Why Cooking is Caregiving, with Chef Hillary Sterling | Better in Person

“I feel like I’m a caregiver,” Hillary Sterling says, explaining why she has spent her life cooking. Sterling is the executive chef at Ci Siamo, a loud, wood-fired Italian restaurant in New York City. In this conversation with Steven Dubner, she walks through a career that started washing dishes and peeling onions in a basement and led to a Michelin-starred kitchen—and then to turning down a dream job at Union Square Cafe because she knew it wouldn’t let her be herself. The episode is built around a central idea: cooking, at its best, is not about following recipes or using thermometers. It is about using your senses to connect with the food, and then using that food to take care of other people.

Learning to Cook with Your Senses

Sterling’s most vivid lesson in cooking came not from culinary school (she never went) but from a brutal night on the sauté station at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill. Her first night on the job, she overcooked more than a hundred pork tenderloins. Her chef gave her a second chance, but also a strange instruction: “You have seven days to be one with the pork.” Sterling took it literally. She spent the week staring at pork tenderloins, cooking them, watching them, timing them. “There’s a moment where they glisten,” she says. “That meant it was ready.” She learned to read the meat without a thermometer—by sight, sound, and touch.