This menu was cooked once. Yours will be entirely different.
Five things I believe
about a good dinner.
Cook around the people, never the menu.
A menu fixed weeks ago is a menu cooked for a stranger. I will never know whose anniversary, whose first date, whose grief. The plates are decided when you are.
Borders are for atlases, not for kitchens.
A Tamil rasam can sit next to a Calabrian agnolotti without either feeling out of place. Most evenings cross three or four cuisines. Some lean hard in one direction. None lean in advance.
Five courses, not nine.
You should leave the table full and exactly that. Nine courses means I was showing off. Five means I cared what I was making. Sometimes six. Sometimes seven, if the table is brave.
Every plate should have a sentence.
I should be able to tell you, in one breath, why this dish is on your table. If I can't, the dish doesn't belong on your table. This is the test I run on everything before it leaves the kitchen.
The room is half the meal.
The candles, the playlist, the table you sit at, the strangers you sit with, the slow way the plates arrive. The food is the centre, but the room is the frame. Both must be good.
Always say yes to the difficult guest.
The vegan friend, the gluten-free cousin, the one who genuinely does not like onion. Tell me. I will cook around it without making a thing of it. Restrictions sharpen the menu, they rarely soften it.
Cooked, lately, at this table.
A non-exhaustive list of the regions, kitchens, and grandmothers that have shown up in the last forty evenings.