The Steady Table
On the table that holds, what feeding gives back & why I keep setting it
Last week I was visiting my family in South Carolina. Everyone was outside, Yas, Heather and Matt watching from the edge of the pool, my mom and dad swirled around the grandkids the way grandparents do...chairs and tables being rearranged. Alex and Selena drove in, too, and someone called for sunscreen from across the yard. And me…I was in the kitchen, by myself, staring at the piles of groceries, and trying to figure out how to make miracles from the kitchen chaos for eleven people.
I landed on grilled BBQ chicken thighs, roasted potatoes and peppers, vinegar-pickled tomatoes with cucumbers and onion, and a salad. Nothing that required a written plan or a special run to the store. Bit by bit, it all came together: first, I brined the chicken in pickle juice I found in the back of the fridge…then tossed potatoes with peppers, herbs, and red wine vinegar, and then quick-pickled the tomatoes and cucumbers while everything else came together. Somewhere between shooing the kids away from “just a little snack” and helping Yas and Matt find the right Aperol balance in their mixed drinks, between turning and basting the chicken, tasting and salting, I stopped and exhaled…long and slow…and I smiled. My childhood home was loud with music and the cousins playing in the pool, but the kitchen was quiet. The kitchen was mine.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be…I knew exactly who I was and what I wanted to do.
That morning, before the pool shenanigans began, we took the kids to visit Nanny Sis in hospice. I sat with her, rubbed her face, and looked into her eyes…trying to find her as she was trying to find her own recognition of me. As we sat there, visiting and feeding her hospital food for lunch, I remembered her own table back when I was a kid. I remember how each Sunday morning after church, we would gather around her table in Ridgeway, SC.
Her handmade biscuits…the ones none of us can quite replicate…those glorious biscuits fresh out of the oven, carefully placed in a basket with a towel over to keep them warm…they drew us all into this space. People found their way to the table from wherever they were, chairs pulled in from all the other rooms. Nanny would set out butter and a plate of sliced tomatoes from the garden…and that was the whole meal…and it was always enough. As a kid, I didn’t understand what she was doing or why it worked the way it did. I didn’t yet understand how whatever went on outside of that kitchen stopped mattering the moment she put food on the table.
After sitting with her a while in her hospital bed, the grandkids gathered around while Nanny looked on silently, searching for that glimmer of knowing. I combed her hair with my hands as we were about to leave and I said, “Nanny…I love you so much.” And it was that moment she did something that surprised us all; she found her voice, her words…and managed to say “I love you” back to me. Tears welled in my eyes, and the light in her finally saw and knew the light in me. That knowing…it’s her legacy, it’s the foundation for everything my family does, it’s what I live for, and it’s what I hope to always give.
That same feeling of knowing…of recognition is one I’ve also felt making lentils for no one on a Tuesday in the city…or at a cutting board in my client’s kitchen at seven in the morning, before the first jeweler arrived…or in the family’s apartment on the Upper East Side, prepping their week of plant-based meals…and also in my head chef spot at expo in the restaurant, prepping for 150 tickets about to fly. The location doesn’t change the feeling. The act of preparing something for someone to receive…to meet their needs…it feels the same, every time.
I have served some of the most elaborate meals of my life...whole fish grilled over delicate potatoes with a truffled pea purée, slow braises of ossobuco with the market’s best vegetables that needed most of the day to settle, soft and low. And I have set tables with mismatched plates, a fresh baguette still warm in the paper bag, a dish of butter softened with Maldon salt scattered on top, a half-eaten jar of jam from the back of the fridge (à la Nanny Sis but with my own twist). And you know what…that second table moves a room as completely as any of the first, maybe more.
Something shifts when people are fed...fed well, simply and with intention. The air moves differently…their shoulders come down…the version of them who arrived, perhaps guarded or rushed or somewhere else entirely, starts to ease its grip, and underneath it, the person who was always there…is just...there.
I have watched this phenomenon happen at long dinner tables and around kitchen counters and on picnic blankets in the park and in living rooms with improvised seating where no one planned to stay as long as they did. I have felt it from the other side of the counter every single time. What I’m finally able to see but never fully able to explain is why it works…without exception. The food may change, the setting shifts, the people move...and yet…still and always…something greater than ourselves opens up.
Joy Harjo wrote that the world begins at a kitchen table; it’s there that children are given their first instructions on what it means to be human; it’s there wars have started and ended; it’s there we have given birth and prepared our dead; it’s there we sing and grieve and give thanks. And it's there we've always understood, maybe before we had words for it, that the kitchen table isn’t just a piece of furniture.
It’s the oldest and most reliable gathering place we have, the space that has always known how to hold whatever we bring to it.
My posts over the past month have been all about looking inward...about learning to listen to our body, to feed it what it’s actually asking for, to recognize what a nervous system in alarm mode feels like and to know what it really takes to bring it back to something like rest. Rest as a verb. All of those things are necessary, and I believe in them completely…but they were never meant to be the whole story.
There’s a thing they tell you on airplanes, so familiar that most of us have stopped even really hearing it. I mean, my AirPods are on before I even get on the plane, so I watch the airline attendant pantomime buckling a seat belt, but all I hear is Amy Winehouse belting back to black.
Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.
This morning as I’m writing this, it hit me…this means more than just keeping yourself alive.
We can’t be fully present with another human being while we are struggling
to breathe within our own lives. We can’t possibly hear someone else’s words
when we are so deep inside our own that the walls have gone opaque.
All the inward work, all the careful tending to our own nervous systems and hunger and rest…to our hearts and our minds, it’s all necessary and in service of this. “Secure the oxygen” prepares us to sit across from someone and actually BE there with them, settled enough in ourselves to let someone else’s experience have somewhere to land.
There is a Bantu philosophy from Southern Africa called Ubuntu, and its central idea translates roughly as this:
umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
a person is a person through other persons
Ubuntu holds that your fullest self, your complete humanity, is not something you can find alone or in solitude, but it’s through your relationships with others. That identity itself isn’t a private achievement but a relational one…one that’s built in the spaces between people…in the practice of looking at someone and being looked back at, in the act of being known.
I am because we are.
The Latin root of the word companion carries the same truth in a different tongue. *Com* means together, *panis* means bread. A companion is literally someone you break bread with...someone you eat alongside…the concept of moving through life beside another person…made inseparable from the act of sharing a meal.
What I didn’t quite expect when I became a professional chef was what feeding people would do to me. I knew I would fall in love with the food, the craft, the seasons, the beautiful challenge of technique. And for sure, I did fall…madly in love with all of it. But what I didn’t see coming was how feeding people would settle something in my chest that almost nothing else ever would. The way I feel more certain of my purpose and more like myself when I am giving something through food…it’s unlike any other certainty I’ve ever felt.
What happens when we gather around the table, I can only describe as the light in me seeing the light in them...when someone takes that first bite and goes quiet for half a second, when a room of strangers gets loud with laughter around the second course, when someone pulls me aside at the end of the night and says they haven’t eaten like that in years. They almost never mean just the food…they are really talking about the feeling…the one of being held, the feeling of being truly seen and cared for.
I met up with May Chang last month for coffee, and we spent most of the afternoon chatting. Having never met before, we settled in like lifelong friends, talking about our lives, our paths, and how we are still figuring it all out, and I felt it then, too. That same feeling of recognition you feel when someone describes their life, and you realize you’re hearing your own story in a slightly different arrangement. You recognize the fear of building something not fully baked yet, the leap from what’s safe to something more true, and the uncertainty of how any of it will land and of choosing to go for it anyway. She knew it, I knew it, and it was in that shared knowing where we both were able to exhale in a way that had nothing to do with the coffee.
The comparison game can’t survive this feeling…it’s a creature that keeps us living in isolation, behind our screens…it needs closed doors and it feeds on the quiet, endless scroll to keep itself alive. But it’s in those moments…when you’re actually sitting across from a real human who’s in the middle of the same alive thing you are…it’s there that the gap between your life and everyone else’s curated version of their own collapses into something finally clear…finally honest. We’re not as alone as isolation tries to convince us, and we’re all considerably more capable than we tend to believe.
I didn’t know this was the “why” of The Freckled Fork when I started it…I was literally and physically trying to piece together my “chef” path after choosing to leave the restaurant for my daughter. But, what I’ve come to realize is that this has always been my path, long before it ever became a reality. A path that began at my Nanny Sis’ table in South Carolina. A path that meandered and forked (pun most definitely intended) through marriage, infertility, adoption, divorce, and the prescribed burn of the walls I had built up to keep myself small.
This path was never a business model or a content strategy but a practice. This path was to build a table that holds…a steady place where people can come a little frayed and as they are…a place of joy that sends them off a little more whole because they were fed well…they were seen…they were heard more clearly. They were reminded, somewhere over a simple plate of good food, that they’re in the company of others doing the same hard and hopeful and uncertain thing.
Derek Walcott ended his poem “Love After Love” with four words that have become a guiding light for me:
Feast on your Life.
His words are about returning to yourself, to the stranger you ignored in the business of living…and that the way back is through the table, through the offering of wine and bread, through the act of sitting down and staying.
It feels like the most honest description of what I am trying to create in this world…in this space…in my little corner of the Upper West Side in New York City.
Come as you are…here is something I made with my hands for you. Because you chose to come here, and it mattered that you would be fed. Here is a room where your story is welcome and the person across from you has one, too…and the gap between you both is smaller than anything we’ve been led to believe.
I’ll keep setting that table, I’ll keep inviting people to sit, and I’ll keep feeding them until I run out of days to do so.
I am because we are.
And the table is where we see it…where we remember it…where we know it…and each other.