What Alison Roman wants

The cookbook author and writer on balancing business with brand, how she creates recipes, and what she’s doing next.

Last Tuesday evening, as Americans pondered what to cook for dinner in the seventh week of coronavirus lockdown, Alison Roman, the cookbook author and writer, was making pasta and spritzes in her Brooklyn apartment — streaming live on Instagram with journalist Katie Couric, Couric’s daughter, and around 2,000 concurrent viewers.

Typical for Roman’s videos, it was fun, funny, free-flowing, and felt more like improv than something staged. The recipe — from her New York Times dining column last summer, featuring zucchini, capers, feta, and fried lemon — was also signature Alison Roman: Approachable but a little daring, and probably stupidly good.

Roman, 34, has emerged as one of the most interesting and visible people in the food media world, at a time when cooking at home has unexpectedly taken over our lives.

She has built a bit of a repertoire around viral recipes — perhaps you’ve heard of, or even made, The Cookies or The Stew — and pioneered using Instagram Stories to build a community around her recipes, as thousands of people cooked them and showed them off.

But this isn’t stunt food. Her recipes are opinionated, driven by flavor — vinegar chicken with crushed olive dressing, “shrimp in the shells with lots of garlic and probably too much butter” — and not by novelty or flair. Her cookbooks are genuinely good and genuinely popular. The latest, last year’s Nothing Fancy, has more than 150,000 copies in circulation, she says.

And she’s now at a crossroads: How to build a bigger business without selling out?

She has sold a television cooking show and is working on a new book, a nonfiction narrative. And as a one-woman media brand, she has smartly attached herself, for years, to two of the leading titles in food media — the New York Times and Bon Appetit — to build audience and credibility.

But what else? Roman’s point of view is potentially interesting and unique enough to drive a “Goop”-like lifestyle brand, spanning food, drinks, clothing, and travel. But does the world need one? 

Or another line of cookware? Or brand ambassador partnerships? And with what tradeoffs? As Roman and Couric were comparing spritzes, I turned to another Instagram Live, where a celebrity chef was cooking with the CEO of a publicly held food company — in front of 28 people. Not so cool.

“I’d rather stay small and always be myself,” she tells me. “But at the same time, I do need to figure out how to turn this into money.”

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Dan Frommer: To start off, what have the last couple of months been like? What have you been doing?

Alison Roman: They’ve been wild. They’ve been very, very busy. Ultimately, I feel grateful for the time to slow down a little bit, because I was moving at such an intense speed that was not sustainable. What I think is funny is that I haven’t done anything differently — I didn’t pivot to do anything specific for this quarantine or pandemic. I wasn’t reactive in the kind of stuff that I was making, but it just seemed to naturally fit.

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• Alison Roman
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