12 Days of Holiday Food Memories: Ari Taymor's Bad Buffet Pasta
We asked a dozen food world luminaries to help us count down the next 12 days with culinary nostalgia, and they gave us their favorite stories of supermarket eggnog, standing rib roasts, discounted candy, and lots of cheer. Enjoy, and happy holidays!
Photo credit: Getty. Lettering: Brian Kaspr.
Chef Ari Taymor helms Alma, the Los Angeles restaurant Bon Appétit magazine just deemed the “Best New Restaurant of 2013.” It’s quite a feat for a 28-year-old who grew up eating In-N-Out and Taco Bell; food was a non-entity until Taymor ate a life-changing leg of lamb at Chez Panisse at age 22. Today he cooks elaborate, “memory-based” cuisine, but as a kid, he was knee-deep in bad hotel food every holiday.
[Over the holiday break] my parents just liked to go places. My mom really likes to travel, and my dad just kind of has to deal with it.
As a kid, food wasn’t really on my radar—In-N-Out, like, or Taco Bell—I just called it a day. Even now [as a chef] I don’t have these tie-ins to traditional foods; I don’t have this perfect ideal of what a food should be.
My mom’s from Mexico, so we would often spend the holidays in Mexico. There are lots of beans around the holidays because they’re considered good luck. Stuffed peppers with mole is one of the big recipes—dark poblano with pomegranate seeds. On Christmas we were pretty well-removed from what was really going on. We were together in a hotel or a restaurant nearby.
We had mediocre hotel meals. At Club Med in Huatulco I remember a really uninspired buffet, and pasta with butter, and my parents getting drunk on Champagne. We were just happy to be by the ocean.
Today I’d rather get sick [eating] outside than eat at a hotel. I’ve been able to avoid the scenario of buffets.
People want there to be some sort of artisanal attachment or sentiment that I attach cooking to, but it has absolutely nothing to do with food. It’s all different memories and feelings that were so far away from where food was for me as a kid.
Even now the food in the restaurant—what it signifies, and what it means to me—are these really specific memories and times and senses. So in the wintertime, we do this celery root soup with smoked lardo, pine juice and apple. For me it’s like the Central coast [of California], the way the weather felt to me—foggy in the morning and then the fog breaks—and you get this overpowering smell of pine and there’s always somebody with a fire in their fireplace. Those elements to me represent a lot to me of what my childhood was like.
