Matthew Slotover

And so just when the weather's terrible and everything's, you know, raining and dark, you go to Valencia, it's sunny, you get these bright fruits and you bring them back and it's just amazing.

And there's all these different types of citrus there.

Yeah, like crazy things that I'd never heard of.

Alice B. Toklas, yeah.

I don't know when I discovered Alice and Gertrude.

They're kind of legendary.

But when we were trying to come up with a name for the restaurant, we just thought, well, this is something that merges art and food.

That's what we wanted to do.

And if you say Tockler's to an art world person or a literary person, they're like, oh, yeah, she wrote the cookbook.

I mean, Gertrude Stein has a claim that the French, they lived in Paris in the early 20th century.

to invent incubism really because her form of writing was sort of abstract before Picasso was making abstracted art it was kind of surreal and they were very close friends and he was influenced by her there's a lot of books coming out Deborah Levy's got a book coming out yeah there's two books out at the moment yeah there's another one coming it's very it's about 100 years people are re-evaluating her at the moment but Alice was her kind of very quiet girlfriend

who just organized everything.

And Gertrude died in the 40s, and Alice was running out of money.

They were selling their art collection to live.

They bought all this amazing art up to about 1910, 1914.

I couldn't afford to buy it after that, and then began to sell it.

And Alice needed some money, so she decided to write a cookbook in 1956 called The Alice B. Douglas Cookbook.

And she sourced recipes from places they'd been to in France in the early 20th century.

But she also asked artists to contribute things.

And this artist, Brian Gyson, sent her a recipe for hashish fudge.