The Food in 'Eat Pray Love'

NYT Magazine with Susan Spungen, culinary consultant for 'Eat Pray Love'.

What kind of food were you making for “Eat Pray Love”?

Pretty straightforward, typically Roman food. So this one big first day, we had bucatini all’amatriciana, we had spaghetti alla carbonara, trippa alla romana, veal saltimbocca, we had carciofi alla giudia — Rome’s greatest hits. For a restaurant scene, we had, like, 25 extras, 6 actors, it was about 100 degrees out … and they put us in a kitchen down the street instead of the one in the restaurant we were working in. We had to trek up a hill, over the cobblestones to get the food to the set. And on top of that, there were, like, 100 tourists and paparazzi standing in between me and the set.