On keeping the playful part of you alive

Mehreen Karim is a freelance recipe developer, writer, editor, and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. She writes Brown Butter Club on Substack and is the host of the Picky Eaters Show.

How do you stick to your vision?

Sometimes this question comes back to whether people have an internal or external monologue. Do you know about that?

Tell me more.

I’ve recently discovered people hear their own voice in their head narrating their experiences. Let’s say one of my friends is walking down the street and they see someone wearing shoes they think are ugly. They’ll be like, “Oh, those are ugly shoes.” I’ve never experienced that. I just feel the disgust. If I want to tell someone about it, I just form that sentence afterwards. But there are people who form the sentence simultaneously. I experience the sensation and I either choose to live or observe it or I don’t. That translates to how I envision a final product or final experience. It’s like I have this internal barometer for the mark I’m trying to hit and there are literal elements in my head, like a rubric of sorts.

Two autumns ago, I held a dinner at this restaurant that was extremely romantic on the inside. It’s all warm woods, soft fabrics, upholstery, velvets and greens. There’s an opportunity to make you feel very elegant and romantic. That sets the stage for how this menu is going to further enhance your evening in this space. Those end up becoming the benchmark for how the food should taste and build upon in each course, the playlists I create for the evening. The way the flavors meet you at every course as well. I had an extremely citrusy and bright salad to begin with so that you aren’t immediately indulging in richer flavors. And color wise as well; the salad was very vibrant but still stuck to the autumnal tones of the interior. We continued to get deeper and indulgent as the meal went on.

I was meant to confirm that pop-up menu in September, and I, for the life of me, could not find inspiration culinary-wise for months. It wasn’t until I had a dinner my mother-in-law made me, on a really cold evening at the beginning of October, this delicious soup that is originally Pakistani. I tasted this and immediately understood this is part of a menu that would fit the experience I wish to bring people. I had to have someone else cook it for me and taste it for me to then build that menu around it.

Are you generally pretty trusting of the process like, “The inspiration will come.” Or are you like, “Oh my god, it’s September and I don’t even know what I’m going to cook yet for this October pop-up.” Where are you on that scale?

At that time, I began to feel disappointed that I didn’t have inspiration because it hadn’t taken me that long ever up until that point. It was a sign to me of how burn-out must have been affecting me. I was no longer cooking at home in a way that fostered that creativity. It required someone else serving and cooking me food for me to realize that I used to be able to cook myself whatever the hell I felt like eating that day. It used to be the quickest way in which I would understand what I’m excited to share with others. I was at that point two to three years into doing pop-ups around Brooklyn.

My brain was used to the fact that what I was cooking at home could have the potential to be something I serve to an audience. That really messed with my natural creative flow. Because I mentally cannot deal with performing something or doing something and knowing it has a secondary intention. Or if it’s incentivized in some insincere way. I feel so hyper aware of that so I no longer believe in what I’m making or doing. So it was very difficult to look at what I was cooking at home and think it was honest to anything I actually wanted to cook creatively. That’s why that was probably one of the first times I did actually panic and push back my deadline.

I’m sure I would have been able to put together a menu if push came to shove and it would have been delicious. And maybe I would have been successful in selling it as something as natural as the menu I did end up creating—but I would know that it wasn’t. And that would have been a first and that would have been really unfortunate for me. I’m sure I could do a good job at selling it to my audience and selling it to myself even but I didn’t want to do that.

Do you find that you generally have a strong internal compass and validation?

Yes, intensely.

It’s funny because I don’t know when I became confident in my own compass. It must have been alongside being in New York. I was raised by my parents but I have a brother seven years older than me and a sister eight years older than me who are also both artists and designers. I was raised with so many eyes on my work. By work, I mean my third grade science project up through my college entry essays, they were all passed through rounds and rounds of feedback by people I trusted were smarter than me and also constantly thought outside the box. They have been sharpening me for my entire youth and adolescence. By the time I left for college, that compass was very strongly calibrated.

I recently had a conversation with my older sister who threw me a baby shower last year that was so conceptually tight that it scared the rest of my best friends. They were like, “That’s even more intense than you.” I’m like, “Yeah, where do you think I got this from?” The notes she was hitting and hoping resonated with me were so obscured in our personal histories as girls and the final product came together as something extremely exciting and relatable for the guests, but only we knew just how deeply ingrained this was in us.

There were so many elements of nostalgia that ended up resonating with the entire crowd but they couldn’t understand why. My sister definitely taught me how to trust that vision. What seems unnecessary in the preliminary stages ends up being the most impressive atmosphere around whatever it is you create.

Can you describe this baby shower?

I was inspired by the song “99 Red Balloons.” I told my sister and my friends, “I have a dream of being surrounded by all these red balloons. I have this lovely giant red dress I’m going to wear. I myself am going to look like a balloon.”

My sister decided we weren’t going to use regular red balloons. She found these giant Mylar spherical balloons. She envisioned my future baby as this magical little boy with little wings. We would watch these ’90s anime like Sailor Moon and [Cardcaptor] Sakura. There’s these symbols of wings and it’s drawn in a very specific manga style. There’s often cloud imagery and airiness in ‘90 slice-of-life anime. She took that inspiration to create this bubbly and whimsical, shiny experience. She created these silver tassels that hung down from every red balloon that almost reminded me of a Chinese lantern. She also engineered this magnet hook and secured each one onto the ceiling. She had an assembly line of my friends constructing each balloon and hanging them up. She constructed a giant—I’m not exaggerating—three-foot wide heart-shaped disco ball. She went to wherever you get giant blocks of foam and shaved it into a giant, perfectly-shaped, cute heart. And mosaic disco tiles like cut individual glass tiles.

The entrance of the party had this gorgeous photo booth where there’s a professional light set up. She made this backdrop from scratch with a red velvet tapestry where she constructed a heart frame and then tied the red velvet around the heart. It looked like an ’80s school dance. We all stood in front of it and took what ended up looking like yearbook photos. And that’s hyper inspired from our love for 13 Going on 30 and the ’80s music. All of these elements felt cohesive to the people joining. There’s 10 pieces of me scattered across this entire room right now and only we knew that.

That’s so beautiful. Were you all able to debrief about it before or after with your sister?

For sure. Before, we were stressed and at odds with each other. I was like, “I told you not to make it stressful!” But that’s the process, especially when you’re collaborating with another artist. It’s only recently I considered myself an artist. My sister and my brother are definitely the benchmarks for that. For my sister, style is the first thing she thinks about, while my brother is logistical. Both always have beautiful products at the end. I’m somewhere in between them.

What made you finally feel comfortable calling yourself an artist?

My sister kind of unintentionally gave me that validation recently. The people I look up to and consider artists, I recognize them admiring my work, too. Whenever I was speaking with friends I highly look up to for their artistic work and processes, it was pretty amazing to realize there were things I was doing that were inspiring them back.

It helped me continue to commit to those processes. It wasn’t just like, “Oh, these incredible artists think I’m an artist, so I am one, too.” It’s more like “If these are the processes shared by so many different artists, I want to continue joining them and doing so. Where’s the finish line where I get to call myself that?” I don’t really care. It’s not like I need to earn that title. It’s more so comforting to understand that these processes, no matter how grueling, are worth my time.

The through lines are validating because you realize that everybody kind of goes through the same thing, no matter what you’re working on. Even the moments when it’s a struggle and you’re experiencing burnout, it’s part of the process. Recognizing that is illuminating.

Exactly. And so rewarding when you do earn a chance to be inspiring to someone else that you look up to. It’s like, “Oh wow, I’m so glad I committed to those extra 10 steps to be myself here.”

Did your family have a background in event planning at all?

We’ve always been very particular about music—lining our experiences with the perfect song, the perfect soundtrack, the perfect movie. We’ve always been obsessed with movies and how they leave us feeling. When we provide an experience for other people, we want to be able to control all the elements as much as possible. We see it as if we’re in the back room with all these control panels and switches, whether it’s the playlist that’s on, or the way the light is working, the time of day that an event is happening, we like to curate an emotional experience for other people.

Is there a through-line in terms of the mood or thoughts or themes you want to curate in your own experiences, your cookbooks, and your writing?

Looking back at my work, the consistent through-line is playfulness. There is a childishness. The word “whimsical” is being fucked with so bad right now and I can’t stand to use it here again, but the word has been on every mood board of mine since I got married and maybe even before that. There’s absurdity in a lot of what I like to make or do for others. Absurdity, whimsical, playful—they’re all on one spectrum as well.

One example of absurdity was when I was doing a residency and my menu was being served at this restaurant for a month straight. I wanted to kick off the residency by celebrating the fact that I was going to have my menu at a restaurant for a month and how serendipitous that this is January, the beginning of a new year.

I threw my ideal New Year’s party. I don’t drink, I don’t really go out too much. I hired my favorite DJ. I made the party start at 10:00 p.m. My favorite foods were served. It was decked out in this sort of playful, bright disco-y decor. I bought this three-foot tall tiered tower and in front of all 300 guests, I started decorating the disco fries. I had squeeze bottles of the disco sauces and garnishes…it was just the most hilarious imagery to see me in go-go boots and a neon green disco-y dress squeezing sauces on this giant tower of disco fries.

That felt very natural to me. Everyone else had a blast, too, because both of the sauce bottles exploded and everyone was like, “That is so classic Mehreen.” I’m really fucking messy and I love it. I’m what my family calls the most careless one in my family. I’m that little black sheep who breaks everything and messes everything up. Despite how calculated I might sound, there’s a level of disassociated destructiveness I also have in what I make. Playfulness, absurdity, destructiveness.

It’s very childlike. You have your toys but you also break your toys but you expect that as part of the process.

Yeah, exactly. That’s very true. I did a private dinner for a friend the other day who was turning 30 and she wanted a very elegant party but there was so much childishness in the way things were designed. There was asparagus sitting in a bright pink sauce. It looked like a fake Tellytubby sauce. And everyone was like, “What the F is this?” But they all liked how it tasted. That sense of wonderment is really important to me.

How has having a baby changed your artist’s life, your creative practice, or how you see the world?

It feels like I’m finally allowed to be myself.

And I didn’t realize I wasn’t being myself. It is so incredible to feel 100 percent trusting that letting him rip up this piece of grass is the right thing to do. And it opened my eyes to how much I’ve probably questioned myself, even as I continue to be this playful version of me. I probably always doubted whether it’s right or not, whether it’s okay or not. For the first time it’s not only right, it is fully appropriate. It is helpful, it is necessary for him. And it’s just this perfect enmeshment of so much of what I’ve wanted to experience liberally internally and externally, how I’ve wanted to play and present myself in my own life that is in harmony now with what my child needs. That’s a very exciting way to move through the world now and be able to guide him through that.

Do you feel like you have a sense of his personality yet or is it way too early to tell?

He’s almost one and we’ve been noticing the way he reacts to new people. Yesterday he walked up to this other baby his size, and the other baby was really nice and quiet and kind. And my son walked up to him and just shrieked at him out of excitement. That’s because every time I see my son, when he wakes up from a nap, I just start screaming at him and he’s like, “Yeah.” He gets so excited to see me. I love that It’s good for us to scream at each other in this way. Screaming doesn’t mean anything bad for the first time in my life. And so I do that with my son.

And that’s what he did to this other poor one-year-old. The other one-year-old looked at me, and I was like, “Oh, he’s so happy to see you. Teach him hello. He doesn’t know hello yet.” Then the one-year-old was disarmed. I’m seeing him have these bursts of energy. He loves just textural details of anything. He crawls along our wood floor and stops at every grain of wood that he hadn’t seen before.

Sounds like you do the same thing.

Yeah, exactly. He’s very observant. As I mentioned before, music has been a big part of my life in terms of setting the tone and emotional atmosphere. There was a song I used to play for him every day while he was in the womb, because I wanted him to be able to recognize it later as well. It’s “Beautiful Boy” by John Lennon. There was the first four or five months of their life where they’re not responding too much to stimuli around them, or not in an intentional way. Around six to seven months I played that song. He always looks at the speaker when a song comes on. He knows that it’s music time. He always does that. But when that song came on, he looked at the speaker, he looked shocked and looked at the speaker, and just stared at the speaker the entire time the song played. And it was such an incredible experience. That was the first time. Usually he just acknowledges it and then continues on. And so, that to me was really special to know that you play music to your belly, not really even being able to imagine the baby inside, and all of a sudden the entire nine months of my pregnancy feels more real than it ever did.

Were there any foods that you really fixated on during your pregnancy? Did it make you excited to be like, “When he can eat this, I wonder if he’s going to have the same déjà vu moment?”

Oh, my god, that’s so true. Yeah, hilariously enough, it was string cheese that I ate 10 times a day. He loves everything actually. I will hand him a piece of raw oregano and he’s like, “Yeah, let me eat this grass.” He wants to try anything in his mouth, but he definitely freaking loves cheese and dairy, that’s for sure. But he eats whatever we eat. I feed him literally anything we’re eating and he loves it and it’s hilarious.

That’s so sweet. Has having a child changed your art yet?

I think it has and will. It’s the first time I think it’s worth creative writing. It’s worth spending my time writing more personal essays. My life feels more precious to me than ever because it might be the only way in which I get to introduce a different version of myself to my son in the future. That is really incredible to me to think I could also set an example for him in the future where I’ve never had the discipline to write consistently for personal satisfaction. And if I believe in my work and my creativity enough, I should be able to commit myself to that. I would love for Sufi to grow up and be able to see what that commitment looks like.

I don’t want to just be a chef. Not that there’s anything wrong with just being that, because I’m really fucking good at that, too, but I know I’m also good at writing and speaking and thinking. I want to know that my thoughts are worth putting somewhere and for him to see that, too. I also think it will just make me a smarter mom for him as well.

The empathy that comes with having a child and understanding what it takes to bring a human into the world…it’s a very jarring sense of empathy, actually. It makes my worldview almost upsetting, because it’s like everyone is a baby to me. The way in which I affect other people, potentially harm other people, I feel so aware of that now. My art or whatever I create, I’m hyper-aware of it having a net positive impact. I’m not as critical perhaps as I would have been before. That empathy drives what I want to output.