In August 2002, I began film­ing ***Bare­foot Con­tes­sa*** despite hav­ing pre­vi­ous­ly sworn off cook­ing shows. A friend’s enthu­si­as­tic descrip­tion of the British show ***Nigel­la Bites***, host­ed by Nigel­la Law­son, piqued my curios­i­ty about the for­mat. After secur­ing a tape from my asso­ciate Eileen, who had facil­i­tat­ed the intro­duc­tion of Jamie Oliv­er to Amer­i­can audi­ences, I was impressed by Nigel­la’s warmth and ease in front of the cam­era but was adamant that I was not her.

Eileen per­sist­ed in encour­ag­ing me, empha­siz­ing the need for authen­tic­i­ty and the impor­tance of my per­son­al­i­ty in the show. She arranged a con­ver­sa­tion with Rachel Pur­nell from Pacif­ic Pro­duc­tions, which unex­pect­ed­ly turned intrigu­ing. Rachel val­ued my style and pro­posed a small crew to film in a man­ner that wouldn’t dis­rupt my life. Eileen sug­gest­ed a tri­al of thir­teen episodes, eas­ing my reser­va­tions.

As I took on the chal­lenge of bring­ing ***Bare­foot Con­tes­sa*** to life, my vision was to com­bine cook­ing with the essence of my social life—food is a way to bring peo­ple togeth­er. I want­ed to include friends like Jef­frey in my culi­nary jour­ney around East Hamp­ton. The crew’s method was immer­sive; they cap­tured my dai­ly life, often fol­low­ing me dur­ing gro­cery shop­ping and at home.

Despite ini­tial strug­gles with film­ing, such as under­stand­ing the dif­fer­ent British ter­mi­nolo­gies and man­ag­ing my anx­i­ety, the expe­ri­ence grew more enjoy­able. The crew, most­ly British, cre­at­ed a sup­port­ive, fam­i­ly-like atmos­phere on set, which made film­ing eas­i­er. The process includ­ed tri­al-and-error film­ing tech­niques, ulti­mate­ly sim­pli­fy­ing to a sin­gle take after real­iz­ing the authen­tic­i­ty of my first attempts was the best.

With the film­ing came per­son­al chal­lenges, like han­dling an emer­gency in our Paris apart­ment when a bathing inci­dent led to water dam­age, which sur­pris­ing­ly turned into an oppor­tu­ni­ty to pur­chase the upper unit I had long desired. Jux­ta­posed with the ongo­ing film­ing, I pre­pared for ***A Mediter­ranean Feast***, gath­er­ing friends to repli­cate a real din­ner par­ty. Despite my self-doubt about my on-screen per­for­mance, the feed­back was unex­pect­ed­ly pos­i­tive, rein­forc­ing that my ner­vous­ness con­tributed to a relat­able charm.

Look­ing back, I rec­og­nize that my foun­da­tion­al prin­ci­ples of food and hos­pi­tal­i­ty remain unchanged over the years. My first expe­ri­ences in the Paris apart­ment with Jef­frey became cher­ished mem­o­ries, mark­ing our dream ful­filled, even amidst the chal­lenges of adapt­ing to a new cook­ing envi­ron­ment in France.