Is there a dish that defines home to you? What is it, and what memories does it hold?
This is the question Ali Elabbady poses in the foreword of Back of House, a hardcover art and cookbook created by artists Diana Albrecht and Ryan Stopera that honors the stories and recipes of twelve immigrant chefs and their ancestral cuisines. Albrecht, a Korean adoptee and art director, and Stopera, a photographer and filmmaker with roots in social work and community organizing, used this question as the starting point for their first collaboration together. This book challenges xenophobia by exploring timely conversations about food and family.
Blending documentary-style photography, narrative essays, and familial and fusion recipes, Back of House offers an intimate look into how food connects family, culture, and identity. The chefs featured hail from twelve different countries including Armenia, Haiti, Mexico, South Korea, Togo, and Vietnam and range from at-home to working chefs. Each story represents a diverse cross-section of immigrant experiences—told through the universal language of food—the dishes we make to remember, to connect, to survive, and to celebrate.
And food is universal.
We all need it to survive. But what we eat, how we prepare it and who we share it with is where culture lives. That’s where memory and tradition lives. That’s where the stories of who we are and where we come from get passed down, one recipe at a time.
That’s the power of this book. It doesn’t demand a concrete answer. The book makes room for the complicated and the still-searching. And right now, at a time when immigrant communities are being targeted and when stories of migration and belonging are being weaponized, this book feels essential. These stories of culture, family, and the care work of feeding community matter more than ever.
I recently got a chance to speak to Albrecht and Stopera to talk about how this project came together. With this book, they wanted to celebrate caretakers who often don’t get the shine. As Stopera told me, “None of the chefs in the book are celebrity chefs. I think one has a brick and mortar space and that one was really special. But, they all do so much with their community but they don’t get a lot of shine or flowers or press, so it felt like celebrating the invisible caretakers.”
The result is twelve intimate and beautiful portraits of people whose relationships with food reveal everything about family, displacement, identity, and home. Please check out the interview on video above or on YouTube (new), or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Podcasts or Pocketcasts.
We covered so much ground in the conversation from how the cookbook came together to the individual stories featured in the book and why this works matter now. Here are a few highlights:
On the complexity of “home”
For Diana, the question “what food is home?” doesn’t have a simple answer. She told me about Jackie, another adoptee featured in the book who grew up in New Zealand with Vietnamese and Chinese Polynesian heritage. Jackie grappled with the fact that much of New Zealand’s food culture “is like a result of colonization, right?” So she created a ceviche—taking fresh fish from New Zealand and “implementing ingredients like coconut milk and Vietnamese fish sauce that paid homage to her Asian culture in a very nuanced and indirect way.”Diana reflected: “I don’t really have a great answer. And I think that’s kind of like the beauty in this book is that there are people who have a very concrete answer to that question. And then there’s also a lot of room for ambiguity and nuance and exploration and being okay with not having that answer.”
On making home through food
For Ryan, who is mixed Chinese and Polish, the answer is dumplings—both Chinese dumplings and pierogi. When he ran a cafe at Public Functionary, he brought that sense of home to his community: “I chose to make home there and share that with the community through sharing my mother’s Chinese dumpling recipe. And that was really cool, you know, to extend that to the community and feed them and make everyone use chopsticks even if they couldn’t.”Ryan also said something beautiful about what happens when we slow down around food: “When you sit down and have intentional conversations, slow down and make and eat food together, that’s what can come of that... Some of the stories are just like wonderful synergy there.”
On intentional curation
Diana explained how they thought about who to include in the book: “Everyone has a very different immigration story. Everyone is, for the most part, from a different country of origin, and this also takes into account family dynamics... I’m an adoptee, and so my relationship with family and culture is very different from people who are connected to their nuclear family and their culture.”
On cooking and music
I asked Diana and Ryan if they had to make one meal with a musical pairing, what would it be? Diana chose Kimchi Stew with Pork Belly and a fried egg, paired with the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack. ”I fought it for so long because I’m like, K-pop, ugh, whatever... and then I watched it. I’m like, okay, this is like really emotional for me as a Korean person.”Ryan shared a recent food memory: making Thanksgiving greens that earned his wife’s grandma’s approval while they listened to the Star Wars soundtrack in the background. ”I could honestly eat greens like every week... My wife’s grandma gave me the approval, which was like everything.”
I tried to think of my answer for this question and I came up with Collard Greens, Fried Chicken Wings, and Hot Water Cornbread (maybe add in Red Beans & Rice) and Quincy Jones’ Q’s Jook Joint or something on KBLX.
If you’re looking for a last-minute holiday gift (or a gift to yourself), Back of House is still available on Ryan’s website or at Bench Pressed.
This is a book for anyone thinking about identity and belonging, for the cook in your life, for anyone who believes food tells our most important stories.
Watch or listen to the whole conversation to hear more about the creative process, the individual stories featured in the book, and why documenting and celebrating immigrant communities through food matters so much right now.
Here are a few other things I thought were worth sharing this week:
I started a new playlist called evergreen.001. It’s a pretty good mix of things and you can listen to it on Apple, or on Spotify.
I finished reading The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy this weekend and… I didn’t love it as much as I hoped. I must admit, I was confused while reading, but did really enjoy the dialogues that existed in the story. If you read it, let me know your thoughts.
Loved Alex Lewis’ list of his 32 favorite albums released this year. One thing that I definitely want to do is keep an running Google doc next year to easily find albums I loved and listened to.
College Radio Keeps Its Cool via The New York Times
Olivia Dean is for Lovers via Nylon
That’s it for this week!
