Back in June after going to see New Pornographers play in Prospect Park, my friend Sean and I went for some pizza. Not just any pizza, though — pizza at Amorina is amazing. Not just your traditional NYC slices, but some wonderful you-put-that-on-pizza? combinations and toppings as well. The restaurant is run by a friend of Sean’s, and when we got there, another friend of his was there helping out for the night. This other friend turned out to be chef in her own right, formerly partnered in her own catering company, still doing some private cooking for people, and helping out her friend, Ruth, the pizza chef when necessary. But it turned out that her day job was running the >Mayor’s Volunteer Center of New York City — which of course, I had never heard of.
It was that night that I said to Nazli Parvizi that I had to do an interview with her. If you’ve ever met Nazli, you would know that it didn’t take much prompting before she said, “Yeah!” but with an enthusiasm and possibly an expletive that apparently isn’t becoming someone in city government. (I’ll never tell! Or … whoops …) So I called Lily the next day and said I had a great subject for one of our next Gothamist Interviews. Lo and behold, that’s what we’ve got today.
Regardless of her love for Wonderbread and mayo sandwiches, she actually has a remarkably broad knowledge and love of all things food and food related, and while I have yet to be invited to one of her apparently infamous Sunday brunches (hint! hint!), I hear she’s an amazing chef. She studied “food anthropology” in college (a major of her own design), and one of the more interesting things she’s thought about doing over the years is creating some sort of art installation that would depict the actual last meals (I mean the food itself) of Texans no longer on death row. In fact, although we couldn’t include this in the interview on Gothamist, she made a comment when discussing this idea that I found particularly fascinating, maybe because it’s probably true:
I really believe in the old saying, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” There is a lot you can tell about where a person lives, works, socio-economic status, race/ethnicity – just by looking at what they eat. And what I love about food is that it is a common ground between everyone – we all eat obviously. But it’s also a good way of approaching people and getting them to talk about themselves.
I don’t know that I had actually heard that “old saying” before, but I’d be scared to have what I eat analyzed for the purpose of figuring out my personality.
The few times I’ve chatted with Nazli, I’ve found a wonderfully uninhibited and lively woman who seems to squeeze a lot of work and social activity into the same day in which I never seem to have enough time to get anything done. And meanwhile, unlike all the people who talk about society’s ills while doing not much more than complaining, she’s actually doing something to make this city a better place. Plus, I so want to see Food Network pick-up the show she wants to do with friend Ruth: cooking, motorcycles, bikinis … need I say more?
Out of Focus 