PERSPECTIVES
nstagram is a huge part of Roman’s success; it is the dominant mode of food-
culture dissemination these days, and she has always been a natural. Her own
feed is a careful, but never careful-seeming, seamless blend of personal and pro-
fessional—which often merge for her anyway. If she’s cooking for her friends,
she’s recipe testing. If she’s traveling, she’s doing research. At the parties she features
on her grid, the food looks casual but also perfect. A shot of a platter overflowing with
sliced vegetables also has an unrelated wine bottle and opener and cutting board in the
frame, making it clear that this is just life, not a photo shoot, not quite. When you cook
her recipes, you can imagine that your life is that effortlessly photogenic, too.
But while there are plenty of people who are great at Instagram—influencers
who shoot their plates at restaurants and chefs who design those plates for max-
imum impact—what sets Roman apart is that the food looks both delicious and
achievable. The vibe is less show-offy than genuinely shareable. “She is very aes-
thetically driven, and she’s very good at making beautiful food,” Nosrat says. “But
also, she never makes it too hard to make yourself. And so it’s this thing where you
get to feel a victory when you make something that she makes.”
Times deputy food editor Emily Weinstein,
who was instrumental in bringing Roman’s col-
umn to the paper, notes that Roman often styles
her own photo shoots—unusual for a writer.
“She thinks so visually that when she’s pitching
ideas, you already know that she has it in her
head exactly what it is going to look like, and
how enticing it will look to people. And how to
entice them to eat it.”
Roman was born and raised in Los Angeles,
where she dropped out of college to work at a
restaurant, Sona, at 19. After two years there and
three at Quince in San Francisco, she decided
to move to New York to try to find some other
kind of food job. She landed at David Chang’s
then-ascendant Momofuku empire, at the experimental bakery Milk Bar, working with
founder and chef Christina Tosi to shape its now-renowned signature high/low deli-
ciousness. “Alison was one of the very first ‘milk maids’—the insanely dedicated group
of young women with me from nearly the beginning, who helped make Milk Bar what it
is today,” says Tosi, who oversees Milk Bar’s eight New York locations and its outposts in
Boston, Los Angeles, Toronto, Washington, DC, and Las Vegas. You can still see traces of
the Momofuku signature flavors in Roman’s food; she loves to jack up an ordinary Amer-
ican dish by adding something slightly out of the ordinary, like yuzu kosho, anchovies,
or preserved lemon. In search of a respite from the high-stress restaurant lifestyle, she
next took a job at Bon Appétit, where she learned to develop recipes and began to hone
the Alison Roman aesthetic.
She adores high contrasts and extremes: wincingly bitter dandelion or broccoli
rabe, bloody-rare meat, chicken skin so crispy it shatters like bacon under your teeth.
And she hates the idea that her food might be misrepresented. At a few of her book
events, people served Alison Roman recipes. “It was like my personal hell. Not that
the food was bad. It was just, like, I had no control over it. Even if you as the diner
would never know if it was better or worse than what I would have done, I knew and
it drove me insane.”
That’s not to say that she’s not willing to make sacrifices in the service of cook-
ability—they just have to be the right sacrifices, the ones she has thought through in
her own kitchen. She knows, for example, that #thestew’s crispy chickpea topping
is more easily achieved by roasting some of the chickpeas separately in the oven, but
she refused to require another dirtied dish (and she knows the recipe wouldn’t have
been as popular if she’d added that step). She also understands that she sets the bar
higher for herself than some of her peers do; there are cookbook writers who hire
assistants to develop and test recipes for them, and it’s been suggested to Roman that
she’s reached the stage in her career where she should start outsourcing. She imagines
that way of working with theatrical disdain: “So I tell you what to do, and you do it,
and I taste it and say, ‘Okay, let’s add another tablespoon of lemon juice or something.
Let’s cook it five to six minutes longer.’” She pauses, looking around her tiny kitchen
as though imagining where this theoretical sous chef would even fit. “I’m like, What
the fuck?! I could never do that. I will always struggle as
a result. I will always be behind, and I will always miss
my deadlines and always be stressed out because of my
inability to let someone else do the work.”
When we’re done smearing shrimp with aioli, Ro-
man and I head out to do some grocery shopping for the
next recipe she’s testing. Her neighborhood in pictur-
esque Boerum Hill is rich in high-toned specialty shops
and Middle Eastern groceries, and while she avails
herself of these, she likes to shop at the most ordinary
stores possible when testing recipes. She wants to know
how the food will taste when made with the ingredients
people are most likely to actually use.
On the walk over, we talk about the book she’s read-
ing (the latest Sally Rooney), and I ask whether she’s
read her friend Stephanie Danler’s book Sweetbitter,
a sexy, decadent account of being young and working
in a restaurant. I’m surprised, but also not, when she
says she hasn’t gotten around to it yet. She mentions
not wanting to relive something she’s experienced
firsthand and also that the book is written from a “front-
of-house perspective.” What she says next actually does
shock me. “I don’t really consume any food media. I
don’t read magazines; I don’t read cookbooks. The ex-
ception, of course, being Instagram, but since I muted a
ton of people that are, like, food people, I’ve become so
much happier.” As a cookbook nerd, I’m stunned—and
kind of appalled—that Roman doesn’t study the medi-
um, but I also understand where she’s coming from. If
you don’t know that everyone and their mother is post-
ing a recipe for keto meatballs this week, you won’t be
tempted to weigh in with your own superior version.
At the grocery store, the employees all seem to rec-
ognize Roman, who cases the produce aisle and skims
the perimeter of the store with practiced ease. It’s early
March, and she’s developing recipes that will be in the
Times around the Fourth of July, debating the merits
of a salad story. People “just don’t care” about another
grilling recipe, she figures. A besotted worker behind
the butcher counter engages in a deep chat with her
about some different cuts of lamb, and when she picks
one, she tells him, “Thank you—I’ll think of you when
I cook it,” surely making his day.
We head for the checkout. She’s filled her basket
with meat and vegetables and tofu, ingredients to make
meals to entertain her own guests and the readers of
the New York Times. Her next book, like Dining In,
will focus on meals to impress and delight dates and
friends. Being single, right now, is working for Roman.
It works for her brand. Her recipes are well suited to a
life phase many millennials find themselves in, and for
which I am deeply nostalgic: childless years in small,
rented kitchens, when cooking is often an occasion and
seldom a chore. Being single also works in terms of her
actual life. She was seeing someone during the writing
of Dining In, but there’s no evidence of him in the book;
she says it’s because she knew on some level that they
weren’t going to be together forever. “I’ve done so much
better careerwise since we broke up. There’s no way he
doesn’t see that. There’s no way that he doesn’t open up
his Instagram and see somebody’s made the stew and
he’s like, ‘Fucking Alison,’” she says, beaming wickedly.
I
THIS IS JUST
LIFE, NOT A
PHOTO SHOOT,
NOT QUITE.
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