Overview of Better in Person with Chef Hillary Sterling
In this episode of Better in Person, Stephen Dubner interviews Hillary Sterling, executive chef at Ci Siamo in New York City, about how cooking became her life’s work, why she sees food as an act of caregiving, and how she uses instinct and the senses as much as technique. The conversation moves between kitchen demos, personal history, restaurant leadership, and the economics of running a high-volume restaurant, with plenty of humor along the way.
Main Themes
Cooking as caregiving
- Sterling frames cooking as a deeply personal, relational act: she sees herself as a caregiver first and a chef second.
- She says she loves making food for other people, especially her son, friends, and restaurant guests.
- For her, feeding people is not just about flavor—it’s about memory, comfort, and connection.
Learning through the senses
- Sterling emphasizes that great cooking depends on listening, smelling, watching, and touching, not just following recipes or using thermometers.
- A formative moment in her career was learning to recognize when pork tenderloins were done by their “glisten” rather than by rigid measurement.
- She teaches cooks to slow down, observe, and reset, especially when they’re struggling.
Italian food as culture, not just cuisine
- Sterling describes Italian cooking as a culture and worldview, not merely a set of dishes.
- She loves the daily rituals of Italy: espresso, cornetti, pasta at lunch, wine, and pride in local ingredients.
- Ci Siamo reflects her approach to Italian food: it honors tradition while also bringing in New York, Italian-American influences, and regional diversity.
A hard-edged childhood shaped her palate
- Sterling says she grew up in a home with lots of canned, mushy, low-quality food, which made her especially aware of texture.
- That background helped explain why she became a chef: she was searching for something better, more alive, and more intentional.
- She also credits her grandparents with modeling a more joyful, appreciative attitude toward food and life.
Career and Restaurant Philosophy
From line cook to executive chef
- Sterling began working in restaurants at 14 in Montauk.
- She worked her way up through New York kitchens, including Mesa Grill and A Voce, before becoming executive chef at Ci Siamo.
- Early in her career, she learned under demanding conditions: long hours, intense pressure, and little hand-holding.
She values fairness and teaching
- Sterling wants to be known as a fair boss.
- She believes strong leadership means:
- correcting mistakes immediately,
- demonstrating the right process,
- teaching by doing,
- and not letting staff struggle unnecessarily.
- Her style is direct, fast, and pragmatic—but rooted in wanting others to succeed.
She is not interested in dictatorship
- She rejects the old-school restaurant culture of cruelty, drinking, and misery.
- Her goal is to create a kitchen where people are challenged, respected, and coached, not broken down.
Career Choices and Creative Identity
Why she turned down Union Square Cafe
- Sterling was approached for the Union Square Cafe job, but she ultimately declined.
- Her reason: she felt she would not be able to be fully herself within that restaurant’s established history and structure.
- At that point in her career, she wanted to build her own identity rather than step into someone else’s legacy.
Why Ci Siamo fit
- She later joined Ci Siamo because it aligned with her vision:
- a modern take on Italian food,
- a place where she could be herself,
- and a restaurant that reflected both heritage and reinvention.
- She sees the restaurant as honest, not overly forced or precious.
The Business of Running a Restaurant
Restaurant economics are a daily puzzle
- Sterling discusses how restaurant finances are driven by:
- food costs
- wine costs
- labor
- She personally handles negotiations with suppliers, including ordering thousands of pounds of produce and seafood.
Volume, quality, and discipline
- She notes that chefs often dream of small, 40-seat restaurants because they allow for more precision.
- But she’s comfortable with high-volume service and says her current food is the best she’s ever cooked because she allows for more rusticity and less perfectionism.
Notable Anecdotes and Moments
The “be one with the pork” story
- One of the episode’s most memorable stories is Sterling’s first major failure on sauté, when she overcooked a huge batch of pork tenderloins.
- Her chef told her to “be one with the pork,” a phrase that stayed with her for decades.
- She used that setback as a lesson in patience, observation, and mastery.
Food, memory, and emotion
- Dubner’s homemade fish stew becomes a funny but meaningful example of how food can trigger memory and emotion.
- Sterling is reminded of something her grandmother might have made, even though she jokes that she doesn’t actually like soup.
- The exchange underscores one of the episode’s main ideas: feeding someone is as much about what they remember and feel as what they taste.
Her first cookbook and future plans
- Sterling discusses her first cookbook, Amatsa, and reflects on how writing and cooking both involve structure, voice, and identity.
- She says she wants to keep expanding her reach—through new restaurants, teaching, and helping more people cook more intuitively.
Key Takeaways
- Cooking is relational: Sterling sees food as an act of care, not just production.
- Technique matters, but intuition matters more: she trusts sensory awareness over rigid rules.
- Good leadership is teaching: her ideal kitchen is fair, fast-moving, and educational.
- Identity matters in creativity: she chose work that let her cook in her own voice.
- Restaurants are both art and business: success depends on taste, culture, teamwork, and relentless operational discipline.
Memorable Quote
“I feel like I’m a caregiver.”
This line captures the episode’s central idea: for Hillary Sterling, cooking is not just a job or a craft—it’s a way of taking care of people.