Zod Arifai at BluImagine! One chef, one week, and thirty-one courses.  Zod Arifai, the fascinating, rocker-turned-chef, invited me to dine at his restaurants, Blu, Next Door, and daryl - a Tour de Zod, if you will.  The dining experience left me, in a word: seduced.  In the afterglow, one question remained: how does this untrained culinary genius do it?

“I don’t think anyone taught me how to cook.” Zod says, with a lingering European accent, “there were influences in my life. My mother’s cooking was very simple, but it was always very delicious.”

Zod’s cuisine, which he describes as “pure, unmasked food,” is largely due to the local purity of Zod’s homeland - a small countryside town in Albania, where everything he ate as a youth was a product of the land.

“We ate extremely, extremely natural.  The only thing we bought was salt and oil. My family ground their own flour, made their own bread and butter.  If we wanted milk, we’d go to the cow.  During the day, my friends and me would take our animals out for grazing, and then we’d go play soccer or swim all day.  On the way home, I’d stop to pick up some beans, cucumbers, or tomatoes at the farms.  Mom would do something with them, and that was dinner.”