Kitchen Keepsakes

Little pieces of kitchens and dining rooms that stay

I recently took a last-minute trip to visit my 91-year-old grandmother.

Rare Medium, in many ways, was inspired by my grandfather (her late husband) who we called Gramps. He was the life of the party, the truest restaurant regular. The kind of person whose face was painted on the walls, a second-generation patron who got a kiss on the cheek when he walked through the dining room doors.

But Sonny, my grandmother, who we call Nana, has just as quietly shaped my love of food.

Even at 91, she still cooks every single one of her meals. Any time I come over, she has a beautiful spread waiting: handmade tuna salad, egg salad, bagels and lox, and her specialty — an assortment of baked goods, usually rugelach or her almond cookies. She is patient, incredibly detail-oriented. The kind of cook who takes her time and knows exactly why something works.

She once handwrote all of her recipes, and has since typed them up, making sure they’re saved and passed down to me, my brother, and my three cousins.

And yet, she rarely needs them. She knows everything by heart, the kind of cook who doesn’t follow a recipe so much as feel her way through it. Things come out slightly different every time. She lets sliced apples sit in cinnamon sugar for hours before tucking them under a crust, allowing the liquid to soak and transform the fruit into something sticky, soft, and almost jammy. Some days the crust is a little more crisp, others more cinnamon-forward, but always hers.

She has perfected the tart, vinegary dressing my family uses religiously on every salad. Her cheesecake uses only cream cheese (omitting the typical ricotta) and is finished with strawberries that have been left to soften into a silky, spoonable topping.

It’s these small things. The patience. The intention. The details that make something taste just a little bit better.

In my family, we joke about the “Sibley gene”- a shared standard for discerning good taste when it comes to food - an ability to notice the small things, the details that separate good from great. It is a badge of honor we wear proudly. But really, it all comes from her.

Alongside her recipes, Nana has kept everything. Notes, cards, invitations; small physical records of a life.

During my visit, we went through them together.

A wedding invitation from her parents (my great-grandparents) hosted in their home in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in 1930. I didn’t even know our family had lived there. Now, almost 100 years later, I live in Brooklyn too.

She showed me a postcard she wrote to her parents from Paris while on her honeymoon with my grandfather, sent back to Jackson Heights, Queens. In it, she describes long, leisurely French bistro meals and how much they were enjoying themselves, but also how much they missed home-cooked food.

They ended up seeking out Jewish food in Paris. Gefilte fish, familiar dishes, something that tasted like Jewish New York. I’m not sure I would’ve done the same, but reading her words, in her handwriting, made it feel immediate. Specific. Alive.

Restaurants, in their own way, are keepsakes too.

They hold onto dishes from another time, recipes passed down or reinterpreted. They reflect a chef’s memory of how something was made, often by a parent or grandparent. Even the objects within them, the plates, the glassware, sometimes come from somewhere else entirely, carrying their own history.

And then there are the things we take with us.

Matchbooks, which may feel trendy again, but are really just small, perfect souvenirs. The kind of thing you don’t think twice about until you find it later and remember exactly where you were sitting. But also, stickers. Menus.

The doggy bag you grab on your way out — which maybe you don’t keep permanently but it helps to savor the meal just a few days longer. Like this one from Claud, after a meal a few years ago where we celebrated my best friends’ birthday, and she got to take what remained of their massive slice of chocolate cake to go.

Some restaurants sell mugs, t-shirts, hats - little pieces of themselves you buy and bring home. During my third meal at Crevette, I noticed that all of the staff were wearing these perfectly creme colored t-shirts that were the perfect thick cut tee, and my coworker and I knew we immediately had to go home with matching ones. It’s one of my favorite t-shirts.

At Salty Lunch Lady Luncheonette in Ridgewood, there’s a small section of kitchen-goods for sale - hot sauces, condiments, Maldon salts. The plates are there too, as if they’re part of it, but they aren’t actually for sale sadly. I would have taken one of the quirky, dainty flower plates immediately.

Tâm Tâm in Miami has equally covetable drink ware - a high-low mix of beautiful logo’d wine glasses that I can picture sipping a cold orange from on the couch, and a pig-shaped cocktail barrel that would probably only make an appearance a few times a year at home.

Some places do sell their dish ware, which feels like the ultimate keepsake: something you can actually live with. A way to hold onto a place, long after the meal is over.

I just yesterday went to Bemelman’s Bar for the first time and am still thinking about my visit. I wanted to steal their branded cocktail napkins but held out. I looked online and found these branded ashtrays — iconic if not entirely practical. Open since 1947, they feel more like a historical artifact than anything else.

I know I’m not alone in having a sizable restaurant matchbook collection, but it’s rare that I find myself actually going through and enjoying them. Writing this piece was a delightful exercise to look back on these keepsakes, to re-identify my favorite matchbooks in my growing pile, and to dig up what are now archival collectors items. Just like I did with my Nana.

This matchbook from ELENA ROSE BESSER’s the Lineup Slice Shop in 2024, which were seemingly repurposed from previous seasons of her Lineup Dinner Club, has a perfect vintage color, lived in creases, and a bit of FOMO with the 12-nights a year copy. It happens to be one of my favorites.

Sadly, I also love the now archival Cecily matchbox, a beloved Greenpoint wine-bar gone too soon. I always loved their playful, joy-invoking animal logo, and look back on it with fondness.

There are so many other favorites. There’s newer ones like this match-box and sticker combination that I just snagged a few days ago from Walrus Rodeo during a recent trip to Miami. They have some of my most favorite restaurant branding I’ve seen to-date, and I felt lucky I got to take a piece of that — folded up with memories of a girls weekend in the sun — home with me to New York.

I love my hat from Ray’s, my totes from both Lord’s and Jon and Vinny’s, which was once stuffed with a box of their buttermilk pancake mix before it was devoured on the first January blizzard morning this year.

I can’t say I have a lot of mugs, but I’d like to collect more.

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I don’t think we do this enough anymore, hold onto things. In a digital world, where everything is documented but nothing is kept, there’s something grounding about having something physical.

Something you can return to. Something you can show someone else, years later.

Maybe one day, I’ll have a box like Nana’s. Filled with small things that don’t seem important until they are.

What are your favorite kitchen keepsakes?

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