No. 1 — Odd lists and instant coffee

What's on the menu for Feb. 3, 2023

I promise that I won’t overdo the tabletop puns, but here we are at À La Carte No. 1 (!) and I can’t help myself. So have a seat (I’m sorry) and I’ll read you this week’s specials (I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry):

Creative suggestion: This inaugural creative suggestion is in response to a question that’s been coming up a lot in my one-on-ones (the personalized mentorship sessions I offer.) And it’s a pretty simple one: where do you find inspiration besides Pinterest?

We already know the obvious answers (books, traveling, museums, libraries, the rest of the internet), but I think it’s more of a problem of remembering and recalling inspiration than finding it. I can go to a great restaurant and have a great time and leave feeling energized by the experience, but if I don’t notice the details that made that experience special, it’s hard to catalog it in my brain and dig it out later.

A lot of times I just snap a quick photo of something (I’m going to talk more about this another week because I have a ~process~), but today I’m going to talk about WRITING STUFF DOWN.

Welcome to “?”.

I keep a long, long list (creatively titled “?”) in my notes app of things that I might want to look into or remember later — something I saw, just remembered, or was recommended. The list includes specific topics (“Welsh blankets”, for instance), people I want to learn more about (Elsa Peretti, Agnes Varda), an allusion to something in my camera roll that I want to go back and look at (“Horses horse painting”, lol), or random ideas (“marigold garland”). When I’m starting a project or I’m bored or I have an itch to learn about *something*, I go to the “?” note and take a scroll. It does a good job of kicking me down a road to somewhere else.

“Horses horse painting”, AKA this blurry screenshot of a painting I saw in the background of someone’s photo taken at the restaurant Horses.

Personal recommendation: This week’s unsponsored, from-my-heart recommendation is Blue Bottle’s Instant Espresso, which I was highly skeptical of and am now an unofficial spokesperson for. I’d like to preface this by saying that I am a very particular type of coffee snob, the kind that doesn’t know anything about coffee or how to make it but has the compulsion to buy a $6.50 iced latte at some point every day and is very picky about it.

Anyway, it comes in a jar and you mix a teaspoon of it with some hot water, add some milk, and voilà…a latte. It tastes just like what I’d get at Blue Bottle IRL and is saving me a lot of money — not buy-a-house-you-coffee-addicted-millennial money, but money nonetheless. I can’t do the math but just take my word for it.

Sub-rec: it’s great with cake.

Person to know: Sarah Nsikak, an incredible textile artist and the creative director of the brand La Réunion. Sarah is a Nigerian-American in Brooklyn who makes beautiful woven pieces, from the dresses La Réunion has become known for to the incredible patchwork tapestries she shows in galleries. 

Take a peek at Sarah’s work at @sarahnsikak and @lareunionstudio and give her a follow if you love it as much as I do. And if you’re in NYC, Sarah’s show “Luck Comes Before Love” is on view at the Ace Hotel New York from February 5 through March 27, so go for me!!!

A selection of Sarah's work.

This concludes the first installment of À La Carte! To receive emails like these every week, upgrade to a paid subscription below. For $1-ish a week you’ll get weekly ÀLCs, plus the occasional extra interview, essay, and more.

See you next time,

Ali

P.S. — I’m still learning how to really use Substack, so if anything seems funky to you, you can let me know by replying to this email. Thank you!!