There is a kind of Italian afternoon that never really ends. The light goes gold, the pasta water comes to a boil, someone is laughing in the next room, and time seems to loosen its grip. Giada De Laurentiis has been chasing that afternoon her whole life. Not the recipe, exactly, but the feeling underneath it, the sense that if you gather the people you love and feed them something made with care, you have touched the thing everyone is really looking for. What she found along the way was not a secret at all. Love, food, and connection were never three things. They were always one.
She reaches for a Sunday. For her grandfather, a long table she can still picture, and a room full of people who had nowhere better to be. He was the one who taught her that a kitchen is really just a place to gather people.
The recipes she still keeps. The tips and tricks, too. But those are not the inheritance she guards most closely. "My grandfather taught me so much about cooking for groups and creating tradition around food," she says. "He was a huge believer in packing everyone around the table, with a really great Sunday dinner, connecting as a family. I have so many tips and tricks I learned from him in the kitchen, but the philosophy of family connecting around the table is what I cherish the most."
It reads a little like a prayer and a little like a travel diary, that idea. Gather the people you love, feed them something made with care, let the evening stretch, and you will have touched the thing everyone is really looking for. Call it love. Call it home. Giada calls it connection, and she has built an entire life around setting a place for it.
Two rituals for one girl
Some traditions you inherit. Others you invent in real time, for an audience of one.
For Giada and her daughter Jade, the inherited ritual is struffoli, the honey-drenched little dough balls of an Italian Christmas. "Struffoli. Making struffoli together at the holidays was a big part of my childhood, and something I have passed down," she says. The invented ritual is quieter and happens far from any kitchen. "Jade and I like to sit on her bed and 'download our day together' we call it, we go through the highlights and lowlights of the day."
One happens once a year, the other every night. Struffoli at the holidays, or the download at the end of the day, it is the same invitation either way: come here, tell me everything. Some of the most important tables do not need a table at all.
Food is joy for me. It has given me so much.
The Italy she wants to give away
When she built Giadzy, she was not really building a store. She was trying to bottle a feeling. "Giadzy came from wanting to share the Italy I know and love. Not just the recipes, but the ingredients, the traditions, and the slower way of enjoying food," she says. Motherhood sharpened the mission rather than softening it. "Becoming a mom made that mission even more important. I wanted to make authentic Italian cooking approachable and accessible."
The enemy, as she sees it, is noise. "There's so much confusing information out there about food. And I've spent a long time finding the pasta that is the most authentic, and the cleanest, and have made it my mission to share it with the world."
That mission met its hardest test in an unlikely shape. Gluten-free pasta is a category most people accept as a compromise before they have even tasted it, and Giada refused the premise outright. "I never wanted gluten-free pasta to feel like a compromise. If we were going to make one, it had to cook beautifully, hold its shape, and taste like great pasta first," she says. The standard set the method. "That meant making it in Italy using traditional methods and keeping the ingredient list incredibly simple."
The reason was personal long before it was commercial. "A lot of my family has gone gluten-free living in America, so it was very important to me to bring a product that I really trust and love with them," she says. From there, it becomes a small manifesto. "You shouldn't need to compromise on cleanliness of the products you're eating because of food sensitivities or allergies. Many of our recipes can be made gluten-free, and we did that on purpose, to help families cook for everyone."
Nobody at her table eats a lesser version of the meal.
A kitchen with no rules
If there is a wellness philosophy underneath all of this, it is refreshingly free of rules. Giada has spoken openly about transforming her own relationship with food, and what she models now, especially for a teenage daughter growing up inside food culture, is not restraint but delight. "Food is joy for me. It has given me so much," she says. The lesson, she hopes, arrives quietly, by osmosis. "So I think raising her in a kitchen that values taste and quality has hopefully started her on her own journey of exploring what food means to her in her life."
On a Tuesday, the woman with restaurants across the country eats like the rest of us. "I eat really simply! I think that surprises people. When you start with high-quality ingredients, you don't need to overcomplicate things. That's my philosophy in business and in life," she says. Dinner, more often than not, is humble and beautiful at once. "So a dinner might be a bowl of pasta and vegetables, with a little chicken."
The kitchen, it turns out, has done something no scheduled quality time ever could. Cooking together has quietly rewritten her relationship with her daughter. "Cooking together has been a true dream come true," she says. "Jade doesn't love to cook, but like every kid, she gets inspired from things she sees online. So when she's game to try something new with me in the kitchen, it's just perfect. It's such a great way to spend time together." She does not need Jade to become a chef. She just needs the occasional yes.
When you start with high-quality ingredients, you don't need to overcomplicate things.
What a day actually tastes like
On the word healthy, she keeps it almost comically grounded. No cleanse, no color-coded plan. "Like I said, I like to keep things simple! Avocados for healthy fats, nuts and seeds for protein and fiber, seasonal vegetables for greens, pasta for carbs, and then chicken or salmon usually," she says. In practice, it becomes a day any of us could actually live. "So that might look like avocado toast in the morning, chicken and veggies for lunch, and then whatever Jade wants for dinner."
The pantry behind those meals is short, and it is exact. "I love Brodo broth right now. They are great for adding to the meal or by itself," she says, before naming the quiet workhorses. "For quick meals, I keep olives and capers around, passata, good canned tomatoes like our Datterini, aged parm, kosher salt, European-style butter… Those are all you need, really." When she needs something fast and comforting in the same breath, there is only one answer. "Honestly? Pasta. Usually something incredibly simple like Giadzy Nodi Marini with olive oil, lemon zest, Parmesan, and whatever vegetables I have in the fridge."
Permission, not perfection
Running restaurants while raising a teenager leaves little margin, and Giada is honest about what time for herself really looks like. "I try to get my steps in every day, whether it's walking the dogs or just around the house. And I enjoy listening to a podcast or audiobooks when I can," she says. But there is a clock in the background now, and she can hear it. "Jade is about to leave for college, so right now I am trying to spend as much time as possible together."
To the mother who feels she is failing because dinner was rushed, repetitive, or nothing like the photographs, Giada offers something better than reassurance. She offers permission. "The important part is feeding yourself and your family," she says. A low-stakes way to keep it interesting is to shop the season. "But one way to make things different is to try shopping seasonally with your ingredients. Maybe you use broccolini instead of broccoli, or a different type of tomato." And then the most freeing line of the whole conversation, delivered like the oldest secret in Italy. "But Italians will cook one meal and eat it for days, that's very normal for us."
Leftovers, it turns out, are not a failure of ambition. They are the tradition. For anyone carrying the invisible weight of planning every meal, that single sentence does more work than a month of meal-prep advice.
The dish that comes up most between mother and daughter is the one Jade has loved forever. "Bolo!" Giada says, with the shorthand of a house that has made it a hundred times. "Jade has loved bolognese forever, and it's the meal she requests most from me. So when she wants it, I try to get her involved in the process of making it." A request becomes an invitation.
One day, Jade will tell her own version of all this, the kitchen she grew up in, the mother at the center of it. What Giada hopes she takes from all of it is simple. "I hope she remembers that I was patient. Maybe that's a pipe dream," she says, laughing. The honesty is the point. "Jade is not afraid to tell me anything and everything, so I hope she remembers open-mindedness. But mostly patience, wink wink."
Finish this sentence
"A seat at my table means…"
Connection.
Everything else, the struffoli and the bolognese, the clean pasta made the old way, the avocado toast and the Sunday dinners, and the downloads at the end of the day, is just the way she keeps saying it. She cooks for food, love, and family. She lives for the same three.
Follow Giada De Laurentiis on Instagram, and browse the pantry at Giadzy.
