The Discovery of Taste
An effort to retrace the origins of my relationship with Taste, from palate to purpose, revealed what had been gradually and steadfastly guiding me all along
As much as it has meant to me over the years, I have often wondered about its origin, our McGuffin, my meet-cute with Taste.
My first instinct to uncover my journey’s tipping point with Taste was to comb through early childhood memories in search of that single moment in my life when an appreciation for it first clicked into place.
But my journey with taste commenced like every other kid my age. I was a picky eater. In elementary school, I didn’t eat hamburgers, hot dogs, jelly, lunch meat and American cheese unlike the rest of the kids I grew up with.
Spelling it out like that just now makes me stop and laugh hard out loud.
I was accidentally eating right. All of that stuff my generation grew up on was SO bad for us.
I can’t help but wonder if I just uncovered evidence of my first brush with Taste, my compass.
My relationship with taste took off in the most unlikely of places, Paris, not France, Illinois – where I grew up. My first high school job took me several miles outside of our small town’s city limits to a renovated farmhouse that had been opened as a fine dining restaurant, a really, really good one too. I started as a busser, but soon became a jane of all trades, the family’s weekend nanny and eventually kitchen help.
It was that kitchen, that proximity to fresh farm-to-table, that captured my attention and my imagination. I loved the work I did there and I learned a lot – how to use a knife, how to create unusual, unconventional combinations on the plate, how to present, sequence and multi-task. I’d go home and try to recreate some of the recipes for my family. I was, without knowing it, experimenting with taste.
Every chance I was given I was soaking up the chef’s vision and creativity like a sponge. Everything was so different than what I was used to.
I grew up around a mom who knew her way around a kitchen and could do devilishly good work with a rolling pin or a skillet, but this was taste from another realm. I have to believe that’s why my palate took keen and special interest in it. I also have to believe that Taste, my compass, was genuinely at work behind the scenes guiding my newfound passion for this whole new world of culinary art and wizardry.
As it turns out, I had fortuitously chosen a high school job that set me in front of taste. Not just any taste, but hard to come by, out of my ordinary taste. I can see now, this was part of the path to the right here and the right now. Even more impressively, I had chosen a job that edged my boundaries with food and flavor out beyond their comfort zones. This job taught me to trust and try, to connect the dots and to imagine. There was no binary right or wrong. Only: did it taste good?
Those two years at Andrew’s at the Westbrook primed my palate for growth and discovery. But years later, my first job out of film school, as an executive assistant for an Academy Award-winning producer in Beverly Hills, ruinously spoiled it.
At The Ladd Company we dined almost daily at the city’s most glamorous restaurants. It was a quick education and one largely lost on me to celebrity sightings and a fascination with the dessert tray. Born with a sweet tooth and gifted with an insane metabolism, I devoured every Tiramisu, Hot Fudge Brownie Sundae and Crème Brûlée in the 90210 postal code. Over the six years I worked there, I ate these so much and so often, that I have never ordered one of those desserts again. It wouldn’t be until a wine-fueled collision at Rome’s Roscioli counter that I would hesitantly but triumphantly return to Tiramisu two full decades later.
Sadly though, I wasn’t enough of a risk-taker or opportunist when I came to sit at these tables. I was not savvy enough to capitalize on the full breadth of the tasting occasions in front of me. Throughout my 20s, I unfathomably sat unstirred by Steak Tartare, Branzino and Crudo. I stuck far too close to the ordinary – Cobb and Caesar salads, pastas with red sauce and cheeseburgers. I saw menus for what they didn’t have instead of what I could take for a spin.
When I think back to the early 2000s when I was moving about LA as a twenty-something, wannabe club-goer, I was more likely to try a new goofy twist on a martini than Salade Niçoise, Bouillabaisse or Soft Shell Crab. I did adopt sushi early on, fell mad in love with Pad Thai at first bite and even took a liking to the Pimm’s Cup. But still I was moving too slow for all that sat untouched and untried in front of me.
As for Taste, I smile at what it must have thought as the palate it was trying to breathe life into was being fed like a six-year-old.
Over time, however, those years freeloading off some of LA’s most coveted lunch reservations did go on to shape my preferences and proclivities in taste. At the very least, they introduced me to fresh California cuisine, a different kind of Italian, elevated dining and one big X-factor I hadn’t ever considered.
Dining in this scene, Hollywood drippings aside, meant soaking up accoutrements like buzz, energy and vibes with my meal. I was being asked to appreciate the role ambiance played in cueing up and underscoring a well-curated restaurant experience. Taste was more than what was on the plate in front of me. Taste was more than transaction. It was storytelling, art and human touch.
The LA eatery menus, and the formats and ambiances that served them up, couldn’t have been more galaxies apart from what I had been exposed to growing up in the middle of the Midwest.
While a single moment didn’t switch my tastebuds on, serendipity, fate and a nonthreatening but consistent rhythm of trying, venturing and abandoning eventually steered me in the right direction, leading me to the combustible magic ingredient – travel.
It was during this time that my father took to saying I was developing champagne taste on a beer budget. He wasn’t exactly wrong. But what he didn’t realize was that all of it was in service of a calling and purpose I wouldn’t discover until I was in my mid-forties. I was swimming in the wrong lane from his point of view, but from mine I was desperate to find a whole other pool.
And that’s exactly what I did when I boarded my first ever international flight. It was then and only then that life, it seemed, had brought me full circle. From Paris, not Illinois – France, I got the first cinematic nudge I needed. It took just one bite from one real, soft and flaky Parisian pain au chocolat.
And in that moment, Travel, my life companion, introduced me to my one true compass.
Taste.
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