Prologue: Nantucket
Another summer on the island is upon us and, as usual, we have a lot to talk about. Chef Mario Subiaco proposed to Lizbet Keaton on the widow’s walk of the Hotel Nantucket; there’s a camera crew filming out in Monomoy (Blond Sharon has it “on good authority” that it’s a limited series for Netflix); police chief Ed Kapenash has been admitted to the Nantucket Cottage Hospital after complaining of chest pain—and there’s a steamy debate about whether or not Nantucket should allow topless beaches. (We think of ourselves as progressive and sophisticated, but let’s face it—we’re not France.)
Then we hear a rumor that Hollis Shaw is hosting something she’s calling the “Five-Star Weekend” at her house in Squam.
This, of course, captures our full attention.
Hollis Shaw is something of a unicorn.
She started out life as one of us. She was the daughter of Tom Shaw, Nantucket’s busiest plumbing contractor, and Charlotte Shaw, a kindergarten teacher. When Hollis was a toddler, not quite two years old, Charlotte Shaw died of an aneurysm in the shower, and Tom Shaw was left to raise his daughter alone. But on this island, we pitch in—it takes a village!—and we all offered moral support as Hollis grew up. We watched her dance in ballet recitals, shoot free throws at the Boys and Girls Club, and cheer for her boyfriend Jack Finigan in the stands at the Nantucket Whalers football games. Hollis was a good student, an outstanding softball pitcher (the team won the state championship Hollis’s junior year and came in second her senior year), and a hard worker. The cottage out in Squam where she lived with her father was modest (though the land it sat on was worth a fortune), and as soon as Hollis was old enough, she kept house and cooked every night. She got a job opening scallops on Old North Wharf after school, and in the summers, she and her best friend, Tatum, waited tables at the Rope Walk.
In her senior year of high school, Hollis wrote what her English teacher Ms. Fox called “the best college essay I’ve read in thirty-one years.” It took the form of a letter to Hollis’s deceased mother, Charlotte. Dear Mom, it started, I think you would be proud of the way I turned out. Here are some of the reasons why.
It was bittersweet when Hollis decided to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We were proud of our girl—she received a full academic scholarship—but once she left, we missed her.
After graduating from college, Hollis moved to Boston, where she worked as the assistant food editor at Boston magazine and got to eat, on the magazine’s expense account, at all of the city’s “Best New Restaurants.” Eventually she met Harvard Medical School surgery resident Matthew Madden. They were married in Wellesley, bought a house in Wellesley, and raised their daughter, Caroline, in Wellesley.
When Hollis’s father, Tom, died in 2007, Hollis inherited the Squam property. Over the winter, we watched as the tiny cottage where Hollis had grown up was moved to the edge of the lot, and a gracious post-and-beam home was built in its place.
It’s official, we thought. Hollis Shaw has become a summer person. (But at least she was our summer person. After all, she could have immigrated to Martha’s Vineyard.) She joined the Field and Oar Club, where she played tennis; she volunteered at the Nantucket Book Festival; and on Sunday afternoons, we saw her at the Deck, sitting at one of the best tables along the railing above the Monomoy creeks, drinking rosé, and laughing with people we didn’t recognize.
Were we bothered that Hollis no longer acted or seemed like a local or that she came to the island only during the summer months and Stroll, with the occasional Thanksgiving and Daffodil weekend thrown in? The honest answer to that question was this: Some of us were bothered, while others were just happy that she was happy.
We were all, however, quick to claim Hollis as our own when she became internet-famous!
During the darkest days of the pandemic—when businesses closed and the stock market crashed and restaurants pivoted to takeout only and the death toll was rising, rising, rising—Hollis posted well-edited content on her then-modest food blog, Hungry with Hollis (at the time, it was a “food community” of 274 subscribers). Hollis filmed herself in her Wellesley kitchen making a meat-loaf sandwich with homemade refrigerator pickles on freshly baked Japanese milk bread. The video went viral. Just like the video of the Italian gentleman playing the violin for his neighbors on his balcony in Bologna, Hollis’s video struck a chord. The sandwich was elevated: the meat loaf was flecked with onions and herbs and topped with a rosy “special sauce”; the pickles were crisp, bright, and tangy; the Japanese milk bread—that Instagram darling—was pillowy but sturdy enough to maintain the integrity of the sandwich.
Was the sandwich time-intensive? Yes—but suddenly the world had nothing but time.
Was the sandwich cheap? Yes—four sandwiches could be made from merely seventeen dollars’ worth of groceries. And an “impossible” version could be made for vegans.
It was what everyone needed: comfort food that was aspirational.
Hollis’s modest food blog suddenly became immodest, flashy, even. In a week’s time, the blog’s newsletter had over half a million subscribers. Hollis added her recipe for creamy yellow tomato gazpacho and a shatteringly crispy fried chicken. The blog’s fans responded not only to the recipes but to Hollis herself. She became the best friend they all wished they had; she served up “everything is going to be okay” vibes. They loved that in her cooking videos, Hollis presented an unvarnished version of herself—wrinkles, freckles, a slight double chin. (The middle-aged women among them thought, Better her than me; I would never allow a camera to zoom in that close; the Millennials and Gen Zers thought, If she doesn’t want makeup, fine, but how about a polish-and-glow filter?) Hollis’s blond hair showed a touch of gray, and she styled it in a non-style: straight, parted down the middle, tucked behind her ears. Her neck always looked good. (What does she use on it, they wondered, and will she link the products somewhere?) She always wore a crisp cotton blouse (she had the same one in a rainbow of colors, though everyone agreed Hollis looked prettiest in the sky blue) with the starched collar flipped up and a pair of gold hoops the diameter of a quarter. Someone asked about the earrings, and she confided that they were a present from her father when she graduated from high school in 1987. Hollis’s fans lauded her for “keeping it real,” though they couldn’t help noticing her enormous diamond engagement ring (it must have been three carats!) and her diamond-and-sapphire wedding band.
After Hollis posted a video for a potato-and-white-cheddar tart with a crispy bacon crust, her blog’s newsletter broke the one-million-subscriber milestone. (Leave it to bacon!) With the help of her daughter, Caroline, who was a film student at NYU and extremely tech-savvy, Hollis started a website for the blog and added two features. The first, called Kitchen Lights, was an interactive map of the world. When someone was engaging with the website, a pinprick of light appeared on the map so that visitors to the site could imagine another cook in, say, Spokane, Washington, or Grand Island, Nebraska, standing in her or his kitchen mincing chives and parsley for Hollis’s tortellini salad.
The second feature, called the Corkboard, allowed Hollis’s faithful followers to leave messages, post recipes, review restaurants, critique cookbooks, and ask questions such as Why does Planters still include Brazil nuts in its mixed-nuts can when no one eats them? Hollis posted on the Corkboard herself once or twice a week, updating the community on her latest triumphs: She had been approached to design her own cookware, she had a book deal looming, there was talk of her own show, which would include not only cooking but lifestyle tips.