This story is part of Image Issue 15, “Diaspora,” a fantastic voyage through the mecca of food, from Hollywood haunts to mall food courts to L.A. staples. Read the whole issue here.

Growing up, I insisted on my specific seat at my family dining Table, which was rectangular and built from a deep red Brazilian wood. My parents and sister laughed at me for my insistence. The thing is, we moved every few years, and while we carried our furniture with us to other cities and countries, our dining room table took on a new configuration in each new space. It didn’t make sense — the seat I was claiming wasn’t ever really the same one. But I knew with certainty which was my seat; I was angry, even confused, that my family didn’t understand. Maybe it was one of the things I decided I could make my own, make stable. That in the moment of eating dinner — a nightly, unbroken ritual — I could feel oriented, in my place.

One might say I have an attachment to tables. I’m drawn, even, to poems about tables, and have translated poems about tables, such as one by the Brazilian poet Ana Martins Marques that proclaims: “more important than having one day loved is to have / a solid table.” I have loved many tables: Tables I could spread myself out on. Tables that have held photos of friends, tables full of beautiful postcards, tables on which jars stuffed with pens rest, tables that shelve books I’ve wanted to keep close piled high. Now I have my own dining table, and I don’t mind which seat I take, oftentimes rotating where I choose to eat, maybe because I’m no longer fighting the reality that things will change, at least not in the same way. I’m going to be in L.A. for a while.

My tables are constantly collecting objects and stories, but they can’t be cluttered. I want enough of an expanse, a clear space preserved beneath, like a sky or ocean or blank page, to open myself up: to think, feel and release. Like Martins Marques’ ideal table that “is like a day bed / with its heart of trees, of forests.” A space that you can imagine unraveling yourself over and laying down on, until it becomes “a type of floor that supports” you.

A table that you can hold and touch and that in turn holds and touches you. A table that brings you into the present moment to receive what is before you with attention: a meal, a book, a piece of paper, a person sitting across from you. A table that helps you feel rooted, grounded, connected to the physical world — part of it, uplifted by it, in love with it.

The table carries a specific significance for Food stylists. As people who have mastered how to present and plate food — often for commercial photoshoots, editorials and events — these artists use the table in myriad ways. In their hands, each detail on the table is a meditated choice: how much wine fills the glass, the juicy face of a sliced blood orange laid on its side, a couple of grapes tumbling off a brimming platter. Through their creations, food stylists can summon memories. Sustenance becomes a conveyance.

“It’s where stories, secrets are told, where loves are revealed, where we eat,” chef and artist Natalia Pereira tells me in Portuguese, as she stands behind her kitchen counter. She didn’t always have a table to eat at while growing up in Minas Gerais, Brazil. “I experienced the taste of hunger many times, me and my brothers,” she says. “It’s an unforgettable taste.” Pereira is an orphan; she remembers her early childhood with her adoptive mother, Francisca, with intense fondness: sucking sugar canes, climbing avocado and mango trees, heating water by the wood stove for her baths, smelling the scent of cake in her mother’s hair. But all that was taken away from her when she was seven. She describes being “kidnapped” by her “official parents,” whom she lived with for two years before shuttling between foster homes. “That’s why I like to welcome people when they arrive at my restaurant. I like it when they eat, when they drink — eat up, girl, drink your juice!” Pereira laughs.

Sixteen years ago, she opened the restaurant Woodspoon in Downtown L.A., a space that has become her way of representing Brazil, of offering up a memory of her childhood through typically Mineiro dishes, like tropeiro beans and pork loin, or chicken and okra. Inside, the tables are square and wooden and graced with flower bouquets that Pereira sculpted from recycled napkins. There are also menus with pictures of vegetables, spoons and people in festive dresses that she drew by hand.

A mesa é um altar, the table is an altar. It allows you to give yourself over to the moment. The first time I meet her at her restaurant Pereira greets me with a mixed plate of typical Brazilian fried snacks — coxinha, kibe, pastel, bolinho — stuffed with beef, cod, cream, and chicken, which I eat and wash down with a tall glass of passion fruit juice. I’m thinking about the freshly squeezed juices at my uncle’s house in the northeast of Brazil, the bolinhos I ate on the sidewalk, the paper bags and my fingers stained with grease. Food stylists can transport you with their work. The table is the point of departure.

It’s also a space where the work comes together. For chef and food stylist Saehee Cho, who founded the food subscription service Soon Mini, her outdoor wooden table is “a central point”: it’s where she writes her poetry, fiction and essays, where she has her morning coffee, where friends congregate, where 3am tarot card readings take place. Cho regularly co-hosts an event at Windrose Farm in the orchards of Paso Robles, where guests help out with the farm — gardening, feeding the animals — and enjoy an outdoor meal prepared by Cho. Whenever she does events, “it really is just translating the feeling that I do every other night with my friends here,” she says. Her friends know to skip the front door and go directly to her backyard — where she grows her herbs and keeps traces of recent food styling jobs: leftover dried peppers and flowers hang in a large net stretched across the side of her home. “You’re coming to a table, you don’t really know what you’re going to get to eat, but you know that it’s going to be served with care and love.”

In Cho’s family, food was “the big communicator,” more so than words. She grew up in Laguna Hills, Orange County, and spent her summers in Seoul, Korea, with her grandmother, who was a food stylist in the 1960s. Cho speaks Korean, but it was food that closed the “gaps” between languages, cultures and age differences.

On the day she is hosting me, Cho lays carrots, cucumbers, and baby yellow tomatoes on long green leaves in the shape of canoes. It’s what she likes serving for large groups of friends — many hands reaching over each other, dipping into the same plate. Maybe eating becomes more mindful when it’s communal; not only the dish, but the table has to be considered and shared.

A table can fill the space you might not have known how to cross or test. It says this space that is mine is also yours. This is a guiding principle behind Karla Subero Pittol’s project Chainsaw, for which she hosts pop-up feasts out of her Echo Park garage. All the tables are communal; the main one, a long piece of plywood mounted on two sawhorses, is a replica of Georgia O’Keeffe’s table at Ghost Ranch (the idea of Sara Marlowe Hall, Chainsaw’s creative director). The table anchors the space, which feels a bit like being in Subero Pittol’s living room. (Sometimes she forgets that it’s a garage — until she finds the spider webs.) The decorations are personal: raw woods and ceramics and tropical colors to remind her of her birthplace, Caracas, Venezuela. Paintings hang on the wall, including one by Subero Pittol of a woman looking over her shoulder, her skin mostly exposed (most of her paintings are based on “Playboy” magazines — “so voluptuous, sexy,” she says of the women). Utensils cluster in recycled coconut milk and lychee cans that light up the space. It all has the vibe of a casual hang.

For Sandy Ho, the chef behind the pre-pandemic monthly dinner series Sanditas, the table is a place where “everything is invited.” She owes this attitude to her parents. They are Vietnamese — they fled the Vietnam War — and when they settled in Belmore, Australia, they were open and curious toward their Lebanese, Sudanese, and Korean neighbors. “Our table never just had Vietnamese food — we would have spring rolls with fish sauce and then lamb shanks, Lebanese bread and hummus all on the same table,” she says. “Everything was allowed at the table.”

Ho — who now mostly collaborates with other restaurants, brands and private clients and does pop-ups for Sanditas — is one for a lavishly long table with a “Mad Hatter kind of spread,” where “one person at the end of table is having to reach over and then pass this and pass that.” I’m thinking, again, of the table at my uncle’s house, where there were sometimes up to 15 of us, at turns standing and sitting, choosing between multiple breakfast options (ripe and underripe mango, tapioca, French bread, cheese). The best kind of table gives you permission. It allows you to reach for a history, brings what is far near. A table eases you, opens your mind and compels you to come take a seat and play. “It’s the choreography that is just so fun and magical for me,” Ho says.

Food styling becomes its own choreography when Ho stacks five white bowls precariously and whimsically high, packing the crowning bowl with dumplings and pouring chili over them so that the reddish brown sauce glides down the porcelain, on to the tablecloth, messy and beautifully irreverent. Or when Cho separates her vegetables by hue — a Korean color theory that allows each item to have its “own moment,” like dancers on a stage, each item expressing what went into its existence.

The labor that goes into selecting, cooking and arranging food can have a grounding effect. After working at Woodspoon from eleven in the morning to midnight, Pereira arrives home tired, smelling of garlic and with oil in her hair, and makes sculptures from leftover ingredients in the kitchen: the figure’s bodies are bound by flour and water, their dresses adorned with fennel seeds, their jewelry assembled from coffee and chocolate. She wants to give these ingredients an afterlife, distilling paints from beets, carrots, and crushed flowers to create floor-to-ceiling paintings of joyous ladies holding overflowing bouquets and emerald-green purses.

“Food talks with me,” Pereira says. “We have our intimacies, ingredients and I.” When she’s cooking, she feels “honored, important.” “It’s a faith,” she says. “I see miracles. To know that we’re able to create, that the earth gave us all this, that we’re able to create flavor, that we’re able to create a palate, that we’re able to leave behind memories…”