On a recent Saturday afternoon,
Benny Blanco’s kitchen was a whirl of activity: Pink-orange fillets of salmon were
being doused with salt, verdant green snap peas were being cut gently on their
bias, a humming food processor was being fed handfuls of safety-cone-orange
carrots to shred.
اضافة اعلان
And there he was, in the middle it all, with his
fingers in the tonnato.
Blanco walked the blender full of the creamy,
pungent Italian dip — a mixture of tuna, mayonnaise, lemon juice, and spices —
over to
Jess Damuck, for her to taste.
“More lemon,” she said after a moment of
consideration.
“More?” he asked.
She nodded, and he grabbed two lemons from the
kitchen island, strewn with a Tetris-like maze of plates and platters.
This is a version
of the dance that Blanco and Damuck, both 34, have executed with regularity for
the better part of a year as they have prepared dozens of dinner parties for a
small, rotating group of friends. Damuck is a recipe developer and food
stylist, and Blanco is a Grammy-nominated songwriter and music producer; their
shared love of epicurean pleasures yielded intimate backyard gatherings that
filled a social void for a certain creative class during the days when
COVID-19 restrictions meant restaurants were shuttered and large indoor congregations
were frowned upon. In a town that runs on velvet ropes and VIP rooms, these
low-key dinner parties have become a highly coveted invite.
Blanco and Damuck met through her boyfriend, actor and
director Ben Sinclair, of the HBO series “
High Maintenance.” Knowing that
Blanco was a gourmand — in addition to his music career, he and food
personality Matty Matheson host a cheekily titled YouTube series — the couple
invited him over the night that she was testing out a challah recipe for her
newsletter.
“When I came downstairs,” Damuck recalled, “they
were standing there with all 10 fingers in the challah, and Benny turned to me
and said, ‘I haven’t even tasted this, and I know it’s the best challah I’ve
ever had.’”
Although these soirees are normally thrown for their
own sake, this night was to fete the release of Damuck’s first cookbook, “Salad
Freak.” As such, Blanco was acting more as sous-chef than a mischievous
co-chef.
“Normally, I’d make it a little more heavy-handed,”
he said of the tonnato. “I’d add some spice, or something vinegary. Maybe I’d
throw a whole chicken in there. But tonight, we’re not going to do that.”
Damuck cut her teeth in the test kitchen at
Martha Stewart Living magazine where, for many years, she was tasked with making the
domestic goddess’ daily lunchtime salad. The endeavor often took many hours,
and it included trips to the farmers market and working within Stewart’s
dietary preferences. “I remember one day she came in and said, ‘This lettuce is
too tender. From now on, I only want crisp lettuce,’” Damuck recalled. “It sent
me into a total panic. No more arugula or baby greens. And butter lettuce you
can’t wash like normal lettuce in a salad spinner. You have to take each leaf
and let it rest on a sheet pan with paper towels.” She must have done something
right; Stewart wrote the foreword to her book.
After the challah experience, Damuck brought over a
watermelon and shiso salad to a barbecue at Blanco’s home in Malibu,
California.
From there, these dinner parties blossomed.
“Meeting Benny and starting to throw parties with
him was great because I was pretty new to LA, and I got an instant friend
group,” Damuck said. These gatherings range from a handful of people in Blanco’s
backyard to high-concept dinners for around 30 guests, such as the
steakhouse-themed party they threw in Montecito, California, for New Year’s.
“Cooking with him is amazing, because he’s so
enthusiastic,” she said. “He’s a really great cook, but it’s not what he does
as a job, so he’s trying to soak everything up as you’re doing it. He is never
highly critical. You know, it’s not always easy to cook with other people.”
Together, they make for an amusing odd couple: She
is poised and deliberate; he is frenetic verging on feral. He likes to plan the
menu days in advance and obsess over everything during FaceTime sessions, while
she likes to be more spontaneous yet thorough in her execution.
As the afternoon faded to twilight, friends began to
trickle in from the entertainment,
music, and food worlds. The mix of
unexpected faces is part of what makes these nights successful. On this
particular evening, guests included actor
Dan Stevens in a matching pajama set;
musician Jessie Ware in from London; Molly Baz, a food personality; Karley
Sciortino, a writer on intimacy and relationships; and Dave Burd, a comedian
and rapper known to fans as Lil Dicky.
Taken together in their tie-dyed Online Ceramics
T-shirts, drooping sweatpants, and Birkenstock clogs, the small assembly could
easily be mistaken for a hippie-chic cult.
Toward the end of the night, Damuck was at the
kitchen door, surveying all the bodies splayed out on pillows in their
post-dinner satiety.
“I saw
Dave Burd try his first vegetable,” she said.
“He doesn’t like fruits or vegetables, but he tried endive, and I think he
really liked it.”
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