It’s 6.30 on a Tuesday night and after a day of eating nothing but a croissant from a bar two blocks away from my student residence, my stomach is pinging with hunger. Almost as if she could hear the rumbles calling from my abdomen, I receive a text from my friend Mariam asking me to join her on a walk to our neighborhood Conad. It’s finally dinnertime.
What ensues is a couple hours of rummaging through grocery aisles translating Italian food labels, debating the ever-annoying “what do we want to make” question and carrying more ingredients than we could have possibly needed back to our communal kitchen. It’s far from what I envisioned dinner in the food capital of the world would look like, but I can’t say I’m mad at it.
Cooking, baking and food in general have always been incredibly important to me, but I didn’t think they would play such a central role in my time abroad. I have always been inspired by the way Italians come together for a meal. Though I love food, I am notorious for leaving dinner to be an afterthought, often grabbing fast food at 11pm when I finally realize that I haven’t eaten yet. It’s easy for food and eating to seem like a trivial part of any day, but in reality it’s fundamental, so why not turn it into a social gathering?
When I imagined life in Florence, I assumed I’d be sitting across from the Duomo, drinking an ice-cold Aperol spritz and laughing alongside my friends, followed by a dinner of traditional Tuscan dishes at some famous, touristy, TikTok restaurant. As a foodie, I saw local restaurants as my gateway to the city. By trying each spot I saw, I figured I would find my way around all of Florence in no time. I quickly realized how unattainable that would be on my shoestring, study abroad budget, and so I returned back to the communal kitchen ready to settle for a simple pasta, just to get by.
What I didn’t expect was how being in this kitchen would become the highlight of my days. On a given night, I can walk into the kitchen and watch a number of heartwarming culinary moments unfold. Some students stand at their station, meticulously chopping vegetables, while others sit and patiently stir their bolognese. The question “What are you making?” bounces throughout the room, while each student explains the meal that they have likely spent all day conjuring up as students are dancing around each other, borrowing ingredients and offering tastes.
The kitchen looks like something straight out of a cooking TV show. Equipped with induction stovetops and state-of-the-art ventilation, it’s the kind of space a home cook could only dream of and, though it is lacking in some of my go-to kitchen tools, I make do with what I have.
Enamored by this environment, I quickly decided that I would start branching out and try to be creative with what I made. With that, dinner stopped being a laborious, solitary box to check at the end of the night; it became social and collaborative. I would call my friends over to taste-test my improvised recipes, and their feedback quickly turned into conversations that lasted our entire time in the kitchen.
On my most recent stint in the kitchen, Mariam and I happened upon nearly 30 lemons that were grown in the garden of our campus. I was elated to have harvested so much fresh produce, so naturally the two of us created a whole menu around these beautiful citruses. As we drank our homemade lemonade, we tossed together a lemon arugula salad, cooked creamy lemon pasta with roasted chicken, and indulged in lemon blueberry bars for dessert. What started as a simple, lemon-themed dinner for the two of us quickly became a community affair as we paraded around the kitchen offering bites to anyone nearby. Before we knew it, we had formed our own food community right in that kitchen.
In the two hours I generally spend in the kitchen each night, more students than I can count rotate through the space. With that comes varying levels of cooking knowledge and so many personalities, but when you bring people together around a shared stovetop, people open up and food is at the center of that. Though Florence is famous for its restaurants, my most memorable meals haven’t happened in them. Instead they have happened alongside my classmates in our cramped, communal kitchen.
