Nancy Silverton’s bonafides are well documented. She’s won James Beard Foundation awards for Outstanding Pastry Chef, Outstanding Restaurant, and Outstanding Chef. She’s the holder of a Michelin star for her restaurant Osteria Mozza. And she’s published more than half a dozen cookbooks. But like most chefs, Silverton had to pay her dues in the bowels of sweaty kitchens and that still informs how she cooks, thinks, and runs her many businesses today. For her next act, Silverton tackles multiple projects at the same time, and we wanted to know how she got started and what she has in store this year for LA’s very hungry fans of hers.
“I didn’t start cooking until I went to school and started making food in my college dorm. I didn’t do it because I needed to work, but because there was a super cute guy who was working in the kitchen. And so I told him I really wanted to cook in the dorms,” said Silverton.
Meyer lemon pizzette
It was there that Silverton got hooked on kitchen life and started her lifelong journey of bringing joy to diners through the food she makes, a characteristic that still shines through to this day.
After leaving school early, Silverton attended Le Cordon Bleu in London in 1977 and wound up working for Jonathan Waxman, who is widely credited as the pioneer of California cuisine. After her stint with Waxman at Michael’s in Santa Monica, she went on to become the opening pastry chef at Spago in Los Angeles working for Wolfgang Puck.
Long story short, Silverton’s star rose fast and she has since opened multiple restaurants, including the Michelin-starred Osteria Mozza alongside partner Joseph Bastianich. The Silverton tree has many more branches, however, including a line of gelato called Nancy’s Fancy, an Italian steakhouse called chi SPACCA, and Roman pizza joint Triple Beam in LA. Multiple chefs consider Nancy a friend, mentor, and mother figure, and she seems to have her hands in Italian restaurants all over Los Angeles.
Chef Silverton
So, what’s Silverton’s next act? There’s actually three. “I’m going to be opening a restaurant, a space in the lobby, and a cheese and wine bar at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. And that’s coinciding with Pizzette since everything is never on time.” The first project is an Italian steakhouse at the hotel called The Barish, which she named to honor her family who was cattle farmers. She’s putting a wood-burning oven and grill in the middle of the dining room so customers can watch her and her chefs whip up succulent steaks while salivating over wine sips. On top of the meats, she’s also going to be serving baked pasta, which few restaurants in LA are even dabbling in – your baked ziti dreams coming to fruition. Due to Covid-19 constraints, at first, Silverton and the team will be operating out by the iconic Roosevelt pool, so Angeleno’s and tourists can chow down outdoors in socially distanced responsible ways.
Pizzette, on the other hand, was originally supposed to be a collaboration with the world-famous Franco Pepe, but the space turned out to be too small (another collab will be coming sometime in the future, however). Instead, Silverton decided to take the space and open something that catered to office workers in the area with desk-friendly food that was easy to eat with one hand. The restaurant will serve smaller versions of her famous pizza, but also sandwiches in the form of a pita pocket, while using pizza dough as the base. “When I was in Israel last year, I had an eggplant sandwich that stood out in my mind, and I realized what was so exciting about it was when a sandwich is stuffed from above, rather than horizontally, every bite is completely different.” Wines by the glass and beer with a small 10-seat counter will accompany the tasty treats.
And finally, there’s Silverton’s long-awaited Chi Spacca cookbook. Coming out in October, Silverton describes it as “a pretty eclectic cookbook that’s more than just meat. There’s a tremendous amount of vegetables and salads, and certainly a good amount of fish.”
Between opening restaurants and writing cookbooks, Silverton continues to dabble in other culinary exploits like teaching workshops to celebrities. Recently, she tried to give Selena Gomez some cooking lessons which was equal parts comedy and tragedy.
“What I chose to do with her was to teach her how to come up with an ambitious array of simple to make things but using different techniques to entertain a group of people with a big layout, like a pasta spread or something like that. So, mostly everything was cooked except for a few things like marinated olives, but pretty much it was things that had to go in the oven or cooked on the stovetop. So, we got all this food ready, and then she realized, not only did her oven not work, but the stovetop didn’t work either. So, then it's like okay, let's move on to the salads. Eventually, her dad comes out and he ends up fixing it and we were set to cook. Then, a little bit into it, we're braising and have these leaks in the oven, and she pulls them out and drops them on the floor! Then I did this thing where we wrapped asparagus and polpette and somehow and I've never seen this before, but she put it at a place in the oven all the way back where it caught fire. She opens up her oven, and there's a big fire going on. I mean, of course, they loved it because it was good television.”
With all she has going on, Silverton is still slated to open her new restaurants later this year, but ever the perfectionist, she won’t rush unless the product is just right. At a preview for Pizzette, Silverton noted that the dough was too tough to bite and that she simply wouldn’t open a restaurant that was only 80% of the way there. So, Angelenos will simply have to wait a bit longer as the Godmother of LA Italian cuisine brings forth more fantastic food in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, they can buy her new cookbook to practice at home.