Silverton’s star soon started its own rapid ascent — especially when she focused on what was then largely an afterthought in the dining landscape: bread. Inspired by the crusty, flavorful loaves she feasted on during her annual trips to Italy, she began experimenting with yeast, flours, and bread starters — and remains grateful she had to learn the hard way. “I’m glad that I grew up without social media,” she says. “I had to teach myself how to make bread, because I couldn’t just go on YouTube or the Internet. Everything is so easy and so quick now.” Those endless hours of tweaking and tasting paid off when La Brea Bakery, which Silverton opened in early 1989 with her then-husband Mark Peel, became an instant sensation in Los Angeles and beyond, stoking a collective U.S. appetite for artisanal breads that even the trends for low-carb and gluten-free have yet to dampen. Silverton’s sourdough starter recipe, made with organic grapes, flour, and yeast, is still revered among home bakers. “I didn’t invent bread — it’s been around a lot longer than I have been,” she says with a smile. “But whatever I did to help people understand, embrace, want to bake [it] — I’m glad that I was part of that movement.”

Silverton first had an inkling she might have a taste for a culinary career attending college in Sonoma, California. As a political science major, Silverton — motivated by a crush on a classmate — landed a job cooking meat-free meals for vegetarian students. The experience impacted her so much, she decided to forgo her final year of college to attend Le Cordon Bleu London. Back in California, Silverton elevated her skills in some of Los Angeles’s most prominent restaurants, including cooking alongside Jonathan Waxman at Michael’s, and as the first pastry chef at Wolfgang Puck’s Hollywood elite-packed Spago in Beverly Hills. Silverton says she feels lucky to have started her career alongside level-headed chefs who “treated people respectfully and appreciated your work there, all of them did. So I never had that screaming stereotypical kitchen.”

Nancy Silverton’s restaurant empire spans three continents. Her numerous accolades include two awards from the James Beard Foundation, including one for Outstanding Chef, the organization’s most prestigious honor. She’s a prolific cookbook author and also has a line of gourmet gelatos and sorbets. She almost single-handedly launched the U.S. artisanal bread craze and possesses such a talent in pastry making, her crème fraîche brioche tart elicited tears from Julia Child, who proclaimed it a “dessert to cry over” mid-bite on national TV. And yet, growing up in Southern California in the 1960s, an era when Swanson and Kraft were hawking boxed macaroni and cheese and frozen TV dinners to U.S. households, Silverton was mostly indifferent about food — more specifically, the kind her mother made. “I wanted to be like everyone else, and the food my mother was cooking was not like everybody else,” Silverton recalls. “She was cooking out of Greek cookbooks and making spanakopita, or cooking out of French cookbooks and making beef bourguignon and all these things that I just really didn’t want to eat.”

Neither did the young Silverton want to eat the school lunches packed by her mom, who was a TV writer on shows including General Hospital and “an early advocate of no waste,” Silverton says. “I had recycled lunch bags from the grocery store, big brown bags rolled down.” Digging in, she’d usually find raw veggies, healthy sandwiches (crusts never cut off like her classmates’ were), and very occasionally, potato chips — but never in individual packs, instead “just thrown into the bottom of the bag.” “I remember eating my lunches inside the bags so that nobody could see that my carrots weren’t peeled, or that kind of thing,” Silverton says with a chuckle. “My [classmates] would never trade with me, because I never had anything people wanted to eat.” How times have changed! At 69, Silverton remains a powerhouse in the industry, cooking food that thousands of people clamor for at her restaurants around the world and in countless chef collaborations and private events; some lucky diners even have the privilege of dining in Silverton’s Los Angeles home. “I’ve been doing a lot of these corporate parties and fundraising things where we’re using my house as opposed to the restaurant,” she says. “A restaurant is always certainly a much better environment than a hotel ballroom, but having it in my backyard is even more intimate.”

Creating culinary magic in her own kitchen at home. Image credit: Nancy Silverton

Silverton’s Italian home. Image credit: Nancy Silverton

Spanakopita. Image credit: Shutterstock

Image credit: iStock; Bastille square Paris France Sunny day Winter

Rising Bread and a Rising Star

Around that time, Silverton and Peel also launched Campanile, a restaurant that helped birth the concept of California-style cooking, right next door to the bakery. The restaurant was so beloved, it inspired eulogies from food critics when it closed in 2012. Silverton remains a dominant force on the West Coast culinary landscape, with a pair of always-buzzing restaurants at the corner of Melrose and Highland: the Michelin-starred Osteria Mozza and the more casual Pizzeria Mozza; and has also put her stamp on the international food scene, with restaurants in London, Singapore, and, most recently, Saudi Arabia. She’s also launched a line of gourmet gelatos and sorbets called Nancy’s Fancy, and is a prolific author to boot — her 10th cookbook, The Cookie That Changed My Life: And More Than 100 Other Classic Cakes, Cookies, Muffins, and Pies That Will Change Yours, is scheduled for a November 2023 release.

out her daily walk a mile and a half up the road and back, then she might head to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for dinner with friends. If she’s going further afield, to Florence, perhaps, she hops on her Vespa — her favorite way to explore Italy. Above all, Silverton makes sure to indulge in the Italian art of la dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing. “I sit at my table and all I do is stare [at the view]. It’s the most beautiful sight, and I could just sit at that table all day long.”

The notable exception to Silverton’s usually packed schedule is the six weeks every summer (and another two during the Christmas holidays) that she and her partner, writer Michael Krikorian, spend in Umbria, where she bought a home more than two decades ago. Italy remains an anchor to the culinary ethos — an ingredient-forward, uncomplicated style — that has shaped Silverton’s career. During her summer sojourn, she loves cooking “super slow” from start to finish, taking her time to craft her menu, source ingredients in grocery stores and food markets, and prepare the meal — usually platters of just-harvested vegetables like eggplant, peppers, carrots, and fennel, alongside a protein dish. “Except for the time that I tell my guests to arrive, I don’t have any of those pressures that you have running a restaurant and being on the line and getting food out,” she explains.

With fresh ingredients in Italy. Image credit: Nancy Silverton

Slowing Down in Italy

Nancy Silverton – chef, baker, and author. Image credit: Daniel Delang

Image credit: Shutterstock. Beautiful buildings on Lake Pichola, a large, fresh water man-made lake in Udaipur

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By Blane Bachelor

Recipe for Contentment

Life & Arts

Silverton says she feels lucky to have started her career alongside level-headed chefs who “treated people respectfully and appreciated your work”

“If you start with the best ingredients, 98% of the work has been done for you”

With independent boutiques, hip hangouts for cocktails, and dreamy waterside cafés, Glockenbachviertel is one of Munich’s prettiest districts

Image credit: Shutterstock. Castillo San Felipe del Morro was designed to guard the entrance to San Juan Bay

August 2023 (Volume 22)

The inspiration for the book was a peanut butter cookie Silverton tasted and wanted to perfect in her own signature style. “I can’t stand when somebody makes something better than me, so I said OK, I have to improve on these cookies, though I don’t know if ‘improve’ is the right word,” she explains, adding that she gives the cookie’s creator, a former employee, full credit for the dough recipe in the book’s introduction. Silverton’s version includes a dollop of peanut butter in the middle of the cookie, piled with skin-on Spanish peanuts. “So really what you’re ending up with is a real peanut butter experience — kind of a peanut butter tart in a sense,” she explains. “But it really was the best peanut butter cookie I ever had.” This is a sweet example of the formula Silverton has “never strayed from” throughout her impressive career: source the freshest, most high-quality ingredients possible, and then let them shine in straightforward, unfussy recipes. “If you start with the best ingredients, 98% of the work has been done for you,” she explains. “All you’ve got to do is tweak it, maybe heat it up, and drizzle something on it, because in the end, it’s already delicious, right? But that’s most important, and I think that too many cooks, whether they’re home cooks or professional cooks, forget that what you’re basically trying to do is make something delicious. And delicious does not mean complicated.”

Silverton says she feels lucky to have started her career alongside level-headed chefs who “treated people respectfully and appreciated your work”

Image credit: Nancy Silverton. Silverton’s Italian home

By Blane åBachelor

Recipe for Contentment

Life & Arts

August 2023 (Volume 22)

Days at her house just outside of town follow a similar pattern: Silverton puts on some classical music — a break from her routine in LA, where she “never listen[s] to music at home” — makes a coffee, and flings open the doors to the pool and olive trees outside. Later in the morning, she cranks out her daily walk a mile and a half up the road and back, then she might head to the grocery store to pick up ingredients for dinner with friends. If she’s going further afield, to Florence, perhaps, she hops on her Vespa — her favorite way to explore Italy. Above all, Silverton makes sure to indulge in the Italian art of la dolce far niente — the sweetness of doing nothing. “I sit at my table and all I do is stare [at the view]. It’s the most beautiful sight, and I could just sit at that table all day long.”

Chef, restaurateur, and author Nancy Silverton has built a remarkable career on a philosophy of beautiful ingredients, simply prepared. Outside the kitchen, too, it’s making time for the simple things that brings her happiness.

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