Most of the year, Tara Lazar, founder of F10 Creative, a Southern California restaurant group, cooks alongside her houseguests. At a 16-foot island, made from an ailing walnut tree trucked hundreds of miles from outside Sacramento to her home in the Old Las Palmas neighborhood of Palm Springs, they gather as she delegates tasks, like stuffing mushroom dumplings or helping prepare potato latkes.
“It relaxes me,” she said, “and it is an unexpected icebreaker.”
But not at Passover.
For her Seder, which can be as intimate as eight guests and as lively as 30, Ms. Lazar prepares her dishes before everyone arrives. The meal is too important, as it has been for generations of women in her family.
“I remember when my Jewish grandmother Rita Tannenbaum Lazar slapped my mother’s wrist if she took the top off the matzo balls in less than 20 minutes,” said Ms. Lazar, laughing. “And my great-aunt’s brisket was so dry that my cousin Gaby, who lives in Israel, covered it with a whipped zhug.”
Ms. Lazar thought that the meal needed something with more flavor, so she riffed on a chicken dish from Yotam Ottolenghi’s 2018 cookbook, “Simple.” (In the book, Mr. Ottolenghi writes that he had improvised on the chicken Marbella in Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso’s 1982 “Silver Palate Cookbook.”)
Putting her desert stamp on the recipes, Ms. Lazar substitutes dates, originally from the Middle East and now grown locally, for the prunes.
“It makes sense where we are to use what we have in the desert, just as our ancestors had to do,” Ms. Lazar said of the dish, which is even served at Birba, a restaurant she owns with her husband, Marco Rossetti.
When the guests finally arrive, they’ll wash their hands. Someone will hide the afikomen for the children, including her two young sons, Maszlo and Maddox, to find. And, instead of lining up at the kitchen island, guests sit outside at a long table under lemon and grapefruit trees.
Date palms and the San Jacinto Mountains — “so similar to the Sinai,” said Ms. Lazar’s cousin, David Lazar, rabbi of Or Hamidbar — line the background.
“It is so awe-inspiring,” added Rabbi Lazar, who often leads the Seder. “An everyday presence, the mountains put us all in our place.”
Looking at the mountains that face the home where she’s spent most of the last 49 Seders, Ms. Lazar said, they “add peace and stability to my life.”
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