This past Sunday, I had the honor of collaborating with Chef Edgar Rico of Nixta Taqueria who reinterpreted several of my grandmother Elda Cristini’s recipes from my cookbook Heart-Shaped Tomatoes.
For those unfamiliar with Nixta, it’s a restaurant on East 12th Street in Austin, Texas. Since opening three years ago, Nixta and its chef-owner Edgar Rico, and owner Sara Mardanbigi have consistently been awarded for the incredible food they put out. Most recently, Chef Rico won the James Beard Award for Emerging Chef and was named to TIME Magazine’s TIME100—a list of the world’s most influential artists, leaders, and innovators.
I’ve been lucky to work at Nixta off and on for the last year, and it has been through that work that I’ve come to know Edgar and Sara, who are married and co-own Nixta together. They are two of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever met and certainly worked with.
I was taken aback when during a quiet moment at the beginning of a shift Edgar asked me very casually, “Would you be down to let me cook some of your grandma’s dishes for a dinner here?” My answer was a much less casual, and much more emphatic “Hell yes!”
It took a while for our schedules to match up, but as they finally did I was nervous and excited about the opportunity to have my grandmother’s recipes shared and manifested in an evening of celebration.
I tried to capture the whole process of what went into the dinner. For me, the experience of watching Edgar, Sara, and both the front and back-of-house teams prepare the food was as important to me as seeing guests excited about Edgar’s interpretations of my grandmother’s recipes.
It was amazing to see the haphazard coordination of three pairs of arms twirling together 26 plates of spaghetti with my grandma’s pesto recipe. And for that pesto pasta to be so thoughtfully paired with wine from Abruzzo, the region of Italy where my grandmother is from.
As I watched those 26 plates come together, I thought about my grandmother’s culinary energy, her old-world stubbornness, her spirit twirling into that spaghetti, onto the plate, and into the mouths and bellies of a group of friends and strangers who have never met her before.
It was beautifully overwhelming. A moment and an evening I will remember for a long time.
✷ ✷ ✷
In addition to everyone at Nixta, this dinner would have never happened without everyone else who contributed to making Heart-Shaped Tomatoes—specifically the book’s co-author Madelyn Wigle, my mom Maria Cristini who wrote all the recipes, and the book’s designer Mitch Wiesen.
Click images to enlarge.