Dream Team Dinners Los Angeles
Jacques Pépin’s Influence Was There All Along
Aaron Lindell is the chef and co-owner of Quarter Sheets, a pizza parlor located in Echo Park, Los Angeles he runs with his wife, Hannah Ziskin.
On Wednesday, May 28, 2025, Lindell and Ziskin will collaborate with Jacques Pépin on a four-course dinner at Quarter Sheets as part of The Resy Dream Team Dinners series. Get tickets here (terms apply).
My 80’s and 90’s Midwest upbringing was characterized by a kind of casual luddism. It’s not that my parents were particularly scrupulous in their aversion to owning a microwave, a VHS player, or springing for cable television, it was more of a “Who needs it?” mentality.
Steve happily did the cooking, mostly from scratch. Jody, the breadwinner, reserved the right to run the household budget and only “cook” one thing well: a sandwich consisting of thick slices of beefsteak tomatoes from our garden, on toasted white bread, slicked with mayo. It was a good sandwich, an inadvertently deft celebration of peak seasonal produce.
The no-cable-TV-thing is how I found my way to Jacques Pépin: beginning in the early 90’s, “Today’s Gourmet,” “The Complete Pépin,” and “Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home” aired on our local PBS station via KQED, a daily respite from sticky Michigan summers. At the time, I didn’t fully understand (or appreciate) what I was seeing, but I felt an immediate connection to Jacques and his friend Julia.
Here was this brilliant, gentle, hirsute Frenchman (cool accent and all) offering up 30 minutes of elegant domesticity. Forget about all that though — it was the look and feel of these shows that took me in: Transported to the faraway exotic lands of rural Connecticut, Jacques takes a bike ride, sniffs a melon, plucks some peaches from a tree, and follows his town’s railroad tracks into a forest where he picks a few large, scary-looking mushrooms. Next, we’re on set where Jacques is already cooking. The lighting is perfectly dim, there is a palpable sense of fun in the kitchen. He urgently cooks his way through three dishes from start to finish. There’s a little wine at the end; a party is on.
In my mid-20s, right around the time I decided that cooking professionally seemed like a good idea, I happened upon a signed 1975 edition of Jacques’ book, “A French Chef Cooks at Home.” Up until that moment I had always just assumed he could cook simply because he was French, and all French people know how to cook (right?).
Come to find out, he can cook because he’s cooked a lot, and in many different capacities, too: at fancy hotels, in tiny dining rooms, for President Charles De Gaulle. I bought it, read about duck l’orange, studied the list of composed menus, and shelved “A French Chef” away — I thought of it as a sentimental artifact that I’d get to later. This book was explicitly meant for amateurs and I was hellbent on going pro. Ironically, the restaurant my wife Hannah and I would eventually open was born as a home cooking project — a pizza and cake pop-up out of a little bungalow in Glendale, Calif.
Here was this brilliant, gentle, hirsute Frenchman (cool accent and all) offering up 30 minutes of elegant domesticity … There’s a little wine at the end; a party is on.— Aaron Lindell on Jacques Pépin
After nearly two decades filled with a lot of cooking in many different capacities, I returned to the book while searching for inspiration in the run-up to opening Quarter Sheets. And in his eight-or-so page introduction, Jacques offers a definitive outline of everything that will never not be true about cooking.
He acknowledges the chef as both technician and artist — the art comes in when fundamentals become second nature. He tells us that there are guiding principles to be gleaned from the professional that can be applied to our day-to-day cooking at home, and shows us how home cooking can and should help restaurant chefs keep their priorities in check. He identifies that the meal itself is only one part of the bigger picture that we piece together when “entertaining.” There, you have it: cooking should be enjoyable and restaurants should be fun.
I really, truly believe in all of this. When you come to our restaurant, you aren’t exactly entering our home for a little dinner with friends, but when we’re doing it right, Quarter Sheets is a parallel universe to that thing. We’re on set, the lighting is perfectly dim, and a party is on. Jacques’ influence has been there all along.
“Happy cooking!” (clink)
