Leaving castings on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the Canadian-born model Dana Drori keeps her blue eyes peeled for bakery windows stocked with hamantashen (the traditional Purim cookie). While shooting in Paris, she knows the location of every corner Haribo store. And in her Brooklyn neighborhood, only Momofuku Milk Bar’s Birthday Cake truffles satisfy her weekend cravings. But surprisingly, in her own kitchen, there are only pickled shallots in the fridge. That’s likely because at home, Drori’s voracious appetite is sated with the written word. And just last week, the sweet-toothed former Black Book modeling columnist and part-time culture writer launched an online food magazine, Aftertastes, devoted to cataloging the memory and metaphor of meals.
Drori cites as inspiration for the project everything from a meditation on hummus in Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s cookbook “Jerusalem” to the style anthology “Women in Clothes” and the poet Maggie Nelson’s fragmented memoir “Bluets.” And she gleaned words of wisdom from an editorial by the Esquire restaurant critic Josh Ozersky, which ran in the New York Observer last year and rallied against the faddishness of food writing. “He was talking about how food blogs dominate the restaurant industry, and if you’re not the ‘it’ thing anymore, no one is paying attention to you,” Drori recalls. “I don’t like food writing reduced to that.” She says she’s instead influenced by the more introspective writing in the New Yorker’s annual food issue, and wants to create an environment that fosters such emotion every week of the year.
For the website’s inaugural content, Drori tapped some of her most chic friends to explore the panoply of emotions food evokes through personal essays and narrative recipes. Writers include T contributors like Sarah Nicole Prickett, the founding editor of Adult magazine, who recalls finding salvation in a Los Angeles bodega, and the historian of “The Simpsons” John Ortved, who wryly contemplates youthful hubris as he forages for chanterelle mushrooms. And the site’s mission doesn’t hinge on total service like most food blogs: While all the meals are worth retelling, they’re not all worth recreating. In one essay, the Vanity Fair contributor Rachel Seville Tashjian recalls her “Heathers”-style hazing of naïve teenage friends with a wickedly gruesome pantry concoction called Baked Champagne. “Rachel’s told that story at a dinner party before, but that’s what I like: the stories you would tell at a dinner party,” Drori explains. “Here, they’re specific and detailed in a way that never comes up in conversation.”
In a section devoted entirely to kitchens, Drori peeks inside the better-stocked cupboards of unconventional food personalities. There, we learn that the Flour Shop founder Amirah Kassem bakes cakes with Versace molds and just how many YouTube videos the comedian Max Silvestri watched in order to successfully mount a pan rack.
For future weeks, Drori is focused on recruiting more of her favorite writers and contemplating staged readings and themed dinners. And her ambitions know no bounds: About her dream dinner for Aftertastes, she says, “I would love to host one serving all the foods that were big between the ’20s and ’50s that are totally nonexistent today.”
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