‘Normal Gossip’ Host Rachelle Hampton’s ‘Grub Street Diet’

“It’s a little funny doing a show that’s essentially about excavating everyone else’s business when I’m about as private a person as they come,” says Rachelle Hampton, the host of the cult-hit podcast Normal Gossip. Because the show is focused on “utterly banal gossip about people you’ll never know and never meet,” Hampton says there’s another benefit: “This is the only job in media where I don’t have to engage with the news cycle, and it feels absolutely incredible.” As part of the worker-owned Defector, Hampton is also free to set her schedule as she likes. “I’ve always preferred to record on Fridays,” she explains. “It gives a natural rhythm to the week that I like, but more importantly, it gives me a ready-made excuse to spend my Friday evenings alone.”

Friday, July 24
In my ideal world, I’d never have to eat solid food before noon. I’ve never been a breakfast person, though that might be because I’ve never been a morning person. Most of my days start with a cup of coffee around 10 a.m. Around noon, I’ll make a smoothie or some oatmeal, which means that most days, my first real meal takes place sometime around 2 or 3 p.m.

Unfortunately, this schedule doesn’t work on days when I record, especially now that we’re recording video in our Manhattan studio. It’s easier to ignore my hunger pangs in the sanctity of my apartment, when I know a snack is less than six feet away, but now my body demands protein to fortify itself against the commute to Tribeca. Still, the thought of hot food at 9:30 in the morning nauseates me, so for breakfast I decant a Fage Greek yogurt (blueberry, lactose free) into a bowl. Usually, I just eat it straight out of the container, as God intended, but today I have some homemade granola that a friend, Lovia, gave me at her engagement party that I want to use.

Lovia was one of the first friends I made in New York, and she just got engaged last weekend. Her newly minted fiancé had us all surprise her afterward at a bar near their apartment. It was the third party I attended in about as many weeks at Cocktail Bed-Stuy. It’s truly a perfect bar for a summer party. After that, we all ended up back at the happy couple’s apartment, where Lovia decided I wasn’t leaving without some homemade granola.

The memory of that night makes me smile as I get ready, and the granola is delicious, not too sweet, and perfectly crunchy. I eat it alongside a sort of bootleg iced latte I make using Café Bustelo instant espresso, milk (lactose free, naturally), and the Starbucks oat-milk hazelnut latte creamer. I used to have a fancy pour-over routine, but at a certain point, I had to accept that all I really wanted was sugar, cream, and caffeine, in that order. I’m a multi-beverage kind of girl, so I also have a glass of water with a Magna electrolyte packet in it, iced-tea lemonade flavor. Kelsey, the former host of Normal Gossip, recommended Magna to me and it’s one of the few products I have a subscription for.

I head into the city to record; our guest today is George Civeris, and before we even start, he offers up some incredible gossip I’ve been doing my best to sow all over the city. The recording is a blast, and I invite George to lunch afterward with one of my co-workers and me. Unfortunately, he’s got another recording, but we do find out that I’m having lunch at the restaurant where he got married, Altro Paradiso, which just feels like a lovely little moment of happenstance. I make a mental note to remember his recommendations: the fennel salad, ragù, and cacio e pepe.

Usually, I head home right after recording to melt into my couch, but Jasper, the co-worker I’m meeting up with, is well known at our company for having the best restaurant recommendations. Plus, he’s our business guy, so I know he’s going to expense the lunch, and I’m almost never too sleepy for a free fancy meal. Altro Paradiso is another home run, though unfortunately it’s not serving the ragù for lunch. The fennel salad is so good that everyone at the table comments on it; the fennel is really thinly shaved and dressed with Castelvetrano olives and provolone so it’s light but dense with flavor. It’s probably my favorite part of the meal. The cacio e pepe is served with thick, almost udonlike noodles that I could eat an unlimited amount of. I order the capellini al granchio, which is angel-hair pasta with brown butter, peekytoe crab, and bottarga. We all split dessert, and I’m treated to another incredible piece of gossip. By the time I head home, I’m feeling delightfully full.

I wait for over 40 minutes for a 5 train at Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall, so I’m sweaty, dehydrated, and somehow already a little hungry when I get home. I make a variation on a smoothie I’ve been making almost every day since 2019 that consists of a banana, whatever frozen fruit is on sale, coconut water, lactose-free yogurt, and chia seeds. I decide to turn this smoothie into a real treat by substituting orange juice for the coconut water. It tastes exactly like an orange Creamsicle.

I then take an edible, which perhaps explains the four lime popsicles I eat in rapid succession right before ordering Popeyes at 10 p.m. I have the brilliant idea of dipping my fries into my red beans and rice and approach nirvana.

Saturday, July 25
About once a month, I let myself sleep as late as I want to. I wake up for the first time around 9:30 a.m. because that’s when I have to do my cat’s inhaler. He was diagnosed with asthma a while back; the daily routine took months to get down, but he’s the light of my life and also answers to “Handsome” because I’m unwell about him.

I feed him and then go back to bed until 1:45 p.m. I am on my phone for a few minutes before I get up. I try not to scroll too much in the morning. I don’t really have social media on my phone — I don’t have any except Reddit, and I use the desktop version, not the app. I delete Slack and Gmail from my phone on weekends, which is the only way I don’t check in on what my co-workers are saying; they’re funny and it’s like having Twitter without actually being on Twitter. I don’t get out of bed until 2 p.m. to make a cup of coffee and heat up the biscuit from my late-night Popeyes order in the oven. The electricity in my kitchen is very sensitive. I can’t use my microwave during the summer (or for more than 30 seconds in the winter) without having to flip a breaker. Heating up a cup of coffee is basically the perfect use case for the microwave. What this means is that I default toward using my oven for everything from heating up leftovers to making toast. It’s annoying, but my apartment is rent stabilized so I’m never leaving.

I spend the afternoon finishing the last 60 pages of Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits — my first Allende, picked up after my friend’s book club chose a different one of hers that didn’t look quite as fun to me. I’d been on a real short-book kick, nothing over 200 pages, so this 460-page brick took me the better part of a month, but it delivered, especially the sections on the coup in Chile. Given the current moment, there’s something clarifying about watching what the rise of fascism looks like in a completely different setting. By the time I’m done, I’m hungry enough to make another orange Creamsicle smoothie.

For dinner, I heat up the last of my Popeyes in the oven. It crisps up perfectly, which reminds me that the most annoying part of using the oven so consistently is knowing that leftovers almost always taste better if you don’t use a microwave.

Sunday, July 26
It’s outside-coffee day! My favorite coffee shop is less than 300 feet from my apartment. It’s close enough that I have to set rules on how often I go, which means it’s still a treat. Despite these rules, I’m enough of a regular that when I stop by, I get some gossip from one of my favorite baristas about a customer I thought I’d seen them flirting with the previous weekend. They confirm they were indeed flirting, and we debate the whole don’t-shit-where-you-eat thing while they make my iced oat vanilla latte. I also get a slice of pumpkin bread; it’s vegan but so moist I assume it’s some sort of olive-oil loaf. Whatever it is, it’s delicious.

I head to the nail salon to meet my best friend, Danielle. Both of our feet look busted, so this date is long overdue. After our mani-pedis, we decide to lie in Prospect Park for a few hours. We’re both hungry at this point, so we go to Smorgasburg before we head to the Nethermead. It’s a hot day, too hot for real food, so I stop by Tang Hulu and get a giant pile of shaved iced topped with tart white peaches and some sort of freeze-dried-berry situation.

Danielle and I sit in the park until we’re almost late for dinner. We’re both in a four-person supper club, appropriately named Supper Club. We meet up every four to six weeks at an expensive restaurant, usually with a hard-to-get reservation; so far, our biggest triumphs include Carbone (on the night Mamdani got elected!), Laser Wolf, Oxalis (RIP), and Tatiana. There’s a group chat for the four of us, though Danielle and Alex are also my closest friends outside of it, so really we’re in about three overlapping chats at any given time (one is literally named “the usual suspects,” because if one of us is somewhere, odds are the others are too). The fourth member is Danielle’s high-school best friend, whom she lives with now. I hate texting, so our actual planning mostly amounts to someone dropping a restaurant into the chat and someone else booking it; I’ve personally only ever contributed one restaurant in the group’s history: Nak’s, a Filipino spot that Jasper put me on to. It was phenomenal, which is a relief, because mostly my contribution to Supper Club is showing up and accepting that I’m about to spend over a hundred dollars. Tonight, we’re going to Zoli.

I have maybe half an hour at home to wash my face and change clothes. I realize I’m way too hungry to make it to dinner, so I down, you guessed it, another smoothie before I run out the door.

Zoli is well and truly in the middle of nowhere, though technically I think the neighborhood is East Williamsburg. It’s in a really cool space that includes an art campus, and we all agree the restaurant would look at home in a dark HBO comedy about a rich couple with a secret. I really love the drink I order, which tastes like an adult version of a Capri Sun, and the Basque cheesecake with Grana Padano is excellent. Otherwise, I think we leave largely unimpressed, which is a disappointment but not a first for Supper Club. They can’t all be bangers.

Monday, July 27
This is my first week without a video recording since mid-June, and it very much shows in the barren wasteland that is my fridge. I’m even out of smoothie supplies! Initially, I was very hesitant to do video episodes. I’ve always thought of myself as a writer who should be invisible behind a keyboard, but Se’era, my producer, made it sustainable enough that this season has really felt like ours from top to bottom, especially after we went on tour together for the first time last year. I was not a theater kid — I’d never been onstage except in a guest capacity — until the night before I was supposed to go on the Town Hall stage. Last year was a lot of new stuff being thrown at us. This year feels more like we’re getting to put our stamp on it.

Feeding myself is one of the first tasks I abandon when I’m tired, probably because for most of my high-school career, I was responsible for planning, shopping for, and cooking dinner for my family of five. Now that I live by myself, it feels like a sort of freedom to be responsible to no one, even when it means my noontime breakfast is an English muffin I dig out from a corner of my freezer, my last egg (soft-boiled), and a second cup of coffee.

For lunch between meetings, I fall to my last resort: a chocolate Fairlife Core Power protein shake. A case of 12 usually lasts me between four and six weeks depending on how busy I am. It’s objectively the best protein shake on the market, but I start to feel degenerate if I use it as a meal replacement too often. It’s enough to get me through a subscriber-episode recording with one of my Defector co-workers, Sabrina, who’s always a pleasure to gab with.

When dinnertime rolls around, I’m starving. I also feel like my brain is leaking out of my ears. I had hopes of going to the grocery store, but they’re obliterated so I order delivery from one of my favorite local spots, Mallenche Mexican Grill. I get the chicken-Milanese torta and eat half, along with an ungodly amount of chips and salsa. Mallenche always uses ripe tomatoes on the tortas, which is a small touch but one I truly appreciate.

Tuesday, July 28
Somehow, groceries did not magically appear in my apartment overnight.

I start my day with coffee and a Magna. It’s almost 2 p.m. before I force myself to eat a packet of Kodiak protein oatmeal. It’s disgusting, which is why it’s still in my apartment months after I bought it on a whim. Luckily, I have therapy at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays so I don’t have to think about the lingering wet-chalk texture in my mouth for long.

After therapy, I very strongly consider finally going to the grocery store. But then it starts pouring rain, which feels like a sign from the universe. On a normal week, this is when I’d fall back on the Emily Mariko salmon bowl I’ve been making on repeat for years or the trick I use to force myself into actually cooking: marinating chicken first thing in the morning whenever I have downtime, so that by dinner I have no excuse not to eat it, usually alongside green beans, my most-eaten vegetable, and a bag of frozen brown rice I will defend to the death.

Since I live alone, honestly, any meal can be anything. But my fridge is still a crime scene so I consider eating the other half of my torta. But it’s been too long since I’ve had more vegetables than a shared salad, so I wait until the rain slows to a sprinkle before ordering from Noodle Lane. The sautéed string beans still have a crunch to them by the time they arrive, and the pork-and-chive dumplings are the Platonic ideal of a fried dumpling: crispy-crunchy on the bottom but still so juicy. And then there’s the lychee-dragonfruit lemonade iced tea I order as my sweet treat of the night. It’s tart enough that my lips pucker on the first sip. I try to make it last as long as possible, and by the time I’m done, I’m fairly certain it’s the best thing I’ve had all week.

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