I was staying at someone’s house in Martha’s Vineyard and he told me, “This is the only way to make coffee.” I had never seen this thing and I was like, Why does it look like this? I remember the coffee being good, but I specifically remember thinking it was such a cool-looking thing. In COVID, I woke up one day and I was like, “I’m at home and I want more than one cup of coffee.” So I bought a Moccamaster. I feel like a father in this way where it’s like 7 a.m., I start the coffee maker, sit there, have a cup of coffee before the day begins. It’s something that I just never knew I needed.
I also really like it for making iced coffee. Because of the way that it’s designed, it makes it very easy to make Japanese-style coffee where you brew it onto ice. Essentially, you take out one-third of the water and replace it with ice. It brews normal coffee. I don’t like cold brew; it makes me feel disgusting. But I love iced coffee, and no one makes iced coffee.
I’ve been a fan of Epsom salt since I was a child. I built a bathtub in my apartment. When I moved to New York, I was unhappy because I didn’t have a bathtub, so I had to find a very specific apartment where my landlord would let me put in a bathtub in. In my industry, a huge problem is that you finish work at midnight and you have so much adrenaline. I started to take these baths because it was the only way to wind down — other than going out or adding to your night. I think of it as half-sleeping. I can’t go to sleep even though I need to go to sleep, but I can take an Epsom-salt bath at the end of my day and it can bring me down to a place where then I can go to sleep.
These are the wine glasses that we’re using at Cove. A friend of mine who used to work in consulting — he didn’t really do anything in glassblowing originally — started this company. I am very particular about my glassware and have always felt that wine glasses are either too big or too small. This is the perfect-size wine glass. From a restaurant perspective, it’s large enough because you get all the scents, and it also appeases the person that wants the big wine glass. But visually it has the right proportions to appease me, who doesn’t like these giant wine glasses. Essentially I think the secret that they realized was that the bowl is made very close to Zalto. But my problem with the Zalto is that when you swirl it — and this a very niche problem — it feels unwieldy because it’s so lightweight. The BOBO has a much shorter stem, so the center of gravity is much lower on the glass. It’s thin, it’s elegant, but it’s also very comfortable to use.
I rediscovered these recently and it has become an addiction. I’ve never had an Amazon subscription to anything except now every two weeks my girlfriend and I get a shipment and it’s like Christmas. Once I got into that rhythm, I don’t know how I ever lived before. I only drink sparkling water and I had a Soda Stream, but I always forgot to do the refill things, and it’s not always perfectly cold, and you need all the backup bottles. I also have always thought, like from when I was a child, that an aspirational lifestyle is when you open a fridge and there’s just an array of beverages. This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to that. Also if you have a liqueur and a grapefruit and tequila, you can always have a Paloma, which is one of the best things to drink. The La Croix can be easily transitioned into a very low-lift cocktail.
I go to the farmers’ market four times a week. A long time ago, I bought my first. I was taking Ubers so I needed a wagon that could collapse and go in the back. Then I started driving to the farmers’ market, and that’s when I got the limousine — the XL wagon. I layer up, so on the bottom it’s root vegetables and other things that can get crushed. Then on the backside I put all of the delicate herbs. On top of the wagon, I put all of my flats so that they balance from edge to edge. I have bungee cords that pull it tight so that it can support even the smallest flat. I use the back flat to perfectly lay flowers so that the petals hang right off of it.
These Mac Sports Wagons have essentially run all of my businesses. When we had Gem and Gem Wine, we would use them to bring wine and food back and forth. I’ve moved an entire apartment two blocks over using a Mac Sports Wagon. I’ve broken one every single year at the end of farmers’-market season, so then there’s the ritual of getting a new one every year.
Obviously I had to put food stuff on this list, but what else do I do? I play tennis. I went through so many different tennis rackets until I found this one. I think a lot about tennis rackets is the endorsements of which tennis players play with them. I’m a big Jannik Sinner fan and always have been. I was like, That’s how I want to play tennis. I’m nowhere near that level whatsoever, obviously. But he’s got very good, consistent form. That was the real goal of getting this racket — to have power but also some control. Even if it’s a mental thing, I think ever since I started to play with this racket, it’s helped my game.
I have destroyed more Vitamixes than I’ve destroyed Mac Sports Wagons because I’m pushing these things to the brink. I finally realized that I need the one with 3 horsepower. Maybe a normal person wouldn’t. There’s the 2.3, and we would blow through those things in a month. I have never found a better blender. To me, what makes a high-level restaurant is how smooth your purees are. That comes down to your Vitamix and your chinois. We also use it to process a lot of herbs by turning them into herb oils. That’s how we break all of our blenders. Essentially, all of our herb-oil recipes are that you blend it until the blender starts smoking or steaming and then you know it’s done. I also recommend, if you are a high-level Vitamix user like myself, to also buy the smaller jar, because a lot of blending is about amounts. You can’t fill it up too much or too little or you won’t get the perfect emulsification.
My very close friend, her family got an olive-oil farm. They took it over and I think this is the second year making oil. I went out to see it in California. We sell it at Gem Home. We use it for everything. It made me really jump back into using olive oil a lot more. It’s a very clean olive oil. I do love the very spicy, crazy finishing oils as well. And they have a premium blend that’s really nice for crudos and things. But as far as cooking oils go, I use it for everything. I’ll sear with it. I grew up in a very big olive-oil household. I realized that that’s how I cook at home, too. I cut stuff up and eat it with olive oil and lemon, and it’s pretty good.
I discovered this maybe six years ago. It was at a time where we seasoned a lot of our sauces and broths at the restaurant with soy sauce or shiro dashi. But we would always have a million gluten-free people every single night. Then we discovered Yondu and it made my life so much easier because we could just make one batch of everything. Tamari is gluten-free, but it’s really dark and roasted and caramelized. Yondu is golden brown and light. I wouldn’t use it like I use soy sauce, like to dip sushi. It’s intense and salty. It’s made from all these fermented vegetables, really one of the more delicious vegetarian flavors. I think for people who want to try to cook vegetarian more, it gives you this depth of flavor that is really hard to gain with normal salt. If you heat up chicken broth and pour in some Yondu and grate a little bit of ginger, it’s delicious.
This is a real deep favorite. My dad used to just always have them. My sister’s obsessed with them. I’m obsessed with them. The amount of people that I know who were like, “You freak. Why are you buying these?” And then next thing you know, it is the only thing anyone is eating. They’re the perfect pretzel. They’re extra-crunchy. The size is really good, too, because you’ll get to the broken bits and there’s some them that some are saltier and some are less salty. I can polish off a whole box in an afternoon.