Where the Chefs Eat asks your favourite chefs for their top restaurants in cities across the world. For this edition, we sit down for coffee with Tamar Adler.
Tamar Adler is a woman of many great achievements. She is a James Beard Award-winning author, a mother, and a Vogue contributing editor. Yet, as she opens her latest publication Feast on Your Life, it is evident her battle with depression has been utterly crippling. She describes how the autumn of 2023 left her on the floor, both mentally and physically; “I’d recently taken inventory of my life,” she says. “What I’d turned up felt meagre. Somehow, my mistakes and missed chances dwarfed my accomplishments, haunting and hunting me.” This wasn’t the first time Adler had faced the demon that is depression – she has suffered it her whole life – but, from it, her latest book was born, and the result is a stunning diary of food, day-to-day life and the beauty found in the smallest of things.
Feast on Your Life began as a gratitude list of sorts, suggested by her husband as part of his efforts to help her. The list was “predictable,” as she says. “Husband, son; warm bed – that sort of stuff.” And, yet, what grew was a gratitude for everything around her – the smell of coffee, “clouds of challah bread” and the “abrasive tang” of pineapples. The repetition of certain things in the kitchen, the stunning description of food – all become entries in a diary for Adler that helped her to rebuild. They bind together into a stunning book that celebrates life, and food, of course, in the most beautiful of ways.
When I speak with Adler from her new home in Madrid, I ask her what it is about food that she feels really pulled her out of the grip of such a dark place. “I think it’s a few things,” she muses. “I think obviously the immediacy of it is really important: it’s right there, and it’s unavoidable. So many of your senses are engaged in cooking and eating. You have to be completely present in it. And I think that amount of presence really does kind of remap your brain, even in tiny ways in the moment, because it sort of changes your attention, moving you from the terrible abstract to the sensory present.” And, for those who have suffered depression, even getting out of bed in the morning can feel like climbing a mountain, so the physical closeness of one’s kitchen itself also helps. “When you finish really being present,” she continues, “you actually do think a little bit differently. And, so, I think it does a really amazing job of diverting you towards a way of experiencing the world that is positive and non-abstract, and that is really grounded in the present moment. And it does it through your senses. I think because food demands so much of our senses, it’s almost the perfect tool.”
