day, so that’s probably my favorite meal.

What keeps you inspired in and out of the kitchen?

My son is a big part of it. I’d say he’s the biggest part. My son and my friends, really. It’s not cookbooks and it’s not really famous chefs. There’s such a good community of chefs here in San Francisco, and more than anything, going and eating their food, talking to them, and seeing what they’re doing with the same ingredients that you picked up is really inspiring. And then, my kid, because he makes you want to work that much harder. You never want to complain about anything. He’s a great motivator.

How old is your son?

He’s turning two. And then we have another one coming.

Awesome! Congratulations.

Thanks.

I know you’re working on a restaurant. Where do you see Hapa in five years?

The restaurant will be open this year. We were saying April, and then May, and now we’re saying June, so it probably means July we’ll be open. I’d like to expand it and open other locations.

The way the food’s been going at Hapa: we started out and it was just about the ramen. When we expanded, we added really simple stuff like chicken wings or a sandwich. And then the food got super technical and kind of out there, and now it’s sort of coming back, and we’re just making things more simple. Trying to just put clarity of flavor in the food and really listen to our guests and what they want. In the beginning, I was like, oh, we’ll tell them what they want. And now we’re just trying to cook the stuff they like and pay attention to that.

I don’t know in five years if that means that we’re opening another Hapa Ramen, or if we’re trying to expand on that concept, or if we’re trying to do something different. I have two full-time employees and I’d like to see them open their own places, because they’re both so talented, so maybe we’re doing that. But I don’t know. I get that question a lot, and I have my bullshit answer that I give people. But the real answer is I have no idea.

I hope we’re still doing the market. I don’t ever want to lose the connection to that. The restaurant will still be open; we have a lease for five years and an option to extend it for five more years. And I’d like to be there the full ten years that we can do it, if not longer. I’d like to do some crazy shit like open in the airport or get a stand in the ballpark. Try to reach as many people as possible, because for as many people as come by and see us every week, all these people come by and say, “Ramen? What is it?” And your best comparison is Top Ramen. “Have you ever had that?” And then they’re like, “Ewww.”

Yeah, just keep reaching people with the food and doing well-intentioned, good, tasty food. And then I think it doesn’t matter if we’re doing ramen or if we’re doing other stuff.

I’m curious: have you ever seen Tampopo?

Yeah, that’s hilarious. That movie’s awesome. The very, very first pop-up we did was at Coffee Bar and it was mayhem. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, and ten other things went wrong on top of that. It was horrible.

The owners had asked us (they were going to project something on the wall): “Do you want to play something particular? Do you want music or whatever?” I think I said don’t play any anime or any Japanese movies. And don’t play weird, loungey electronic music. And they played Tampopo and weird, loungey electronic music. And so the first Yelps we got were like, “And they were playing Tampopo. And they must think that they’re so great.” Ugh, but yeah, I like that movie a lot.◘