About

I love making things, I love sharing, and I love teaching. I'm back in the Finger Lakes, with my husband Sam, after 23 years in NYC.

Food has been my professional focus for the past 20 years. In 2010, my friend Kareem and I started Melt Bakery, an ice cream sandwich company which we started with $350 and a big dream. We went on to operate up to 13 locations seasonally, with brick-and-mortar stores in Manhattan's Lower East Side, in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, and, for a while, in Macy's Herald Square. Melt ran and was beloved in NYC for 12 years (as I peer down the corridor of 2026, the idea of restarting it is not far from the top of the pile of Things To Maybe Do). I continue to excercise my ice cream brain as a consultant. My next big ice cream project was Marco Ice Cream, which started in NYC and ended up in Denver. That project has ended now, and I've picked up a new gig designing and formulating for the rebirth of a Baltimore brand... more to come on that one!

In 2022, as we settled into the log cabin, I began wondering "what's next" and was afforded by Sam some time to discern. (Ministers are great at this.) I had developed a love of Spanish wine during my time in NYC, and after lots of discussion with what would become my incredible opening team, I launched Pintxo Wine Bar in Canandaigua. Our team, menu, list, and program has grown steadily, garnering rave reviews and terrific press in the region. I'm applying the skills I learned at Melt in corporate culture and beyond, always striving to stay transparent, embrace challenge, and do better every day.

I've always turned to writing as a way to express myself, a way to process, a way to simply remember. I started writing about food during my culinary training at NYC's Institue of Culinary Education, and my writing is still centered around it. In all my craft, it becomes an ever more important tool for self-evaluation. More is coming.

Photography has been a major hobby of mine since the early 1980s: the first cameras I can remember owning were a Kodak Disc Camera and an underwater 110 (a Minolta, maybe, that one?). From there, I graduated to the iconic Pentax K-1000 which I received as a joint birthday-Christmas gift in 1988. I learned to develop my own film and print my own exposures, and started selling my photos to my high school classmates! That camera is still with me, and I still love to shoot with it. In a dubious move early in college, I got a credit card and used the entire limit on day 1 to buy a Canon EOS Elan, which I loved and still love, and still shoot. In the early aughts, I got a digital Canon as a gift and so entered that world. Fast forward to 2020-21: I already knew sourdough so while everyone else was doing that I decided to take my photo hobby in some new directions. I not only got a digital Pentax (a true gem I still adore using) but also a new-to-me medium format film camera in the form of a Pentax 645. Now, I have a modern Canon mirrorless camera as well. All of these are a joy to shoot, based on my mood, or the requirements of a subject or situation. I love the always joyful nostalgia with me in this hobby, as it's one I share with my mother, as I did with her mom.

I don't claim any expertise, or have any formal training, in woodworking: like all my crafts, it's a practice and when I'm not doing it regularly, I'm not growing. I had a lot of inspiration in the pretty impressive DIY abilities of my dad and grandfathers (my maternal grandfather was a legit and talented carpenter). I built quite a bit for Melt in the City, getting a lot of practice not only in our shops but also our market kiosks and booths. Settling into the cabin for a year and change gave me quite a bit of space (well, and a woodshop, so that was handy); I found a great deal on a ton (quite literally) of beautiful, clear Western Red Cedar. I used the first lot of it to build a cedar hot tub, which still relaxes me, especially on cold winter days. With the next big chunk, I built the bar at Pintxo. (This is not a typical bartop wood, as it's very soft, but it had the very attractive quality of being on hand. So far, so good!) I've made some other little doodads, like a patio table, Adirondack chairs, and odds and ends like the shelving and silverware rests at Pintxo. Next, I turn my eye to art- and photo framing. We'll see how it goes.

Music was where creativity began for me. When I was four, my grandmother began teaching me at the piano, and I went on to study with my aunt and some other local folks, including my beloved, departed Rick, my dad's best friend and someone who should still be here to mentor me. I continued with the piano through college. I'd always been fascinated by banjo, too. Sam gave me a banjo lapel pin which I wore (and still wear) on my jeans jacket, and my dad gave me my first instrument; a Christmas or two later, Sam gifted me lessons, so I started to pick that up a little more seriously as well. The attitudes I learned in music are something I try to apply to all my disciplines: Practice, Objectivity, kaizen. One piece, one measure, one note at a time.

Travel, seeing the world, has always been a passion of mine. It's not a craft, at least not in the way I practice it, but travel has always been a cornerstone of my identity. I'm always working to do it more. I lived in Besançon, France for my final semester of college (studying French, alas; lovely though the language is, it is not food, and it is not wine), and have loved my several visits to Germany, Spain, Canada, Mexico, and Japan. The United Kingdom is next! (Honeymoon, ahoy!)

In 2018, Sam and I dined at Kanazawa Mon, a fabulous kaiseiki restaurant in Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan. While the food was incredible and I can still taste every detail of it on my tongue (those ginger-steamed oysters!), what I remember sinking into my bones as we sat at the low table with our host was the honor, the love, the patience I could feel in the way every board had been lain in this Meiji-era home that was now our restaurant. It spoke of Process. It seems to me very common, here, to be driven to the finished product, to be proud of the built-home; goal goal goal. It is not many places in the world that have spoken that clearly to me, but as I came to sense in those walls the typically Japanese respect for Process - the joy of it - I knew that in any discipline I decided to pursue, I would endeavor to embrace Process. I'm trying.