The Feel Good started with a sentence fragment from a collage I had made (yes, those three words), a sense of exasperation about the direction the world and business of food has been heading in, a curiosity about what my no nonsense but highly picky Grandma would have thought about it all, and a desire to get down to something more elemental and loving than just another flash in the pan concept.
My grandma cooked like an angel but had no patience for fussiness or ridiculousness. And let’s be honest; there is a lot of tomfoolery in the world of food today. Spend an hour surfing the blogosphere or on insta, if you don’t believe me, and check out the kind of over-the-top creations restaurants are coming up with just to get noticed on social media. But do they taste good? What about the customer? Does anyone really want a milkshake with a donut squished on top of it? Nothing would have irked my grandma more than being forced to endure something that was made to be a supercool surreal photograph but was barely possible to eat.
The menu is inspired by recipes from my family—from traditions, not trends—and iconoclasts in the world of food that stuck to their guns. Ladies like Julia Child and Marcella Hazan who made delicious, cravable food by honoring the craft and skill of good cookery. Ladies who, like my grandma and my mom, have an impregnable ethics of food. Ladies who have preserved a tradition that is above all about using food as a way of nourishing and expressing love. Hence our motto: tradition-driven.
