Zimmi’s Chef Maxime Pradié’s Grub Street Diet

Working chefs will often admit that they just don’t cook much at home; Maxime Pradié loves it, and it translates to his menus. “The food at the restaurant is based on my lived experience,” says the chef, who grew up in New York and spent summers with his family in France. “Things I’ve either seen traveling throughout France or at the dinner table with my family or hyperregional traditional recipes.” Pradié’s approach has connected with diners at Zimmi’s, the restaurant he runs with Jenni Guizio, which will celebrate its first anniversary this weekend. “I’ve been continually saying to my staff that I feel like I’m just starting to cook the way I really wanted when we opened,” he says, “since it takes some time to be given the vote of confidence from guests — so there’s proof of concept, I guess, that our choices are working.” Before the anniversary, Pradié took a few days away from the restaurant to cook some more — for his 9-month-old son and his wife’s family during Thanksgiving. “I really do love cooking at home,” he says, “and try to do it as much as my schedule allows.”

Wednesday, November 26
A big trend in the first year of opening a restaurant has been, like, going in and out of having time for breakfast. Now I’ve decided that I have to make time for it every day. A lot of what I make in the morning is stuff that my son, Émile, can also eat. I made some steel-cut oats with flaxseed and chia seeds. I put that together with a little bit of yogurt, pumpkin seeds that my wife had made, and poached quince that I’d made. My wife’s family is Iranian, and quince is big in that cuisine. She and I are always eating it, or we’ll purée some into yogurt for our son.

I also made some coffee. I drink pre-ground Lavazza. I’m telling you this right now and I’m getting looks from our pastry chef — she’s rolling her eyes. This coffee is really cheap. I love specialty coffee. There’s a shop near the restaurant called Arcane, which is amazing, but at home it’s very non-special because when I wake up in the morning, I make a bottle for my son and I put a pot of coffee on and that’s about as much time as I have before, you know, he really wants his bottle.

I don’t eat lunch very often at the restaurant unless we have something new going on the menu or I’m hungry enough to make a piece of toast. We’d gotten in a whole pig 31 days earlier — I only know that because I like to create a schedule of when to produce certain things — and we had tête de cochon. I tasted that on a piece of toast with mustard. It’s extremely atypical for me to take something that’s done, like a finished article for the menu, and eat it. I try to keep that for the guests. Not this time.

I have certain parameters around staff meal because I personally hated working in restaurants where people would put up crazy things like mac-and-cheese bake with frozen chicken tenders that are blasted with Velveeta cheese. I want people to go into service feeling energized and grounded, so we need a salad, a starch, and a protein. I’m not dogmatic about it — I’m not counting calories — and it doesn’t have to be three individual dishes, but those are the parameters. We had chickpea curry with rice and a salad of iceberg lettuce.

I don’t usually eat anything after service, either. I tend not to be hungry, and I try to get into bed kind of as soon as possible with my life being what it is right now.

Thursday, November 27
No breakfast. I just made coffee because we were going to my mother-in-law’s place and it’s a production to get an infant anywhere. My wife, Kimya, and I were really focused on that, plus we were doing some cooking that day.

We went uptown and I cooked turkey, but realized it wasn’t large enough for the number of people we had. I Instacarted a a two-bone prime rib. Mostly, I needed to stem the tide of anxiety around not having enough food.

I roasted the turkey breast as a crown, and one day after work I’d taken off the legs to cure them and confit them in duck fat. Then I crisped them up and made some stuffing with things I’d gotten from the restaurant. We had cotechino from the same pig, leftover quince, and duck jus and some old sourdough. I bought sage at the market and made a stuffing with all of that, which was pretty compelling.

Everyone else in the family brought other Thanksgiving things — another stuffing, salad, mac and cheese — that sort of stuff. My mom brought her excellent deviled eggs. We had like a dozen people. One person in the family takes the lead each year to organize everyone, sending a text like, “Here’s what you’re responsible for.” Some years, people will chime in to say, “Oh, I want to do this” or “I wanted to make that,” but this year, Kimya’s cousin took the lead. She’s just like, “No, this is what you’re doing.” If I’d sent the first text, I wouldn’t have been able to exercise as much hard power as she does.

Then we had dessert. One was a really lovely pumpkin pie made with nice quality winter squash and pumpkin-spice mix from our spice purveyor, Burlap and Barrel. Kimya made cardamom whipped cream, and we fed that to Émile — it’s the first dessert he’s ever had. It was a good moment for him.

Friday, November 28
I made an omelet for breakfast. I’m not one of those people who thinks leftovers are the best part of Thanksgiving. Like, looking forward to those megasandwiches with everything in them? It’s just not my thing. I’d rather move on.

There wasn’t much in our fridge except rosemary, which I don’t really like. Or I thought I didn’t: I discovered that I do like it dried. And I don’t mean dried rosemary that you get in the spice rack. In this case, we’d left the rosemary in the fridge for too long and it was completely dried out. This is what I like. I put butter in a pan and fried some of this dried rosemary in it and then made an omelet, put some Parmesan in the middle, and folded it up, and it was one of the best things I’ve cooked in recent memory. It was sort of discreetly luxurious. It had this lovely onion-truffle aroma with the brown butter. Luxury ingredients aren’t central to my ingredient pyramid, but I did think this would be even better with truffles, so now we have this at the restaurant with shaved white truffle. I’ve never been interested in just buying white truffles and shaving them over whatever, but in this case I found something that necessitated them and I’m down with that.

At home we had the omelets with sangak, the Persian bread with nigella seed and sesame seeds that is traditionally cooked in a hearth. I usually work on Fridays, but I took the day off to give myself a little bit of a long weekend and that was breakfast and lunch.

And, um, for dinner, I ate leftovers. But I didn’t make the big sandwich.

Saturday, November 29
Breakfast was the porridge situation that I eat and then feed to my son, with yogurt and berries and maybe like a slice of orange so he’ll get to experience that.

For lunch, Kimya and I went and got sushi. We had a babysitter that day, my aunt. So we had sushi at Tomo 21, the place across the street from Carbone, which is cute, and then we went and saw Frankenstein, which was great.

For dinner I made roast chicken, which I make almost every week. It’s my favorite food. I do it with garlic that you keep in its paper. In French, you call it ail en chemise, “garlic in the shirt.” I roast the chicken at a really low temperature for a long time, and at some point I add potatoes, which always take longer than the chicken. I get the oven really hot to finish the chicken because I like it to be very well done — not, like, hammered, but I like it when the chicken tastes like what you get outside a butcher shop in France. With the potatoes cooked in the chicken fat and a nice zippy salad: For me, that’s the best.

Sunday, November 30
My wife started feeling very sick, and one thing I love to make is straciatella alla Romana, Italian egg-drop soup. I made stock with the leftover chicken carcass and picked off every last bit of meat scraps. I season the broth with lots of nutmeg and black pepper and then crack in like two eggs per person. I stream in the eggs with lots of Parm and the picked meat, which is not traditional. I finished it with lots of black pepper, and my wife loves acidity, so I made hers with lots of lemon juice and mine with a tiny bit of red-wine vinegar that we made that’s always sitting on our counter.

My son obviously can’t cook yet, but he does like to watch me. So “we” got started on dinner, making veau marengo, veal stew with tomatoes and mushrooms. Before we ate the stew, Kimya’s mom dropped off lunch, ghorma sabzi and rice. Her mom makes the best rice I’ve ever eaten.

It’s great to be married to someone with this built-in cooking tradition. The food is almost codified, not in the way that French food can feel legislated but codified into society. Everyone, top to bottom, has an opinion of what should go into the food. My mom is an excellent cook, and, you know, for example, I love those deviled eggs, but that recipe isn’t 2,000 years old like the ghorma sabzi.

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