Inside the Kitchen: Seven Questions with Chef Suzanne Cupps of Lola’s

Any kind of rice bowl, with fish. So it could be a poke-inspired type thing, or chirashi, or crab rice. Something that has fresh herbs, with rice and fish. That’s the kind of thing I would want to eat for the rest of my life.

What comes up first for me isn’t about me sitting as the diner and eating. My favorite food memories are just me as a cook at Annisa and Gramercy. Just cooking on the line. I didn’t start out in my career as wanting to cook because I liked food. I loved more of the environment. A lot of those moments were more about the passion that went into the career of being a cook versus the actual dishes.

It’s a careful and thoughtful approach to service, food, drink, and the quality of all the things. I feel very drawn to that here at Lola’s, even though when you walk in, you might not feel like it’s ‘fine dining’ in terms of—we just don't have the finishes that some other restaurants have. But when you eat the food, when you meet the staff, it should feel like, Oh, these people are trained correctly; they could open a fine dining restaurant if they want. For me, it’s that thoughtful approach to restaurants.

Now that I’m a restaurant owner, without a company backing, my goal is just to create a successful restaurant that makes a difference in New York. I don't want to just run something that stays afloat, that people like; I want to be able to have a point of view, to support farmers and good sourcing, and to make people want to come back often, just because they love the service, they love the beverage, they love the food. I’m not in it to run a mediocre restaurant. I’m working really hard to keep up the quality, to look at all the details of the experience, because of that competitive nature of New York. I want to run a great restaurant, and I want to feel like in five years, 10 years down the road, that it’s an important place for New York.

And I also want to teach. Now that most cooks are less than half my age, I think it’s really important, is that aspect of, how do you be patient, teach, train—and not just cooks, but front-of-house, and everybody—to want to stay in the industry or learn life skills for whatever is next for them. That’s really important. It’s not head down, do whatever I say. I want an environment where it feels like I can learn from them, too.

I want to visit my friends and I want to support the people that are running restaurants, because I know it’s so hard. So, my friends, Tracy and Arjav, have a place called Birdie’s in Austin, and I haven’t gotten to make it down yet, but they’re crushing it, and I know it’s a great environment. Another one of my friends helped her older brother open a place called Charlie’s in Napa Valley, and he’s an awesome chef, so I want to go there. We did a dinner with a former sous chef at Gramercy Tavern, Kyle Knoll, who has a place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, called Birch—I want to go there. I think it’s important to show up for people. And I appreciate when people reciprocate that for me.

Sourcing is the heart. Cooking is exciting when you have really great ingredients to work with. And for me, it’s not truffles and caviar. It's more of like, sprouting cauliflowers and different varieties of vegetables and grains and heritage meats. So for me, that’s like the key to my cooking: buying great ingredients and figuring out ways to showcase them so you can taste the hard work of the farmer. Sometimes it’s through a different technique, sometimes it’s through different flavors or a surprising twist.

Ranch. Also, I don’t like a lot of sweet things in the morning, but once a month or so my mom used to make pancakes for dinner. So there’s something about pancakes for dinner for me.