821: Carla Lalli Stopped Performing and Started Cooking for Herself

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Carla Lalli** (0:30)
This episode is brought to you by Facebook.
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**Carla Lalli** (1:08)
When I started really thinking about comfort and nourishment, why do we associate comfort food with overdoing it, and how really closely linked that idea is to guilty pleasure, which is another demonic thing that we've created to link the pleasure and enjoyment of food with somehow feeling bad.

**Matt Rodbard** (1:31)
This Is TASTE. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.
Carla Lalli built her name in the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen before going independent and publishing two best-selling cookbooks. Yet, there was much more going on in her life. 24 years into her marriage, it ended. And her sparkling new book, Food Is a Feeling, tells the story through 65 recipes and 30 essays that treat cooking not as a lifestyle brand extension, but as the thing that got her through it all. On this episode, Carla and I talk substack life, savvy recipe shortcuts, and getting it all down in a voice that feels true to real life, not online life. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Carla Lalli, welcome to This Is TASTE. So great to see you.

**Carla Lalli** (2:19)
You too.

**Matt Rodbard** (2:20)
Oh my gosh, we haven't had a conversation in the studio since 2019

**Carla Lalli** (2:25)
I know, it's really crazy.

**Matt Rodbard** (2:26)
It's crazy. Yeah. I absolutely love your book.

**Carla Lalli** (2:30)
Thank you.

**Matt Rodbard** (2:31)
The writing is just so great.

**Carla Lalli** (2:32)
Thank you.

**Matt Rodbard** (2:33)
It's full voice, it's just really, you're drawn into the story and we'll get to the story. But also, just the way we wet recipes, it's not easy.

**Carla Lalli** (2:42)
No, I really wanted to kind of flip the way that we normally or that I would normally develop a recipe and then write something to go with the recipe. In this book, I wanted to tell a story that sets up the recipes. It's just like a total flip. The recipes that are in the book actually reflect what was going on either in my life or in the memory that I'm talking about in the essay.
There is a little bit of a randomness to the recipes because they're driven by the experience instead of breaking something up into categories and being like, we need a carrot recipe.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:28)
See, I like that more than forcing recipes into boxes.
People do that well. It's the vocabulary we work with most cookbooks. When you can nail it and the randomness feels less random as you read, it's a special book.

**Carla Lalli** (3:45)
Thank you.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:46)
Yeah. Before we get to the themes and a bunch of essays I want to talk about, we'll talk about Montreux a little bit too.

**Carla Lalli** (3:51)
Okay.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:51)
I got to go back there.

**Carla Lalli** (3:52)
Yeah.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:52)
Always want to talk about Montreux. You cook so much, but you also dine out. I know you do both. Where have you been dining out in New York recently?

**Carla Lalli** (4:02)
Oh, my goodness.
Where have I been dining out? I don't go to new places that often.
I think that something that's going on in New York right now is that dining out is like astronomically expensive. I would say the most frequently visited restaurants are within a city block of my house. So I go to Zong Zong, which is on my block. Amazing noodle soups and wontons. I go to Burrito Suarez, which also I don't have to cross the street to go to. Just incredible flour tortillas and delicious burritos and salsas. Then I always call it Green Mountain, but I think it's actually Mint Heights is also a really good Indian place that is also half a block from my house. Those are in high rotation.