How Antonia Lofaso's Favorite Childhood Meals Fueled Her Love Of Cooking

Celebrity chef and restaurateur Antonia Lofaso can trace her love of cooking back to her childhood. While answering 20 questions for Resy in 2022, Lofaso said her two favorite nostalgic treats from childhood were Jell-O molds and fajitas. But she didn't just eat the beloved dishes; she also learned to make them herself.

During a 2014 Reddit AMA, Lofaso explained how Jell-O molds — desserts made by placing Jello-O in a ringed serving mold — got her interested in making food. "I started cooking when I was about 7 years old. And the first thing I got excited about making was a Jell-O mold," Lofaso replied to one Reddit User. She explained that she first saw the unique dish at a neighbor's house and became fascinated with it. "[I] was like, What is that? and started cooking them every night. And then started dabbling in cooking for real," she wrote.

Lofaso also "fell in love with fajitas" the first time she saw a plate of the smoking and sizzling dish go by at a restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. She shared her steak fajitas recipe in a 2022 Food Network YouTube video and noted that she "knew" she wanted to cook "for the rest of my life" after her first fajitas experience.

Antonia Lofaso's first culinary loves being a Tex-Mex dish and an American dessert staple foreshadowed her love of experimenting with different types of cuisines. Her restaurant Scopa Italian Roots, located in Venice, California, is the chef's "interpretation of old-school Italian food," per the eatery's website, and offers an assortment of Italian-American dishes.

Lofaso is also the founder and executive chef of Black Market Liquor Bar in Studio City, which serves "eclectic" American cuisine, and Dama in Los Angeles, which is a Latin-inspired bar and restaurant. You'll find Latin dishes including paella, quesadillas, and arepas on the menu at Dama.

Lofaso loves to see restaurant menus including items from several different cultural traditions. During an October 2024 interview with Forbes, she noted that more people are broadening their food horizons, which allows restaurants to experiment more. "People are really celebrating diverse food. It's given chefs permission — not that they didn't have it before, but now because they've got guests flooding their restaurants — to take what they know about Korean, Mexican, or Israeli food," she said, adding that people are no longer associating Mexican and Israeli cuisine with casual dining only. "Now we're not limiting what we believe fine dining and progressive dining are," she said.