![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/51ae60cf141612ed3ca33b6f464e27e6a0-gsd-maxime-pradie-adam-mazur.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
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\n Pradi\u00e9, whose high-rustic approach to French cooking has helped make Zimmi\u2019s a hit.
\n Illustration: Adam Mazur\n <\/p>\n
Working chefs will often admit that they just don\u2019t cook much at home; Maxime Pradi\u00e9 loves it, and it translates to his menus. \u201cThe food at the restaurant is based on my lived experience,\u201d says the chef, who grew up in New York and spent summers with his family in France. \u201cThings I\u2019ve either seen traveling throughout France or at the dinner table with my family or hyperregional traditional recipes.\u201d Pradi\u00e9\u2019s approach has connected with diners at Zimmi\u2019s<\/a>, the restaurant he runs with Jenni Guizio, which will celebrate its first anniversary this weekend. \u201cI\u2019ve been continually saying to my staff that I feel like I\u2019m just starting to cook the way I really wanted when we opened,\u201d he says, \u201csince it takes some time to be given the vote of confidence from guests \u2014 so there\u2019s proof of concept, I guess, that our choices are working.\u201d Before the anniversary, Pradi\u00e9 took a few days away from the restaurant to cook some more \u2014 for his 9-month-old son and his wife\u2019s family during Thanksgiving. \u201cI really do love cooking at home,\u201d he says, \u201cand try to do it as much as my schedule allows.\u201d<\/p>\n Wednesday, November 26<\/strong> I also made some coffee. I drink pre-ground Lavazza. I\u2019m telling you this right now and I\u2019m getting looks from our pastry chef \u2014 she\u2019s rolling her eyes. This coffee is really cheap. I love specialty coffee. There\u2019s a shop near the restaurant called Arcane<\/a>, which is amazing, but at home it\u2019s 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\u2019s about as much time as I have before, you know, he really wants his bottle.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t eat lunch very often at the restaurant unless we have something new going on the menu or I\u2019m hungry enough to make a piece of toast. We\u2019d gotten in a whole pig 31 days earlier \u2014 I only know that because I like to create a schedule of when to produce certain things \u2014 and we had t\u00eate de cochon. I tasted that on a piece of toast with mustard. It\u2019s extremely atypical for me to take something that\u2019s done, like a finished article for the menu, and eat it. I try to keep that for the guests. Not this time.<\/p>\n 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\u2019m not dogmatic about it \u2014 I\u2019m not counting calories \u2014 and it doesn\u2019t have to be three individual dishes, but those are the parameters. We had chickpea curry with rice and a salad of iceberg lettuce.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Thursday, November 27<\/strong> We went uptown and I cooked turkey, but realized it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n I roasted the turkey breast as a crown, and one day after work I\u2019d 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n Everyone else in the family brought other Thanksgiving things \u2014 another stuffing, salad, mac and cheese \u2014 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, \u201cHere\u2019s what you\u2019re responsible for.\u201d Some years, people will chime in to say, \u201cOh, I want to do this\u201d or \u201cI wanted to make that,\u201d but this year, Kimya\u2019s cousin took the lead. She\u2019s just like, \u201cNo, this is what you\u2019re doing.\u201d If I\u2019d sent the first text, I wouldn\u2019t have been able to exercise as much hard power as she does.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. Kimya made cardamom whipped cream, and we fed that to \u00c9mile \u2014 it\u2019s the first dessert he\u2019s ever had. It was a good moment for him.<\/p>\n Friday, November 28<\/strong> There wasn\u2019t much in our fridge except rosemary, which I don\u2019t really like. Or I thought I didn\u2019t: I discovered that I do like it dried. And I don\u2019t mean dried rosemary that you get in the spice rack. In this case, we\u2019d 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\u2019ve cooked in recent memory. It was sort of discreetly luxurious. It had this lovely onion-truffle aroma with the brown butter. Luxury ingredients aren\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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\u2019m down with that.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And, um, for dinner, I ate leftovers. But I didn\u2019t make the big sandwich.<\/p>\n Saturday, November 29<\/strong> For lunch, Kimya and I went and got sushi. We had a babysitter that day, my aunt. So we had sushi at Tomo 21<\/a>, the place across the street from Carbone<\/a>, which is cute, and then we went and saw Frankenstein, which was great.<\/p>\n For dinner I made roast chicken, which I make almost every week. It\u2019s my favorite food. I do it with garlic that you keep in its paper. In French, you call it ail en chemise, \u201cgarlic in the shirt.\u201d 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 \u2014 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\u2019s the best.<\/p>\n Sunday, November 30<\/strong> My son obviously can\u2019t cook yet, but he does like to watch me. So \u201cwe\u201d got started on dinner, making veau marengo, veal stew with tomatoes and mushrooms. Before we ate the stew, Kimya\u2019s mom dropped off lunch, ghorma sabzi and rice. Her mom makes the best rice I\u2019ve ever eaten.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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\u2019t 2,000 years old like the ghorma sabzi.<\/p>\n EAT LIKE THE EXPERTS.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Grub Street newsletter.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve 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, \u00c9mile, 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\u2019d made. My wife\u2019s family is Iranian, and quince is big in that cuisine. She and I are always eating it, or we\u2019ll pur\u00e9e some into yogurt for our son.<\/p>\n
No breakfast. I just made coffee because we were going to my mother-in-law\u2019s place and it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
I made an omelet for breakfast. I\u2019m 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\u2019s just not my thing. I\u2019d rather move on.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ll get to experience that.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s always sitting on our counter.<\/p>\n