It began as love, not a product.

Are you Armenian? People ask, because a name and a face can only tell you so much. The real answer is longer and better: Italian, Puerto Rican, Scottish, Irish, Polish, and Ukrainian — six cultures that met and married their way across New York, and cooked the whole time.

I'm a twenty-year professional chef, but I didn't learn to cook until college. When I got hungry for home I called my mother from the payphone in my dorm, and she taught me dinner one recipe at a time — the way her mother had taught her. In 2021 the two of us sat down to make what we thought would be a little family cookbook.

She was sick by then, and we worked on it through her treatment. She passed away in February 2022. She wanted nothing left unsaid, so I've carried the book forward exactly as we began it — a history of this family told in the food it made. It is a love letter from her, and from me. For you, Mom.