Ground rules

From my weird brain to your screen.

My near empty, pre-renovation apartment in Paris. 600sf of freedom!

Greetings from Paris! 

I'm both very excited and slightly shocked by how many of you signed up without me doing anything! The internet is amazing sometimes. Welcome! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Melanie! French implant in the sunny land of Los Angeles. I spend 110% of my time being the founder of Ghia. Travel, surfing, and designing things are my coping mechanisms to get me through the highs and and lows that come along with making spritzes for a living. 

It’s not a coincidence I’m pressing send on my first Substack over 5000 miles away from home.  It is almost always when I’m far from the office that I am my most creative. This often means finally taking the steps to do-the-things I have been daydreaming about from my desk for the previous few months - whether it’s a newsletter, a book proposal, or a 6 ft totem pole made of papier mache. It all happens in those moments in between.

That being said, I have never dreamed of writing for an audience. I came to the US at 17 for college after secretly applying to Brown without my parents knowing ~ a story I’ll share with you another day~ and realizing upon arriving that I. Could. Not. Understand. Anything. Back in France, I used to love words, but after having to drop all my first semester classes to focus only on learning English, I think I will forever feel inadequate in my use of Shakespeare’s language. So please, be nice and focus on the content. 

This is a good time to shout out Grace, from the Ghia team, who on top of being an incredible restaurant-whisperer, is a much better writer than me and accepted to help me. Her substack ~ Harriet World ~ it’s really funny and is linked in my “recommended”.

Lately, I’ve been receiving so many questions on instagram and it is nothing short of a privilege. The fact that you would ask me what I think after having become aware of or appreciated my work over the last few years is the coolest feeling. Responding to your questions is a task I feel both lucky and proud to take on every day. My answers include links, maps and sometimes jokes or hot takes and they more often than not do not fit on Instagram stories and need words to describe the feelings around them rather than pretty pictures. I never dreamed of having a community of people at my fingertips to chat in depth about the correct amount of salt and olive oil with, but here we are.

I digress a lot! Here are some ground rules and what to expect: 

1. Long(er) form opinions. Pretty much every newsletter will be shorter than this one. Mainly we’ll start by answering the questions that flood my inbox the most: travel recs, thoughts on being a founder (I have loads, buckle up!!!), renovation stories (I just bought my first apartment!), recipes from someone who isn’t a chef, and skincare tips from someone who definitely isn’t a dermatologist. 

2. Inconsistency: This is a test, and it will likely be inconsistent and imperfect. I want no pressure from any of you but mainly I want no (more) pressure from myself. Some weeks you’ll get three and some you’ll get zero.

3. Realness! I’m also a little bit technologically challenged so if I wanted to make it look super nice I probably couldn’t do it on my own. But as I said, this is my version of “meeting new people” - getting out of the echochamber of instagram where I made you believe in the first place that I had decent taste, and rather open up the weird thought bubbles that surround me daily. Send me yours back!

4. Fun: I always say, how you spend your days is how you spend your life. And I really want to spend my life having fun. It doesn’t matter that pretty much nobody (myself included) can afford half the stuff recommended on this page whether it’s trips or Objects of Desire. They’re pretty to look at and for me, it’s enough! The experiences and the recs we can all dream about until we book that ticket to Napoli. Isn’t the journey half the fun anyway? I want this substack to feel like the whatsapp group with your girlfriend dedicated to The Real Real find. No judgment! You may skip one week, or save it for your Saturday-morning-coffee another.

5. It’s also a conversation, so please don’t hesitate to let me know what you want to hear about! 

Why Night Shade? 

Well, Massimo Bottura already used Slow Food and Fast Cars - I’m only half kidding. Nightshade vegetables are the core of the Mediterranean diet. It is with these very same vegetables that I learned to cook with my grandmother, someone whose recipes and spirit I will mention here extensively. If you’re on a FODMAP diet, I’m sorry, just like me, this Substack is not for everyone. I also just love the word, it reminds me of when my mom and her girlfriends would play cards and smoke cigarettes until 3am on warm summer nights. They would crack jokes and talk shit and have so much fun, and while I’m fully aware this isn’t the proper definition of ‘Nightshade’, (I’ve come a long way since relearning English at Brown) it personifies that feeling of being able to talk freely and have fun that I’m hoping comes across every time you read this newsletter. 

Speak soon!

Melanie