JJ Martin: ‘I’ve relaxed into the beautiful chaos that is Italy’

Receive free Food & Drink updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Food & Drink news every morning.

“Spontaneity and simplicity.” These are the two Italian approaches to hosting that the American journalist-turned-designer JJ Martin has picked up from the country that she has lived in for 22 years. “There’s been this real progression from the angry, disgruntled New Yorker that moved here in 2001 and couldn’t figure out how to, like, get dinner on the table,” she says, “to just sort of surrendering and relaxing into the beautiful chaos that is Italy.”

Founder of La DoubleJ, the maximalist fashion and homeware brand, Martin remembers her frustration, in her early days in Milan, at the informality of its social mores. “Italians will invite you to dinner the night before and whoever is available comes, and usually everyone’s available because nobody has made plans yet,” she says. “Then if you’re hosting they say, ‘Can I bring my friend?’ And you’re like, ‘Wait, it’s seated and I only have 12 places!’ I had to change my mindset to be more like them because I thought, ‘Well, everyone looks really happy: maybe they know what they’re doing!’ The Italians are some of the most well-adjusted, easy-going, loving humans on the planet.”

In Italy, they’ve always been doing farm-to-table

For a midweek outdoor summer lunch, Martin hosts at the home of Jeanne Labib-Lamour, the design director of La DoubleJ. “During fall, winter and early spring, I entertain at my apartment, but I only have a balcony – so when the weather starts to get really nice, we always go to Jeanne’s house because she has the epic terrace.” 

Martin enjoys keeping the mood laidback. “I like to bring a little bit of the California sunshine and relaxed attitude. I don’t want the stiffness of the set table,” she says. “I do a buffet, so that you’re not served one course after another; everyone keeps getting up to get more. It’s easy and I love the effect. It’s aesthetically pleasurable and fun to set up the table with flowers and all the food on platters and bowls.” 

And while she does pull some crazily non-Italian gastronomic moves, like serving quinoa instead of pasta and putting avocado in a mixed salad, she has adopted the country’s approach to using fresh produce. “It’s so funny: in California, everything now is about farm-to-table and the rise of Erewhon Markets. In Italy, they’ve always been doing farm-to-table. That’s just food.”