It was a summer day years ago in Texas, and Aimee Hunter was visiting her grandmother on her farm. Grandma spent an hour making a potato salad for Hunter, using all ingredients grown just outside her door. Hunter took one look and blurted out “I don’t like potato salad!” Her grandma promptly burst into tears.
“So I tried a bite,” Hunter recalls, “and it was the best thing I’d ever tasted.” She was just seven years old but she never forgot this lesson.
Ten years later, Hunter went to Guatemala on a mission trip.
“All the people in the town would cook for us,” she remembers. “It was magical to see how food offerings brought people together. That’s when I decided to be a chef. The communal experience of food is something so wonderful that I wanted to be a part of it.”
She was accepted into some prestigious cooking schools, but didn’t have enough money for tuition. So she decided to learn on the job. In 2003, she moved to New York, mostly cooking for private families.
“I worked for extraordinarily wealthy people in the Hamptons,” she says, “and organized outlandish and mostly private events.”
But some were open to the public – and a few drew national attention.
“I was the first to do pop-up picnics in Central Park,” she says.
But after 12 years, big city life lost its charm and Hunter moved to rural California. She spent a lot of time on local farms buying produce and watching the farmers work. She’d always known that fresh ingredients were best. But, she says, “there’s a big difference between cooking with farm food and actually growing it. I learned how much work goes into crops and produce before the chef gets it. The chef gets the praise but often it’s the vegetables that make the dish. If someone hands you a perfect vegetable it’s like they are handing you a fistful of rubies.”
Hunter came to Tulsa on a whim – she wanted to visit a friend. She didn’t plan on staying very long, but she slowly fell in love with the city, especially with the blocks of rambling old mansions half a mile north of downtown. There was a vacant storefront with no takers. She put in a kitchen with a wood counter around it, bar stools around the counter, placed a long table in front, and now it’s Prism Cafe. In this sun-filled, welcoming space, breakfast and lunch are served, with recurrent pop-up dinners.
Hunter’s cooking style is much as you’d expect after reading about her life.
“I want to make things people will be excited to eat,” she says. “I’ve never wanted to impress people with needless technique or fancy style. I stick to timeless classics like roast chicken, but I make sure the meat is juicy and the skin crispy. I try to make people think. People don’t use tarragon or cardamom that often at home, so I sometimes do, just to show them that there’s a gigantic world of flavor out there.”
She also applies what she learned in California. She shapes her menu to use the produce she gets.
“A farmer I know just dropped off some banana peppers and arugula,” she tells us. “I’ll pickle the peppers to use in sandwiches and we’ll have an arugula salad at lunch tomorrow. It’s making me hungry,” she says.
Most produce is from farmers she knows. There won’t be much local produce in winter but there will be local eggs, bacon, chicken and milk.
Some items stay on the menu every week.
“There’s a brie apple sandwich that’s everyone’s favorite,” she says. “Melted brie, thick slices of apple, balsamic glaze, homemade mayo, on a very soft ciabatta. There’s ginger lemonade I make. It’s very sparkly and bright and fresh – people love it.”
The dinner pop-ups, on the other hand, are never repeated. Fifty or so people gather, new friendships are made, sealed by delicious food.
“I create things I’m craving,” she says. “Oaxacan, Thai, Middle Eastern, you never know.”
Main image cutline: At Prism Cafe, the East Coast Italian is a new offering. You can get the sandwich with garlic Parmesan focaccia by Slate Sourdough, an artisan bakery in downtown Tulsa. Photos by Stephanie Phillips
