On opening Jason Hammel’s The Lula Cafe Cookbook, it is beautiful. The images are sparse except the detail of the food. All simple dishes, solely attention to detail plating. It is colorful only due to the organic hues offered from the ingredients themselves. It is exquisite yet not ostentatious. Hammel showcases what he does best, good food with care. Care being the key word here. It is easy to be yummy. It is hard to do that with the added hug that is a meal as a love language to the people it is served to and the ingredients that it is made of.
It is the same when you walk into Lula Cafe’s doors. You have heard the praise, the rave reviews. You have seen the wins from James Beard, you witness not a single table unseated. This is a good place, with good food, that is clear. But what isn’t apparent until you sit down or read through the book is that Hammel and Lula go beyond just good food. Pasta Yia Yia is a simple creamy spaghetti. It is not trendy or overly complicated. It is comfort in a pasta bowl. It is family. It is a memory. Hammel shares food experience, hoping that we too will connect and remember what that meal made us feel. Not just that it filled our bellies, that we enjoyed it, had no complaints but that we felt cared for, that we felt special. You walk away from a Lula meal connected to something bigger than satiety.
Lula’s cookbook is very much for the special occasion meal, to source not so average ingredients, to fully flex your farmers market haul. It’s also to make the average Tuesday much more enjoyable. The process for the granola alone makes a bowl of yogurt more than a hurried morning meal alongside a chugged cup of coffee. The candied pecans, the browning of the butter. This is not your toss it all in a bowl, stir, place on a sheet pan for 20 minutes homemade granola. It is addictingly crunchy with the many grains, it is spiced and barely sweet making it still feel healthy beside its decadence.
I mixed my choices for the everyday recipes with the special ones. The carrot cake being one. A true Lula staple and a household tradition of my own for my daughter's birthday. A rare occasion where carrots are begged for and so I must indulge. And like with the granola, no step is left out or hurried. Lula Cafe balances the good for you nutritionally with the indulgent. You never feel as if you should go for an extra run, but do leave the meal harboring feelings that everyday should feel that exquisite. It isn’t without effort, but without the effort the love is lost and the moment to be remembered, even in the most mundane of days, is gone with it.
There were short cuts that could have been created in each recipe and while tempted to cook my traditional way which is as fast as possible, I followed directions instead. I slowed down. I candied things separately, I whipped in separate bowls, I do admit to using store bought jam, shame on me, I know. Old habits die hard. But each time that I didn’t expedite my life and meal, I realized that something really special would occur. I would enjoy it all that much more. I would savor not only the moment of the steps that it took to get there, but the relishing of the meal itself was more than just sustenance, more than the ease of hunger and anxiety. It was as precious as Lula itself.
In one cookbook, and in one cafe, Jason Hammel has brought back sentimental eating in the best of ways. Not so simply simmer garlic and cream, add a pinch of cinnamon, and you’ll be on your way to realizing that food as medicine is more than an apple a day. Food is, like us, the sum of its parts. So why not make the parts better.
The Lula Cafe Cookbook is available from Phaidon Press, Lula Cafe and anywhere books are sold.