“I’m obviously supposed to say I love my pasta, but deep down, I might love my vegetables just a little bit more.”
For Chef Hillary Sterling, that is not just a charming aside. It is a deeply-rooted philosophy built on a profound respect for seasonality. It is also something I understood almost immediately after spending a day with her at Wildflower Farms in Gardiner, New York. There, she kicked off the property’s new Chef’s Atelier: Field to Craft series in collaboration with Le Creuset–a program that will soon welcome Chef Maxime Pradie of Zimmi’s and Chef Joshua Pinsky of Claud.
On the beautiful 140-acre estate, about 30 of us assembled to forage and harvest vegetables alongside Chef Sterling and Farmer Will Conway, gathering the ingredients we’d use to prepare our lunch and dinner. As we peeled beets, grilled carrots, and whipped up a vinaigrette, Chef Sterling shared some of her favorite stories and lessons. Many of these tales are featured in her labor of love, "AMMAZZA!: Culinary Adventures from New York to Italy and Back Again"—a debut book she actually initiated three separate times over the last decade before everything finally felt right.
Sterling has so much to celebrate right now. Beyond the long-awaited arrival of her first book, she continues to lead the high-volume kitchen at Ci Siamo in Manhattan West, and is actively preparing to expand the restaurant to Boston’s Seaport this fall. In the middle of all of those projects, she is a devoted mom to four-year old Rowan–who ran around Wildflower Farm as happy as a clam–while continually nurturing her staff to improve their skills and maintain a sense of curiosity.
Sterling says she remembers growing up eating canned vegetables and the revelation of tasting asparagus straight from her aunt’s garden. In her book, she recounts the moment her aunt snapped an asparagus stalk directly from the garden and handed it to her. The experience lodged itself in her memory—not only because the asparagus tasted different, but because it changed her understanding of what an ingredient could be.
If you’ve ever been to Ci Siamo, you’ve witnessed her revelation in action through the treatment of the asparagus–and all the vegetables for that matter. When I visited in May, asparagus was served charred with Vermouth, blue cheese and dates, a dish she even admits boggles the mind of some until she says, “trust me, it works.” Of course, it does.
Trust is a word that comes up repeatedly when Sterling talks about cooking, particularly when she talks about her team at Ci Siamo.
The Manhattan restaurant, which opened in 2021 under Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group, is not small. Sterling has between 60 and 70 people in the kitchen, with another 70 or so working front-of-house. On one recent day, the restaurant served roughly 700 covers between lunch and dinner, including about 450 at dinner alone. I told her that the atmosphere feels a little like being at a wedding; it’s a grand space that somehow feels warm and familiar. “It feels like that every day,” she added.
Watching the kitchen at Ci Siamo move during a busy service, there was little sense of chaos. There is movement, certainly, but it was purposeful and rhythmic: cooks making pasta, tending the fire, assembling dishes, and communicating with one another. Sterling’s approach to leadership in the kitchen has much to do with that level of orchestration.
“We manage in real time,” she explained. Rather than waiting for a formal training session to address a problem, she teaches constantly—stopping, adjusting, demonstrating and explaining in the moment. Sometimes, she simply calls a “time out.”
There are also more formal opportunities for education. Every week and a half or two weeks, depending on her schedule, Sterling leads a regional Italian class for the restaurant team. The lessons move from north to south according to the seasons. A sommelier selects a wine, a chef chooses a dish and Sterling teaches the history of the region, its food and its culinary traditions.
That same impulse runs through AMMAZZA! The book, written with Theresa Gambacorta, contains more than 100 seasonal recipes, but the intimate stories Sterling shares in each chapter make it so distinctive and memorable. She has been cooking for years, in the public eye, and at a caliber many would envy, but the book offers a rare and deeply personal side, readers may not have ever known.
Raised in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, in a Jewish household where her grandmother kept kosher downstairs while the family kept “nonkosher” upstairs, Sterling eventually found herself in Rome after culinary school. There, she writes, the city captured her heart and filled her senses. It’s where the aroma of roasting meat and freshly baked bread stopped her in her tracks.
After returning to New York, she worked with Bobby Flay at Mesa Grill and Bolo before moving through some of the city’s notable kitchens, eventually working at Lupa Osteria Romana and A Voce, where her time with Chef Missy Robbins solidified her appreciation for the regionality and traditions of Italian cooking.
Those influences meld harmoniously in AMMAZZA! where Italian technique and tradition are filtered through her Brooklyn childhood, and the New York restaurant culture she has helped craft. “Ammazza” is a Roman expression for astonishment—like “wow” or “you slayed.” In the book's introduction, Sterling further explains that it’s the visceral sensation of being delightfully overwhelmed by pleasure. It is an apt name for a book that marries food and memory and the endless pleasure that comes from rediscovering both.
If the stories don’t get you (but, they will), one of the photographs just might bring everything full circle. Sterling’s son appears in the book a few times—in one photo that they stand hand in hand in front of her grandmother’s house where she grew up—but in a photo on page 121 you see him with his mother’s curls and a pair of tiny, Elton John-like sunglasses; it’s a photo that seems to connect Chef Hillary Sterling’s journey from the joy found in her aunt’s garden to a career defined by live-fire cooking, seasonality, and respect for the land.
As she expands Ci Siamo to Boston, Sterling stands for a belief in family, and one of mentorship, community and curiosity. These are all things that anchor her legacy in the joy of the kitchen table and moments that deserve… Ammazza!
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