“They have to care about you for them to care about the chicken,” she told me. Roman’s studied imperfectionism lowers the threshold for emulation, creating a strong sense of intimacy with her fans. If she’s batching up Martinis, she’ll be serving them in a repurposed flower vase. “I recently found this note to myself scrawled on the back of an electrical bill that I had probably forgotten to pay, written one night after a dinner party.” If Roman is putting out little things for people to eat, she’s calling them “snacks,” not canapés. “Roasting a nice chicken for people is such a good way to say, ‘I love you,’ ” she writes. In Roman’s world, an admission of effort must be offset by an ungiven fuck. The distinction seems to be about the appearance of caring overly much.
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Roman writes in the preface to “Nothing Fancy” that she has “always been allergic to the word ‘entertaining.’ ” Yet teaching her audience how to entertain-even if she calls it “having people over”-is a large part of what she does. She is home cooking’s most relentless polemicist, pairing a preference for high-acid, crunchy, creamy, herby, briny, chili-flaky food with salty takes. She also maintains a popular Instagram account (“Does broccoli undo alcohol? 🕵🥦🤷”), a YouTube channel (half a million views for a summer pasta salad), and a monthly newsletter (titled, somewhat pissily, “A Newsletter”). Her cookbooks, “ Dining In” (2017) and “ Nothing Fancy” (2019), have together sold around four hundred and fifty thousand copies. Roman made her name as a food columnist and the host of cooking videos for Bon Appétit and the Times.
“In a world where everyone feels the need to be excessively polite, she’s excessively herself,” David Cho, a business adviser who consults on her projects, told me. She’s always a cook, often a writer, occasionally a performer, and never a pushover, even when she’s getting in her own way. It’s hard, even for Roman, to put a concise label on what she does. “The only way I will be successful is if I’m myself, because (a) I can have a really shitty attitude if somebody asks me to do something I don’t want to do and I can’t be myself, and (b) there’s so much noise out there, so many people that develop recipes, so many places that you can find one.” Eighteen months after a disastrous interview and its attendant miseries-“I was single, I was cancelled, I was in a pandemic”-she was feeling reflective. Roman had just lit a candle and was playing moody music. Marigolds sat on a coffee table in a green glass vase. Roman had added hanging plants, a rattan Papasan chair, and a modular sofa she got from Joybird, giving the loft-style living area a seventies-folksinger energy.ĭusk was falling. The bones of the new place were industrial chic: exposed pipes, a brick wall painted white. FreshDirect bags that she had used to haul her belongings were still visible in a corner. She had moved in a few months earlier, having outgrown a smaller nearby apartment and its snug, Internet-famous kitchen. “You either like my style or you don’t, you’re into the vibe or not,” Roman told me, in October, sitting on a low-slung moss-colored velveteen chaise longue in a corner of her apartment, in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill. The amount of time it takes to fill the tub is roughly equivalent to the time it takes to tear up a loaf of stale bread, for croutons fried in chicken fat. The thing to do, according to Roman, is to start the water, put on a towel, and head back into the kitchen. Showers are “objectively boring” and inferior to baths. Instapots are a no, as are runny dressings, tomatoes on sandwiches, apples as snacks, and drinks served up. She doesn’t sift flour, soak beans, or peel ginger. She’s a slicer of onions, not a dicer a “ride-or-die corner person” when it comes to lasagnas and cakes.
Alison Roman approves of creamed greens, knobby lemons, and iceberg lettuce.
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