PERSPECTIVES
Instagram rules the food world.
ALISON ROMAN—cookbook author and
queen of the millennial dinner party—rules
Instagram. By Emily Gould
HOST CULTURE
lison Roman is taking her aggression out on the aioli. In her airy apartment
kitchen on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone, she’s whisking egg yolks
and oil and garlic until they’re the color and texture of fresh cream while chat-
ting about how it sucks, at times, to be best known as a creator of viral recipes.
Her most recent hit was a chickpea and coconut milk stew she created for the New York
Times that became known on social media simply as “#thestew,” prompting a Slate arti-
cle headlined “Is #TheStew Actually That Good?” Roman knows that she should ignore
this kind of trollery. She knows it’s not a good use of her time and energy to engage with
her detractors, and she understands that this kind of criticism is actually a good sign,
because how often does a recipe get so well known that people get mad online about it?
Still, she whisks a bit harder—but with expert control—when I bring up the Slate
piece. “I was just like, ‘What? Do you know how cooking works? Have you ever cooked
a thing?’ I was so incensed.” She pauses, considering her words, or maybe calibrating the
precise texture of the sauce. “I’ve been cooking my whole life. This is all I’ve ever done,
and I care so much about the recipes that I make and the stuff that I put out in the world,
that to have somebody assume that I didn’t think it through lit me on fire.”
Roman’s fiery nature has taken her far. At 33, she is the author of Dining In, a
best-selling collection of recipes she calls “highly cookable”; has a regular column
in the New York Times; and boasts an Instagram account with nearly 200,000 fol-
lowers. Dining In has the minimalist chic of a niche lifestyle magazine like Cherry
Bombe or Kinfolk: Supersaturated food photographs contrast with stark chunks of
A
blinding-white negative space. Everything is served in
white, cream, or millennial-pink ceramic vessels, scat-
tered with handfuls of herbs. The book is ubiquitous in
the kitchens of the kind of stylish young women who,
like Roman, might Instagram their own manicured
hands as they fan out a lettuce head or grasp a chicken
leg. There are around 100,000 copies of it in print.
The salad we’re about to eat is, perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, very Alison Roman and a good example of what
she means by “highly cookable.” It incorporates flavors
of a restaurant dish that many people are familiar with,
but with a twist that makes it both more delicious to eat
and more interesting to cook. Roman’s introductions to
her recipes seduce you by making both the food and the
process seem enticing: You probably have some of the
ingredients on hand, you realize, and anyway, it doesn’t
seem that hard. “I’ll be more articulate when I sell it in the
column,” she says of the shrimp salad, before explaining
that it’s her take on classic Shrimp Louis, except that she
hates creamy dressing and ketchup—two of Shrimp Lou-
is’s seemingly nonnegotiable ingredients. Her solution is
to deconstruct the dish’s flavors, omitting the elements
she doesn’t love and leaving only the ones she does. She
tops a platter of crisp lettuces and microgreens with
shaved radishes, poached shrimp, jammy eggs, green
beans, and an assertive shallot vinaigrette. She serves
the punchy, creamy aioli on the side for dipping, an extra
step that elevates the dish but doesn’t add much time
or effort. The result is a salad that has exactly as much
creamy dressing as each individual diner wants on each
individual bite. “I don’t want to serve you, because I know
every salad component is a really personal thing,” she says
as she puts the platter on the table.
To casual observers, Roman’s rise probably seems
sudden and effortless. An uncharitable or envious ob-
server might even be tempted to chalk it up to Roman’s
considerable cuteness. It’s true that she has a mane of
thick yellow-blond hair and very long, subtly tattooed
limbs, and that these assets feature semiprominently
in the cookbook. But they don’t overshadow the food;
her looks and personality are simply another part of the
aesthetic. Even her omnipresent orangey-red manicure
carries meaning.
Samin Nosrat, the author, chef, and star of Netflix’s
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, loves that Roman’s nails often ap-
pear in photos of her food. “To me, the nail polish thing
is deeply subversive,” she tells me. “I don’t think I had a
mani until I was 32 years old.” She’s never met Roman,
but admires her work a great deal. “I started cooking
when I was 19, and cooks in restaurants don’t wear nail
polish because it will chip and get in your food. I spent
all this time as a young cook trying to gain some measure
of respect in this field. That meant fitting in and doing
whatever it took to be accepted and taken seriously
among mostly men, but also women, who had been sort
of...pounded into submission by an industry formed by
men.” To Nosrat, Roman’s nails say, “I dare you not to
take me seriously. Look! I can be a serious cook who
came up in this very male-dominated field, and I can be
my whole feminine self.” (For the record, the manicure
is gel; Roman doesn’t own a dishwasher. “A regular man-
icure lasts less than a day on me,” she says.)
BLAZER, $1,790,
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HOOP EARRINGS,
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RING BAND, EFFY
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PHOTOGRAPHED
BY JAI LENNARD.
STYLED BY RONALD
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