Lil’ Deb’s Oasis, the sparkly, tasty, queer restaurant that has became Hudson’s culinary lodestar over the last 5 years, describes its palette as tropical comfort food. The place was cooked up by Carla Kaya Perez-Gallardo and Hannah Black in 2016. Hannah comes from Alabama and Carla’s background is Queens-Ecuadorian-macrobiotic, and merging their tastes involved the use of lots of lime, fish sauce and butter. “Tropical comfort” is meant to evoke both of their origins and describe their sensibilities: “hot, sticky, juicy, moist fever dreams of flavor.” I got to meet Carla recently when she gave a talk at Archestratus and can confirm she’s every bit as warm and animated as Lil’ Deb’s. As she seems well-aware, people visit the restaurant because the food is always delicious and surprising, but also because it embodies this specific aesthetic and personality that she and her team defined and cultivated from the beginning.
Everyone who’s spent any time feeding themselves has a culinary aesthetic, and noticing it is the first step to making cooking an act of creation instead of a chore. If I had to throw some words out about my own, they might be: Punchy chaotic many-textured many-choices vegetable-remix food. I like simply-prepared vegetables paired with complexly-flavored sauces. I like caramelized onions with kale, capers with golden raisins, lime juice with coconut, seaweed with pickled things and dips full of nuts or tahini. I like to lower the sugar but add salt to my desserts. My favorite type of meal has bread or roasted potatoes, a bunch of cooked or raw vegetables, and multiple different sauces, because you get to make up your meal with every bite. I like a table crowded with choice.
I’m not sure how I developed my tastes, though growing up I loved dim sum — king of the small plate — and then Mediterranean food and then South Indian, once I learned dinner could be a big piece of fried bread with 5 or 6 different things to dip it into. Now I’d say that Superiority Burger is one of the places that most matches my vibe, or my aspired vibe. I love the messiness and unpretentiousness of their kitchen sink salads and overflowing sandwiches, which are consistently based on in-season produce and really great sauces. Lil’ Deb’s is newer to me, but also has an aesthetic that I’d like to incorporate into my own. When I eat at a place I love, I think about which dishes or flavor combinations I want to bring into my own kitchen, and which I should just enjoy without trying to make myself.
The people I know and share food with also find their way into my kitchen style. They say that you’re the average of your five closest friends, so I’ve also been thinking about the culinary aesthetics of some of my food friends. How would I describe them?
Annie: Extremely colorful. Friggin loves Skyr. Also sesame and layers. Multi-textured as well (maybe that’s why we get along). Precise but experimental.
Natasha: Simple and elemental. You look at her list of ingredients and you can’t believe you need so little to make something so good. Comforting and centering, just like the way she speaks and moves through space.
Jenn: Fun, powerful. Powerful fun! Smoky and sharp. Crunchy (not as in hippie, but as in the Cronnnch you make when you bite in). A feeling of abundance at her table.
It’s no coincidence that all of these wonderful people’s kitchen personalities could also describe their rest-of-life personalities. The way you approach a kitchen comes out of the way you approach the world, whether that means you come at it in the same way you do everything else or in a completely different but complementary way, as a respite. Your cooking aesthetic is one of those pieces of yourself that can develop without any conscious control, which makes it a good object of study. Seeing yourself through that lens is another way of seeing yourself.
I went on a family trip last weekend and one night Anthony and I took over the grill to make a too-big meal for everyone exactly the way I like to cook. We grilled tofu, halloumi and plantains and served them on a platter with cumin-spiced peach chutney made from our peach-picking expedition, plus some dollops of rich yogurt over the plantains. I made a green romesco from the Lil’ Deb’s cookbook (except I changed every ingredient) and nestled it among quartered radishes, slices of cucumber, and grilled zucchini and scallions. I made buckwheat flatbreads topped with a miso-tahini-scallion spread, which I also mixed into the flesh of long blackened Japanese eggplants. We grilled a few slices of the yellow watermelon we got from the farmers market. Everyone loaded up heavy and colorful plates and took them out to the screened-in porch where we ate while watching a storm come in over the Chesapeake Bay. The sauces mixed together on people’s plates as the light faded until you couldn’t see what you were eating, but it all tasted good together. After seconds or thirds, I brought out a blueberry bibingka to finish the meal. The other — most important —aspect of my cooking style is that the food I make needs to be shared.
What I’m Cooking
Peaches Party
All the ideas about what to do with your summer peaches. Grill them, cook them, pickle them,
