Chef Reilly Meehan’s earliest food memories were of combing his family’s garden in Santa Cruz with his Oaxacan nanny, Lucy. They’d pick verdant cilantro for tortillas she would char.
“There’s a couple recipes in the book dedicated to her,” he says between tour dates for his debut cookbook A Little Bit Extra, which will bring him to Bookshop Santa Cruz on April 13.
He gushes in the Acknowledgments section in Spanish: “To my lifelong kitchen guide, Lucy. Thank you for sharing your recipes, your memories, and your love.”
When his father, Charlie, who owned Seabright Brewery, where Meehan learned a “sense of urgency and organization,” would cook a steak, Lucy turned the sides into magic.
“She would take the leftover mashed potatoes and roll them in a flour tortilla and pan-fry them until they were crispy,” he says.
The recipes are crowned by juicy stories like this – conversational, colloquial, befitting someone who knows how to pop on TikTok (594.4K followers and climbing). Introducing his recipe Radicchio Double Down, a salad pairing quick-pickled radicchio with raw, tamed by white balsamic syrup and nutty, aged Gouda: “Some call me the original BGG (Bitter Green Girlie!).”
Some fans of his vertical video output are materializing on tour stops.
“Yesterday I met a gal named Nancy,” he says, “who brought with her a printed out Instagram DM she sent three years ago. It said, ‘I would love to have a cookbook from you.’”
His reply at the time?
“‘I’m working on it,’” it read. “‘We’ll make it happen.’ It’s surreal.”
The recipes inside feel like a late afternoon meal that would be waiting for you after a long drive to Palm Springs.
There’s a reason Meehan is squeezing a lime on the cover, juice dripping over the title. Chefs evolve through culinary identities like David Bowie, and this is his current one, subject to change.
“It’s punchy, it’s bright,” he says. “Veggie-forward. Really herbaceous, lime juice, lemon juice, acid.”
He credits his Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese classmates at the Professional Culinary Institute in Campbell, California and teammates from his time on the competitive cooking circuit as another crucial influence. Chefs undergo osmosis with who they cook next to, especially when they’re young and absorbent like he was, but they learn just as much by bonding.
“At 2 A.M, we’d go out and get pho, or to some hole-in-the-wall Chinese place I never would have known about.”
To match his flavor profiles, he needed collaborators who’d bring the bright. He found them in photographer Erin Scott and stylist Jillian Knox.
“They were like, ‘We never get an opportunity to go full color, full crazy, over the top. Let’s do it.’”
Out were “airy, linen-y, marbly food scenes.” Instead, Scott chose high saturation to articulate Knox’s power clashing of Meehan’s internally vibrant dishes against externally vibrant backgrounds.
Autumnal marigold Silky Gochujang Butternut Soup with copper spoons tops jade tile hexagons; Charred Green Beans pile like kindling on a many-ringed rose plate; evergreen Kale Chip Salad glistens on stone cut like cross sections of fossilized jelly beans.
When Knox relents, her color matches are sublime. For Cheesy Breakfast Oatmeal, Meehan’s version of cozy Copenhagen porridge, the author is posed in plaid of spinach-green, bacon-burnt umber, and yolk yellow. It takes the eye milliseconds to register the bowl in his lap contains all those ingredients.
Meehan wanted to avoid the hamburger commercial artificiality of food styling, where the mayo is actually a highly toxic epoxy. He insisted to his publisher he wanted to cook everything pictured, only learning later from Scott what a rarity that is.
“Most people hire full food stylist teams to do it all, which I understand,” he says. “There is a skill set particular to the type of cooking for photos.”
So no fibbing, but finessing was fine. He reaches for the Italian word sprezzatura to describe Knox’s style. Depending on the translation, it means “studied carelessness” or
“effortless grace.”
“She would just throw the forks down, and they would perfectly fall,” he says with some envy.
Now all his forks are tumbling into place, and he calls this in-store event a “full circle moment.”
“My grandma was a poet and she used to do readings at Bookshop,” he says. “I remember being a little kid, listening to her read and thinking how cool it was. It’s really special to come back.”
Chef Meehan appears at 7pm on April 13 at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz. Admission is free, but RSVP at bookshopsantacruz.com/reilly-meehan. There will be prepared samples from the book while supplies last.
