Kamala Harris is a cook — and a good one. Will it help her win?

Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff order food at El Cholo in Santa Monica last year.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Staff Writer

July 30, 2024 3 AM PT

While Kamala Harris was holding the first rally of her presidential campaign, Charlee Nessel was polishing off a skinny margarita at one of the vice president’s favorite L.A. restaurants: El Cholo in Santa Monica.

Nessel, a regular, was pleased to learn that Harris often visits the Wilshire Boulevard spot when she’s in town. Might that influence Nessel’s vote in November?

“If we have similar tastes in food ... it would be a starting point,” said Nessel, a real estate agent.

But, she said, there was a caveat: “I would be curious if she ordered something authentic or froofy.”

Food has long been part of politics. It can reveal a bit of personality and connect a candidate with voters. But pitfalls abound. When a culinary moment doesn’t work — John Kerry ordering a cheesesteak in Philadelphia with Swiss cheese instead of Cheez Whiz, or Gerald Ford attempting to eat a tamale without removing its corn husk wrapper — a politician can seem elitist or even, yes, chowderheaded.

Harris, though, seems equipped to navigate potential food faux pas, because she harbors genuine culinary expertise, and has for years made it part of her public persona.

Kamala Harris cracks an egg with one hand in her 2019 series "Cooking with Kamala."

She maintains an eclectic list of favorite L.A. eateries, from greasy spoons to elevated Italian and American spots. She has long talked about her love of cooking, and demonstrated it on the 2019 YouTube series “Cooking With Kamala,” which saw her, among other feats, make masala dosa with actress Mindy Kaling. And Harris, 59, has expressed a kind of reverence for Sunday family dinners.

“One of the things that I do that I find most enjoyable — and it just grounds me — is to cook Sunday family dinner,” she said in an Instagram video posted July 21, the day President Biden announced he would not seek reelection. “That gives me joy and it grounds me.”

Bennett Rea, creator of the Cookin’ with Congress blog, said that although “Cooking With Kamala” was a show, it didn’t feel like a performance. “It felt like she entered people’s homes,” he said.

Her videos also showed subtle kitchen skills true cooks appreciate. “She uses the back of the knife to scrape celery into the bowl — you don’t want to dull the knife side, which I did when I was learning to cook,” he said.

Among her abilities: She can deftly crack an egg with one hand. Moments before a TV interview, she advised a journalist on how to brine a Thanksgiving turkey. She reads cookbooks to unwind and has mused that one day she’ll write one.

If Harris defeats former President Trump in November, she would become the best cook to ever serve as president, said Bruce Kraig, author of “A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America.”

“She really ought to say, ‘When I am in the White House, I am going to share recipes with you,’” he said. “It would undercut a lot of the right-wing Americans yelling about getting women back in the kitchen.”

Food has been part of Harris’ policy agenda since at least her days in the Senate. In 2020, for example, she introduced the Closing the Meal Gap Act to expand and strengthen the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for low-income families.

In the days after Harris was endorsed by Biden, the media have homed in on her interest in food, even speculating that a Harris presidency could boost Washington’s dining scene. L.A. may offer a template.

Harris’ favorite Southland restaurants suggest a willingness to stray from the world of white tablecloths and weighty wine lists. Among her go-tos, The Times has reported, are Zankou Chicken, the beloved Armenian chicken chain; and Guelaguetza, a pioneering Oaxacan restaurant in Koreatown.

Bill Esparza, author of “L.A. Mexicano,” a book celebrating the city’s Mexican food culture, was impressed by Harris’ inclusion of Guelaguetza, which was founded in 1994 by Oaxacan immigrants. With “Guelaguetza, you are supporting an Indigenous family,” he said. “Oaxacans refer to this part of California as ‘Oaxacalifornia.’”

The Santa Monica branch of El Cholo, whose original Western Avenue location opened in 1923, also made the list. Its inclusion makes sense: Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff have a home in nearby Brentwood.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Nessel, surrounded by friends and a small dog on the restaurant’s sunny patio last week, acknowledged that “El Cholo represents something.” By the end of the happy-hour conversation, Nessel said she felt she understood Harris — at least in one way.

“You come here to get full ... and not have to worry about anything else,” she said. “I feel that’s what she comes here for — she comes here to feel satisfied.”

Entranced in the kitchen

Harris has said that she learned to cook from her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher who died in 2009.

She told Glamour magazine in 2020 that her mom, in action behind the stove, was mesmerizing.

“As a child, I remember hearing the pots and smelling the food, and kind of like someone in a trance, I would walk into the kitchen to see all this incredible stuff happening,” said Harris, who is of South Asian and Black descent.

Years later, she did not shy away from voicing her culinary opinions. Take, for instance, the tuna-melt incident of 2020. As the pandemic raged, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) posted a tongue-in-cheek cooking video online detailing one of his “favorite all-time recipes.”

Derreck Johnson, founder of the Home of Chicken and Waffles, stands in front of a Kamala Harris mural.

Warner “poured an entire can of undrained tuna on white bread, topped it with cold cheese and an obscene amount of mayonnaise, stuck the whole thing in the microwave, and ate it in front of America,” Washingtonian magazine reported. “If a bar even exists, it’s set low.”

Harris wasn’t having it: “Mark, we need to talk. Call. Please,” she tweeted.

Later, she shared a video online that taught viewers how to make a delicious tuna melt — and it included Warner, who joined via Instagram Live.

“He has to know that he should drain the water,” explained Harris, who wore an apron from her alma mater, Howard University.

Vice President Kamala Harris makes a stop at Brown Sugar Bakery in Chicago in 2021.

But even in the kitchen, politics is inescapable. Rea noted that when Warner asked what type of mayonnaise Harris used, she said, with some awkwardness, that it came from Whole Foods.

The high-end supermarket chain, Rea said, is a brand that “automatically is not going to connect with 60% to 80% of the country.”

Hazardous culinary terrain

For Harris, there are other potential hazards to speaking up about her predilections in the kitchen.

Consider something as innocuous as Bolognese, the Italian meat sauce that can take several hours to prepare. Harris is known to be a fan.

Jan Whitaker, a restaurant historian who maintains the blog Restaurant-ing through history, advises: “I would not use French words, or Italian words. Anything [like] ‘Bolognese’ — that could turn off a lot of Americans. It doesn’t even matter if it’s a simple dish, it’s just the word.”

Meat and potatoes may be safer terrain. And among Harris’ favorite L.A. food shops is Huntington Meats, the vaunted Original Farmers Market butcher. She is known to buy its spicy sausage, a key ingredient in her Thanksgiving cornbread dressing. As Huntington’s 20-plus varieties of sausage glistened behind glass, owner Jim Cascone said he was “very honored” to have the vice president’s business. “Food lovers come from all sides,” he said. (The verdict on Harris’ sausage of choice: pleasantly piquant, with a nice, earthy tang.)

There is, said Rea, something subversive about Harris regularly putting her culinary chops on display. At a time when Project 2025‘s policy playbook, created by allies of Donald Trump, touts “traditional American values,” Harris’ embrace of cooking while running for the presidency flies in the face of norms, he said.

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, First Lady Jill Biden and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff.

“Some politically minded people would say [to Harris], ‘Tamp back on being in the kitchen, because we are fighting an uphill battle running a woman for president,’” said Rea, whose blog centers on cooking politicians’ favorite recipes. “She doesn’t seem to be doing that. Her refusal to set that part of herself aside speaks to how important it is to her.”

Trump, on the other hand, is no gourmand: the former president’s cravings tend toward fast food and well-done steak.

He may be using food to project that “he’s rich, but he’s not an elite,” said Whitaker, who has written about presidents’ dining habits.

“That’s the thing his supporters love,” she said. “It could be a strategy.”