417: It’s Kismet with Sara Kramer & Sarah Hymanson

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. We tried to make like an upscale California Boston market, like how easy it was and like how it's like everybody could get something that like suited them. And we wanted that, but we wanted to make it a little bit fresher, healthier, updated. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Sarah Kramer and Sarah Hyman-san are the co-owners of Kismet and Kismet Rotisserie, two beloved Los Angeles restaurants that have won plenty of fans with the power of herbs, seasonal vegetables, and feta. They've recently released the first Kismet cookbook and stopped by the studio to talk about adapting their recipes for home cooks, their favorite ways to treat spring vegetables, and more.

1:29Sarah Kramer, Sarah Heimanson, this is Tase. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us. So happy to be here. I'm going to say like the Sarahs is how some people refer to you. And I feel very happy to have like both of the Sarahs in front of me right now. How has your New York trip been so far? The best, always, every time. How long has it been since you guys are both back here? We come back all the time. Both our families are here. So we find ourselves here often. Yeah, I was staying like for the past many years, at least seven years with friends who were living off the Grand Stop of the Elf for so many years and they just moved to California.

2:05So now I have like a totally different setup here, which is so nice, actually, to like be in a different neighborhood than the past many years, like what my New York home has been. So it's like a fun, fresh feeling. Is there a thing that you come back to eat? 14th Street, you've never been seen. I've never stayed in Steinheim before. You're like a Union Square girly now. I mean, more like East Village. I've never lived in the East Village of all of the neighborhoods I've lived in. Never East Village. I mean, it is such a good eating neighborhood here in the city. Yeah, these days. Yeah. There's lots of good things to be around.

2:39Yeah, I'm like a stone's throw from Superiority Burger. The best. Have you been since they opened the restaurant? I actually went last night. Oh, how was it? Oh, delicious. um shiso ice cream with concord grape like jams rolled in dreamy so good their desserts are so i mean everything there is so special but whenever i go i go with my friend tanya who's a pastry chef and she orders dessert first like before anything else which normally i normally can't really get behind that just from like a vegetable perspective but there's so many good desserts that it's hard because like you will fill up on everything else and then i'm not really a dessert after dinner person because I'm like kind of too full for it.

3:17And so I can kind of appreciate it. I would want to just like go for dessert and then go a different time for dinner. Yeah, that's the pro move. Yeah, I'm also not a huge dessert person, but there I just have an extra stomach. I mean, it's worth it. It's so good. Yeah. So I'm curious, coming back to New York, if there's something you make a point to eat. I feel like bagels is the obvious trope, but all of my LA folks are really like pro the bagel scene in LA right now. So maybe that's not necessary. I mean, I do love the Courage bagels. But that's not the answer to her question. No, you're just like, yeah, you're right.

3:55What do you eat when you're here? What are you eating in New York? I do often go to Superiority Burger. I love Cafe Koshgar. Have you been there? And Brighton Beach. It's kind of like a go-to for me if I can make it. I really like, well, because I was staying off the Grand Stop for so long, I always make it a point to go to Okanomi for breakfast because I love the set breakfast there. But now that I'm not there, it might be hard to get out there for that specifically. But I'm not a bagel person because I'm gluten-free, which is a bummer. That is a bummer. Have you been to Ho Foods for breakfast?

4:33Ho Foods? No. Yeah, it's kind of by where you're staying. It's like a Taiwanese breakfast set, So it's very different than the kind of like grilled fish, like Japanese vibe. But it is gluten free and breakfast. So I feel like I have to mention it. Thank you. But there's always like new places to go to in New York. Yeah, I'm excited to go to Penny. Haven't been there yet. Oh, it's very sweet. Yeah, I did. I really liked Claude. Yeah, I like sitting at the bar at Penny. It's like a really nice bar to sit at. And I was walking by with my mom, who's from Northern California. And we like popped in to see how the construction was going.

5:05And she immediately clocked the like Swan Oyster Depot reference, which they were so the people working there were so excited to hear that like a Bay Area local was like calling that out as the reference point, which is really fun. Yeah, that's exactly what they want to hear. Yep. Okay. So I could talk to you about New York restaurants all day, but I would much rather talk to you about L.A. restaurants and specifically your restaurant, Kismet, which I think is such a perfect neighborhood restaurant and the kind of place that I wish I could go to all the time if I lived in L.A. instead. And I guess I'm curious to hear a little bit about what made you decide to come up with a cookbook at the stage in your collaborative career together as chefs.

5:44Yeah, we, I think, had always had it in the back of our minds. I think it felt like something we would always eventually do together. And I think especially now we're at the point of like having worked together creatively and professionally for 10 years. It feels like a really good like look back, kind of like retrospective of our work for the past 10 years. And just like a good like way to, I think, express our own thoughts about that, because very often other people are expressing their thoughts about our work. And it's really nice to have an opportunity for us to put our thoughts somewhere.

6:24Yeah, I mean, I think we signed the deal before the pandemic. Yeah, in late 2019. Yeah. And I think it's really, it was really helpful, actually, to go through the next few years together because we experienced a lot of change in the world, but also just structurally and personally within our business and in our relationship. And I think we mature is kind of a funny word, but I think we are just like more mature. We have more experience. And I think the book is better for it. It's a little bit more grounded. And we had, I think, a perspective that is more easily like transmittable to an audience.

7:15Yeah. They don't know us. And I think like we were able to like zoom out and be like, what kind of book do we really want to make when we had more time to think about it? And we really wanted to make an accessible, approachable book for the home cook, which I think had we done it several years ago, we may not have been quite as able to do. And I think also we now have had rotisserie for a few years, which is a more casual outpost. And the book is able to reference that piece of our work together as well. Yeah, I guess to take back a step, if someone is listening who hasn't had the opportunity to go to Kismet before, how would you describe Kismet and Kismet Rotisserie and the way that the food at both of those kind of two different outposts intersects and deviates?

8:03I would say that Kismet is a vegetable-focused, sort of like a market-driven Mediterranean meets California restaurant. It's kind of a mouthful, but it's definitely informed by our two very different backgrounds, both personally and professionally, what we're both bringing to the table. It's the product of our two experiences seen through this sort of Cal-Mediterranean lens. And it's a little bit nicer, like sort of casual fine dining. Have a nice glass of natural wine. Yeah. I did sit directly behind Natalie Portman the first time I went to Kismet. Everyone says that. Really? Natalie Portman.

8:44She's been in a few times. Yeah. Thank you. Shout out to Natalie. Come on the podcast. Yeah. No, she's been a really good customer all through the years. Like even our sandwich shop in the Grand Central Market that we had before Kismet. she would, as a vegan, we've always had a lot of food for her to eat. Yeah. And we're not a vegan or vegetarian specific restaurant, but we do cater to that crowd really naturally. I think just by virtue of the food we like and like to cook. And so the rotisserie is kind of a natural extension of Kismet, but much more casual and really geared toward takeout. I think that we were getting, you know, LA, it's a takeout kind of town and we were getting a lot of requests for takeout from Kismet.

9:28And we just didn't want to do that pre-pandemic. Pandemic changed some things. Now we do takeout from Kismet as well, but a lot less than we do from Kismet Rotisserie. And Rotisserie, as it sounds like, is a chicken rotisserie place. But really, we like to say that it's like kind of a vegetarian restaurant with chicken. Yeah. Also, that concept, the food, the recipes are made to hold well and to travel well. And while I think the takeout at Kismet is good for what it is, it's certainly not meant to be takeout. Right. And we wanted a restaurant that if people are going to have it, we want to have control over the quality of it.

10:10And that was also a fun challenge. Totally. And that concept is a little bit more comforting, a little bit more nostalgic while still being healthy and fresh. I think that we definitely took some influence and inspiration from like our 90s childhoods and like have some fun throwbacks like poppy dressing, you know, like miso poppy dressing, which is on our wedge salad. Hibiscus cooler. Yeah. Some fun things that feel like a little bit like just easy and comforting. I think that we're the only ones, though, that know the 90s. everyone's like i don't really see how not how it's 90s it's like i feel like we tried to make like an upscale california boston market kind of yeah it's like a weird thing to say because boston market isn't great like i don't love boston but i have really fond memories as a kid of eating the corn and the mashed potatoes as a vegetarian yeah and like kind of loved the the overall concept, like how easy it was and like how it's like everybody could get something that like suited them.

11:20And it's like feels very approachable. And we wanted that, but we wanted to make it a little bit fresher, healthier, updated. When we're in California, it's so easy to get good vegetables all the time. What a privilege. Yeah, I was going to say my mom, I think, especially delights in sending me like photos of her like strawberries in March at the LA farmer's market and she knows that we don't get them until June here probably like we still don't have any yeah strawberries right now we're very very spoiled you're very spoiled but I think it's awesome because you have this bounty and there's so many things that you can do with it and I guess on the 90s front I would say that I did grow up going to rotisserie chicken at the farmer's market in LA all the time and I do think that's very 90s but what you're doing in terms of like even the dressings that are going with it or the vegetable sides like it does feel like the kind of natural evolution of that like specific kind of restaurant and what it serves for people.

12:17Yeah. Yeah. That's that was the hope. Yeah. So you mentioned vegetables and I want to talk to you a lot about vegetables because that's my passion project. And I feel like you guys are down with that. And also I've heard that you both have gardens. Is that true? We do. Yeah. Our pride and joy. Yeah. Were you gardening before you were cooking with vegetables in this kind of way? And does having a garden kind of change what you're excited about or interested in working with. Do you want to speak to it first? I mean, so I grew up in downtown Chicago and then I lived in New York and that's where I started cooking.

12:52I've never had any outdoor space until three years ago, but I always really wanted to garden. And so this is the first time when I've had the space and it's been just so wonderful. But I always was very interested in produce and frequenter of farmers markets here and worked at stone barns and always worked in places that had a focus on seasonality and vegetables. Yeah, we certainly have that in common. I was like one of those freakish people in my 20s who had like real raised beds and kept chickens in my Brooklyn garden apartment. Oh, my God. Which was a choice. I mean, I like really prioritize trying to have that over a nice apartment or like a usable apartment at all.

13:43It was a very weird apartment, but I really, really wanted that experience. I think that like I've always had like dreams of being on a farm, but like couldn't quite get away from a city. And so this was like my meeting in the middle of those two desires. And it's always been really important for me to see the whole process. And I think it really does inform your cooking. It makes you appreciate the individual products so much more and like see the whole life cycle. And just I think you just gain a real sense of like pride and love for it, like a greater sense of that. Yeah, definitely. I feel like the first time I saw, I think it was just probably a photo of how asparagus grows.

14:28I freaked out because it's just like just like that. Just pops up from the soil. They're so silly. It feels like this is really how you grow, like kind of cartoonish in that kind of way. And I would imagine like at least for me, whenever I've been able to like help my sister with her garden or, you know, because I'm not in the Brooklyn garden stage of my life. unfortunately i find myself feeling this idea of restraint like i want to do less to the vegetables because i know how much they've done to get to that point and also like how much more delicious they are you they like really don't need a lot done to them you know it's like when you're growing beautiful things and like very often they're much fresher than anything you can get i mean yes at the farmer's market but it's the freshest thing you can possibly get and so they don't need a whole lot done to them and you have like an emotional attachment to them which yeah is real yeah it is real based on my like emotional response to even seeing how asparagus is grown uh i was there's like some funny memes on the internet that are like memes on the internet yes i'm 100 years old

15:35um that's someone making a joke of like one bunch of asparagus from or maybe the asparagus is the wrong example like one tomato from the supermarket six dollars one homegrown tomato 85 dollars because it's actually so much work and expensive yeah yeah it's kind of similar to like the experience i think a lot of people have of making sourdough during the pandemic is like oh actually like i think bread should be more expensive because it takes so much time to obviously Obviously economies of scale. Like I don't. Yes. Yeah. But I know it's a good reminder that really beautiful food takes a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of practice and a lot of skill and that people should pay for it if they can.

16:22And the government should just subsidize it a lot more. Yeah. More organic corn subsidized, less corn syrup subsidized. If only. So thinking about spring vegetables, maybe getting into summer, I'm curious if you guys would each want to nominate like what you get most excited to see in your own garden or at the green market and like some preparation that you find yourself being drawn to. Well, I always get excited for artichokes in the spring. They're so special every single year. I'm just like amazed at how they grow. The plants are so big and beautiful. And then you have like these perfect little jewels like popping up in them.

16:58And you can get them in lots of different sizes. But like teeny tiny ones are just the cutest. And we have a really great marinated artichoke recipe in our cookbook that I have been really excited to cook and eat. It's like with some orange zest, a lot of olive oil, a little fish sauce, toasted garlic, nigella seed. It's just like really perfect holds for a long time. And, yeah, it makes me super happy. to have with our backyard out of chokes. They also come back every year so they don't take a lot of work, which is really nice to grow. Yeah, that's nice. The fish sauce addition sounds really cool and unexpected.

17:32What's that kind of doing in the marinade? It's bringing some like umami in depth to it. It's like you don't necessarily know it's there. You're just like, oh, this tastes better. Yeah, it's like the grounding base note for the marinade. I feel like that's a real tenant of our cooking is that things ideally feel simple, but they're not. Yeah. They are to make. They are to make. But there's like a little something special. There's a wink. There's a wink. Exactly. A secret wink. Yeah. What's your vegetable that you would nominate, Sarah? Hmm. I'm a big greens person. I knew you were going to say greens.

18:07Well, I'm just thinking about what I like to eat. Big greens person. This year, normally I'll start everything from seed like a crazy person. But this year, and I'll pot it up and whatever, blah, blah, blah. but uh this year i just direct sewed everything because i didn't have time and a lot of things that normally you wouldn't direct sew and so i'm actually just curious to see what survives i have like a tiny amaranth plant that i i really like because it tastes like dirt in a good way in a good way it makes me feel healthy i like that well i hope you come back from your book tour and the gardens are flourishing and there's exciting new things happening.

18:50I want to talk to you a little bit about the recipes in the cookbook. I'm curious how many of them came from restaurant recipes and also how you kind of worked at adapting those restaurant recipes, because I'm sure some things probably had to be simplified or scaled down. Most things, yeah. Very little is exactly the way that we would do it in the restaurant. There are a couple of things, but we really wanted to make it, again, easy, approachable, and possible. We want it to be a book that gets stained. We want to make sure it's actually in your kitchen. We don't want it to be an art piece. We tried to make it beautiful nonetheless, but we really do want people to use it and get dirty.

19:27Also, the way you cook in restaurants is just so different from the way one cooks at home. In a restaurant, everything is done in stages. You're never cooking something from start to finish. And so it's really required a reframing of technique as well. Definitely. And we worked for, I think, a whole year doing it at my home in my kitchen, which was great and tiresome. But, you know, I don't have a dishwasher. Oh, man. There's a lot of dishes we did before we'd then go to the restaurant afterwards. words. We'd often like do it in the morning. But it was fun. I think it was a really good challenge for us.

20:13And I think probably for sure makes us appreciate the cookbook world quite a bit more and makes us appreciate home cooking quite a bit more. And probably I think for me, I can say I think it's like made me a better home cook because I, you know, both of us come from restaurant worlds. And I think that my brain has so often worked as restaurant, you know, sequencing in terms of how to think about recipes. And I think doing it at home more and more has made me be like, oh, yeah, it's so different, just like Sarah's describing. But we did so much of the book is so many of the recipes are based on restaurant recipes.

20:57We did do a good amount of developing of other recipes? Of new recipes. Of new recipes. To like round out kind of what we felt like the book was missing based on what we were bringing in from the restaurants. But it's also like a reflection of 10 years of cooking together. So not exclusively things that we've done in the restaurants per se, but things that we've done at different points that don't necessarily make sense in the restaurant at any given moment. And something from, you know, our falafel restaurant, which is no longer open. So it's been a lot of different things stitched together. Yeah.

21:29Do you have like a shared Google Drive folder with all of the recipes you've done over the years? We have so many shared Google Drive folders. We exist on Google Drive. The whole Google Drive is shared. Who would we be without Google Drive? If it ever crashes, we're ruined. Yeah, you and me both. Yep. I mean, really everyone. Yeah. The whole world. Yeah. It really would be. It's just a totally complete disaster. Is there one recipe in the book that started out from the restaurant that you think had to undergo the most evolution or the most work on it to get to the final product in the book? I mean, actually, the artichoke is a pretty good example of one that evolved quite a bit, but we didn't make it easier.

22:07I think we made it different. Actually, maybe we made it harder. But actually, the process of making the sauce in the restaurant was a big pain. Oh, you're right. So it's like, you know, kind of easier, kind of harder. It really depends. I think it's a good example, though. I agree with you. I think that, you know, the way we do in the restaurant is a whole steamed artichoke or boiled, I guess, which is a word we don't often use. You know, boiled things sometimes are good. Sometimes. I mean, you can make sure that it's properly seasoned. But very often, I would say boiled, not a beautiful culinary word.

22:46No. We don't see it a lot. No. But, yeah, boiled artichoke or steamed artichoke. You might call it a steamed artichoke instead of boiled. You would call it a lightly cooked. I would call it a whole artichoke. I would call it a lightly cooked. You could say like a tender. A gently cooked. And we would serve it whole in the restaurant. It's so beautiful. I think in the restaurant you want to present it that way. And at home I like eating it that way too. But we have this chapter in the book called As Good Tomorrow As It Is Today. And it's all full of like marinated little things, things that hold well, just like the name.

23:15We want it to last for a couple days in the fridge. and be able to pull it out and have it ready to go and be just as delicious today as yesterday. And who doesn't love marinated artichokes? Oh, they're the best. They're such a prize. So I think it was to celebrate that, you know, spring bounty. You can, like, keep coming back to them. It's not necessarily—you can make a big bash. You can hold them for quite a while. You can also—if you don't want to deal with cleaning artichokes, you can buy frozen artichoke hearts. True. You don't hear it here, but— Hot tip. True. I mean, we're always looking for ways to make our lives easier.

23:49And in California, we have just so many amazing, very multicultural grocery stores and a very big Persian-Armenian community. And it's very easy to buy bags of pretty nice frozen artichoke hearts. We haven't ever served them for the record. No. No, we would never take the easy road. But one could. At home. The home cook if one wanted to. So the evolution of that recipe is just in terms of how the artichoke itself is being prepared. The artichoke and then the sauce. So instead of it being a whole artichoke where you're ripping off the leaves and dipping them into this lovely sauce, we've made a marinade of the sauce to coat the artichoke hearts that we are cleaning down.

24:35So it's a lengthier process of dealing with the artichokes, but the sauce itself is really easy to put together. I love the sound of that. I'm picturing it on like a crusty sandwich as a compliment. Yum. It would be very good. That's where my brain goes. What else is in the sandwich? I don't know. I didn't really get that far. That's where I started. And we're always like, it'd be great with sliced turkey. You're always there. Or tuna. You love a turkey sandwich. Tuna. I do. I mean, I like tuna and I like sliced turkey. I like them both also. I like a tuna sandwich. I love Court Street Grocers here.

25:04Oh, yeah. Their vegetarian sandwich. Have you had that before? No. It's like my ultimate. I eat meat, but I don't really like cold cuts that much. And it's like thick roasted planks of butternut squash, maybe provolone. And then this like pickle mayo, I think, where they have it kind of like chunky. And I guess I'm just picturing the artichoke going into that situation. I do think it would be really good as a part of a veggie sandwich. At the restaurant right now, we're serving it with butter beans as well, which I think is tasty. It's kind of like a little just marinated duo. Yeah. Good for like an aperitivo.

25:44Yeah. I love that. I want to talk to you about the cookbook shoot. I'm curious what it was like because the photos are just so beautiful and bright. And I feel like it would have been fun to do. Were you shooting it at one of your homes? We shot in two locations. One was my home and one was a rental home. Not far from where we both are. and shout out to Chris Bernabeu for the really beautiful photographs. We had such a great time working with him and our prop stylist, Kaylin Kaminsky. They just made it a really good time. It was so fun. Yeah, really fun. And Chris is always bringing a good... Playlist.

26:23Playlist. Good vibe. What was the vibe of the playlist? It was like Mariah Carey. He's like a diehard Taylor Swift fan. Swiftie, like diehard Swiftie. Yeah. And just a pop music. It's like a bunch of like pop queens. Yeah. But just like also chill. Super fun. But yeah, it was at, yeah, those two locations. And I would say that like it was a little bit like of a groove to get in having never done this kind of photo work before. We both food styled it. So that was also like kind of an extra level of being like, how do we think about our food for photos in a broader sense than the way we think about the like the restaurant photos?

27:08It's like such a different thing, actually. Sarah's very good at that. Thanks. Very good. It was just really fun. I just had a really good time with it. and to think about how to slightly deconstruct the plate so that it looks just naturally bitten into and how to make things look shiny and make things look delicious in a way that is also not overwrought. And yeah, I think it went really smoothly. It was really quick. It was a lot of work, though. Unlike, I mean, these people didn't live in L.A., so we also had to pack it in. Yeah, it was like a total of 10 days, I think. Yeah. For how many recipes?