Host Culture

Instagram rules the food world. ALISON ROMAN—cookbook author and queen of the millennial dinner party—rules Instagram.

- Emily Gould

Alison Roman is taking her aggression out on the aioli. In her airy apartment kitchen on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone, she’s whisking egg yolks and oil and garlic until they’re the color and texture of fresh cream while chatting about how it sucks, at times, to be best known as a creator of viral recipes.

Her most recent hit was a chickpea and coconut milk stew she created for the New York Times that became known on social media simply as “#thestew,” prompting a Slate article headlined “Is #TheStew Actually That Good?” Roman knows that she should ignore this kind of trollery. She knows it’s not a good use of her time and energy to engage with her detractors, and she understands that this kind of criticism is actually a good sign, because how often does a recipe get so well known that people get mad online about it?

Still, she whisks a bit harder—but with expert control—when I bring up the Slate piece. “I was just like, ‘What? Do you know how cooking works? Have you ever cooked a thing?’ I was so incensed.” She pauses, considering her words, or maybe calibrating the precise texture of the sauce. “I’ve been cooking my whole life. This is all I’ve ever done, and I care so much about the recipes that I make and the stuff that I put out in the world, that to have somebody assume that I didn’t think it through lit me on fire.”