Romeo and Amanda—ad execs by day and gastronomical pioneers by night—are the creators and producers of the latest in L.A.’s DIY food fetish. Their weekly blog, We Can Cook That, details their at-home emulation of some of the city’s most famous dishes, including the Flank Steak at Animal or the Grilled Duck Breast at Campanile. The site was created as a byproduct of the couple’s love for cooking, L.A. cuisine and the financial burden that comes with too many trips to the reservation booth. We chatted with them to find out where they find their ingredients, their most difficult challenges to date, and whether their own restaurant is in the cards.
You guys make quite the team. Who’s the chef and who’s the photographer?
Actually, while Romeo is definitely the Master Chef and Amanda helms the digital camera and writes the restaurant review, we both share a lot of the responsibilities as many of the dishes take both of us to try to recreate—from coming up with the recipe and tasting their dishes to guessing what ingredients they used.
Are you formally trained?
Nope, we just love the trial and error, especially when it means we get to eat all of our mistakes.
You choose the restaurant based on a running voter generated poll on the website, but how do you decide which dish you are going to make from the chosen restaurant?
While there’s really no set method on how we choose the final dish, we mainly a) order things that pique our interest and b) try to have a variety of what type of food we work with from week-to-week. For instance, the steak at Animal was a very voter-generated choice while with Campanile, we simply fell in love with the grilled duck breast.
Do you enlist the help of the chef for cooking tips and ingredients?
So far, we haven’t met with the chefs to discuss their menus, however our waiters have been very helpful in answering questions we may have about a certain ingredient or how something might have been prepared.
Do you need their permission, at least?
Who knows?
What has been the most difficult dish to prepare so far?
The flat iron steak from Animal was a huge recipe to try to tackle on our first time. We had no idea how many components we would be required to make it—the cheese fondue and the sauce on the steak are still mysteries to us! We actually threw out the first batch of rice when making the Arancini Balls from Bottega Louie and started over.
Do you ever get redos if you mess up?
We go off our first try and rank our efforts honestly. The pictures you see of our plated dish is truly what we made with our basic knowledge of cooking.
So… Is there like a weekly dinner party at your house?
So far we have kept things pretty intimate (just the two of us), but we’ve had several friends interested in being our taste testers so guest judges may be in our near future. Who knows?
Much of the time these chef’s are using some pretty rare ingredients. Where do you do your grocery shopping?
We can’t say enough amazing things about the Santa Monica Farmers Market and Whole Foods. Since most of the restaurants we visit also get their products from the local farmers markets and cook dishes with ingredients that are in season, the ingredients are fairly easy to come by.
Up until this point, though these have difficult to cook, they are still somewhat manageable. What happens when the time comes for a visit to The Bazaar? I’m thinking molecular gastronomy may present a problem.
We’re not afraid. We actually had the Bazaar as one of our options for the “B” week on our blog, but Bottega Louie won. We have discussed that some of the challenges with this blog will probably require us to buy certain kitchen gadgets along the way and are not sure how we will tackle molecular gastronomy, but we will definitely keep our renter’s insurance up to date just in case we have a molecular disaster.
One day down the line when you have mastered all of LA’s greatest dishes, can we expect some originals? Maybe even a restaurant of your own?
We will see where the future takes us. Once we learn more about the ingredients themselves, cooking techniques and which flavors compliment each other, we would love to create original dishes and recipes for our readers. And who knows, maybe someday we will open a place where we really are the chefs.
For more information, visit wecancookthat.com.
