#alison-roman

#alison-roman

The recipe that Alison Roman may be best known for today is her caramelized-shallot pasta, published in 2020 when she was a food writer for The New York Times. It became the defining recipe of the early pandemic in part because its ingredients-except for the anchovy fillets-are pretty basic. And there are only 10 of them, including the pasta and salt. For Roman, the mega-viral recipe came to embody her signature "Stone Soup style": familiar ingredients magically transformed.

The grocery store came first, before the house, the husband, the baby. When the chef and cookbook author Alison Roman closed on the building that would become First Bloom, her debut retail venture, in the Catskills town of Bloomville, New York, it was a local pizza parlor. The store's opening, in 2023, marked a moment when Romanwho chronicles her life and cooking for a million-odd followers across Instagram, YouTube, and Substackneeded something for herself.