Interview with 3rd Ritual Founder, Jenn Tardif

JENN'S HOME IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Jenn's beautiful Bed Stuy home is full of rituals she shares with her husband and two-year-old daughter, Lola. We spoke about how food is such an important ingredient to those rituals and its presence across cultures.

BREAKFAST

Mornings are busy with a toddler in tow so I accidentally started intermittent fasting at some point. I’m not big on diets of any kind but it’s a lot easier to simply start with tea than attempt to shovel a cold piece of toast into my mouth while doing six other things.

My morning tea is my way of practicing what we preach with 3rd Ritual because we always say that a really simple ritual can be sacred and that the way to activate them is to infuse them with intention. When I make my tea it’s an enactment of this small gesture that’s for me. After having been in service to my daughter (which is totally joyous and done with a lot of levity) it’s still important to do something that’s taking care of and acknowledging myself.

I fill my kettle with water, I set the temperature (my sweet spot is 200 degrees). The brand I’ve been using is Barry’s English Breakfast. After I let it steep, I add a spoonful of honey and a spoonful of milk. It has this beautiful light color. In the summer when we used to be able to go outside, I would always treat myself to an iced chai because that’s something I never mastered making from scratch at home, but I became addicted to it after studying in India. It totally transports me. My everyday tea is a way to ground – a chai tea is a vacation in a cup.

LUNCH

Lunch feels more like eating to survive. I need fuel in the tank to function. Sadly, it doesn’t get a lot of thought. I’ve never been one to make my lunch the night before. I am very function over fancy for that meal, especially during the week. During quarantine, lunch coincides with my daughter’s nap and so I might eat leftovers or whatever my husband is eating, while I’m answering emails and doing three other things. When we’re not in quarantine, I would usually grab something on the go. I’m a big sandwich person. I’m so not what you would imagine – if anyone thought this was going to be a wellness interview, it’s not that. I eat bread. I eat peanut butter. My lunches haven’t waivered very much from being a kid.

DINNER

Dinner is the complete opposite of lunch. The way lunch is an afterthought, dinner is something we plan and is very ritualized. It’s something that has become truly the highlight of every day. During quarantine we started eating dinner as a family. (Before that my daughter was just a little bit too young.) But now we all sit together at the dinner table. We know what we’re having well in advance so there’s anticipation throughout the day. We have this ritual, that actually my daughter started, where we all cheers and then give thanks for something that happened that day, so every day can become a celebration. It’s really sweet. We haven’t skipped it in so long. If we have friends joining us, they participate too. We take our time. We sit at the dinner table for an hour, which is a lot for a two year old.

This is where I should probably confess that I’m not much of a cook and … wait for it, my husband does 98% of the cooking in our house. Does it make you hate me less if you know that I am extremely grateful? He’s Philipino and I’m Chinese, so rice-based dishes are our comfort food.

We eat a lot of fish. One of my recipes that my husband makes is a miso glazed salmon with roasted broccoli and rice. Or he’ll do black sea bass. He does this incredible cheeseless vegetarian lasagna. It starts with a bechamel and he layers from there. For two meals a week we’ll use the Martha & Marley Spoon boxes.

Dinner is like this climax and there’s this beautiful buildup beforehand where I’m playing with my daughter in the living room – and our place is really small so my husband’s just a few meters away cooking. There’s music, there’s wine, there’s conversation for the first time as a family after being busy and focused on work. There are no phones. It really feels like the time we’re the most present. Food is definitely the thread that holds our attention and anchors us a little bit more into the now. We try not to focus on tomorrow’s to do list. By way of our gratitude ritual, we try to hold on to the day and savor something – there’s always something, even if it’s super small.

DESSERT

Wine.

I love a chenin blanc. I love a Spanish white. Shoutout to Leon and Sons who have been delivering wine to us throughout COVID.

SPEED ROUND

Go-to comfort food?
White rice with soy sauce and a cracked egg.

Favorite place to shop for kitchenwares?
Wirecutter.

Cooking playlist?

Solange and Nina Simone and Jessie Ware.

Five food items always in your kitchen?
Bananas. Cholula. Barry’s English Breakfast tea. Soy sauce. Limes.

Best snack between meals?
Popcorn.

Last thing you ordered for delivery?
Crispy brussel sprouts and a pizza from Saraghina.

Dream dinner guest(s)?
Close friends and family. A revolving roster of different combinations of people who don’t necessarily know each other, but who we know will find something amazing in common. I love curating the conversation side of the experience. (And I’m known for giving a toast.)

Favorite seasonal treat?
I love watermelon.

Go-to cookbook?
The only recipes I have are emails from my sister-in-law, Fred.

Cocktail of choice?
Aperol Spritz.

Favorite neighborhood spot?
Calaca.

Whose routine would you love to see on Everyone Eats?
Rajni Jacques. She’s funny and smart and has all these incredible rituals.

Favorite restaurant globally?
Blue Hill at Stone Barns. (Disclaimer: we’ve only eaten there once and aspire to eat there again.) They’ve had a big influence over me and food. For my husband’s Father’s Day present, we splurged and got one of their fish boxes and it was incredible.

Most underrated kitchen tool?
My Schott kettle. It actually has different temperature settings for different types of tea. Like a green or ginger tea is much less hot. It’s my morning ritual to make a tea and this kettle makes it feel so specific.

Foodie celebrity crush?
Nadiya from The Great British Baking Show and Anna Speckhart.

Go-to market or grocery store?
Waegman’s or my local corner store.

Last meal on Earth?
A poutine with white vinegar.

Weirdest eating habit?

I love white vinegar. So much. I could take a shot of it.

Restaurant you’re most excited to try?
French Laundry.

Where do you most feel like The Regular?
In my friend Nurit’s backyard.

THIRD SCOOP

Ritual is such an important part of your life. What is the overlap and significance of food and ritual?

Ahh, where to begin? Food is a necessary ingredient (sorry for the pun) in ritual and is present throughout history and across almost every culture from feast to fast which makes sense if you think about the ways in which it unites the senses.

Back when it was safe to gather, my friend Jess used to host these incredible Shabbat dinners to honor the Sabbath. I’m not Jewish and yet through Jess and the incredible community she cultivated, I’ve benefited and learned so much from Kabbalistic teachings. It’s a beautiful example of how modern interpretations of tradition, like hosting a dinner party, can still be infused with meaning and even, religion or spirituality, without being polarizing or dogmatic.

How do you bring food and ritual into your family life? What traditions were established when you were a child?

I didn’t grow up in a very religious household but our big family dinners were always an event. We didn’t have a separate kids table, we just kept adding seats around my parents’ dining table as more babies were born which is a small but important detail...that way we could all remain at eye level, part of one central conversation instead of being siloed. It’s how we came together for good or bad. Where we shared small news and big laughs. My dad is French Canadian so we’d always follow the meal with a cheese plate and glasses of red wine that were always magically half full. I loved the lingering that would follow a meal. The felt sense of staying in what we all knew deep down was a fleeting moment in time.

On Christmas we would all form a dumpling making assembly line with my Chinese grandmother at the helm. One person (usually my sister) would be in charge of rolling out the dough, then she’d pass the perfectly flat and round disk to the person on her left who’d spoon in the filling (traditionally it was pork and chives but we later started experimenting with vegetarian medleys) then over to the youngest members of the family for the pinching. We lost both my grandmother and mother several years ago, but we’ve kept this tradition, and I guess our lineage, alive by continuing to come together to make dumplings every year. It embodies so much of what I gravitate towards in ritual — a seemingly simple practice that is both accessible (we’ve now taught our own children to pinch and fill) and sacred.

How can we use 3rd Ritual to improve our own food rituals at home?

Since launching our candle holder BEL, we’ve heard from so many people that they use it at dinner parties. When the candle is lit, wax melts and eventually a pin falls, landing with a resonant ding — many folks use it as a tool to create meaning from the otherwise mundane. Some have asked each guest to share an intention when the first pin falls, others have used it to time a moment of silence at their wedding with the intention of invoking more presence and mindfulness as they proceed with the festivities.

I’m obviously biased, but it has become a staple at our gatherings — even folks who have never meditated in the traditional sense find it easier to hold still when they have something tangible to capture their attention. When I light it, I often tell people to view the flickering flame of the candle as a mirror to the fluctuations of their mind. The melting wax is an homage to the passing of time. And the pin falling pierces through the soft atmospheric sounds, uniting guests for a sacred moment in time. We had a pretty elaborate 3rd Ritual holiday party last year with crazy catering and gift bags and yet nearly a year later people still reminisce about the moment we all stood still in silence. It’s our way of practicing what we preach - that when you move half as fast, you notice twice as much.