Gelée Founder Zoe Messinger’s Guide to Joy

As I quickly learn, Zoe Messinger always has a creative idea up her sleeve. More importantly, whenever she’s at a career juncture, she’s able to weave together seemingly disparate threads from her life to create a unique path forward. Prior to founding Gelée, the collagen-based jelly that sets up into beautifully-hued blobs of joy, Messinger worked in L.A. kitchens like Kismet and Freedman’s, ran a food truck in Europe, published a series of vignettes centered around global restaurants, and performed as a stand up comedian, just to name a few ventures. With Gelée, Messinger is exercising her artistic muscle (spot Gelée molds at Fashion Weeks in Paris and New York, plus the Venice Biennale), as well as her fundamental beliefs that food should be nourishing and fun.

Food was centric to Messinger’s world from an early age: Her mother is a pastry chef who also photographed the Alice Waters-led Berkeley food movement in the 1970s. While studying at Cornell’s School of Hospitality, Messinger interned at restaurants like Catch in NYC’s West Village. When she landed in LA, she was pulled in a few directions, but ultimately decided to “earn her chops” and work full time in a restaurant. Those turned out to be Kismet and Freedman’s.

Edible: How did your time spent cooking in restaurants lead to the inspiration for the brand?

Messinger: I've always been really vegetable­ centric and passionate about working with women, if not for women, and at farm­ to ­table ­driven restaurants. [With Kismet], I literally was in the car with a friend, and I was like, "Wait, stop." And I jumped out with my knife bag and a resumé. I had no idea what they were going to say and if they were hiring. And I said, "I can make a really great salad. Can I have a shot?" And that night, I staged, and it was insanely overwhelming, terrifying, exhilarating, amazing, all the words at the same time. And then I got the job and I started at garde manger. Kismet was an eye opening experience…I got to witness everything, which also I think plays into me as an artist. Restaurants, creating art, facilitating, viewing art — it feels like a dance, like an experience, connection. And to witness that and then be part of it was really quite powerful.

[Working at Liz Johnson’s Freedman’s], it was me, Liz, and usually one other cook, and we did everything. So that was prep, cold, hot, service. So it was a lot of fun. I learned so much from both of these experiences…There were so many special moments that keep reminding me as I'm talking about this, that a restaurant, to me, has always been a family. And it's definitely something I'm trying to bring to Gelée as I build Gelée.

Landing on a jello concept felt almost kismet itself for Messinger. Inspired by the lychee and grape jellies from the Taiwanese markets she would visit with her mother as a kid, and the jelly creations in Gather Journal, Messinger has “always had an inclination towards jelly textures.” When Covid hit, she started focusing on her health and the collagen-rich bone broths that nourished her.Collagen-as-canvas sparked an idea, and she started experimenting with flavors, eventually starting a jello cake pop up called Hot Tart out of her L.A. bungalow.

Edible: The ideas were forming, and you were having fun with it — when did the idea of the Gelée concept as it is now officially take shape?

Messinger: [As the world was coming out of Covid], I wanted to give people an escape. And I also kind of think that that's what jello does. It's like this fantasy. It has this ethereal dream­like landscape that it provides, not only with the way it moves and how you can see through it, but the feeling of it on your palette and the unexpected ways you can make it quite molecular or quite basic.”

So the last pop­up was for Valentine's Day. And I did a Campari spritz jello cake, and I had to borrow neighbors' refrigerators on the block because I did these giant Campari spritz jello cakes with floating marigolds from the farmer's market and Harry's Berries. And that’s when I thought, "Okay, I really need to pursue this." And I started playing around with, "How can I make this into a freeze ­dried powder with all the same integrity, all the same intention, so that it could be in a box just like it was in the '60s."

Edible: Design and art feel essential to Gelée. Where do you find creative inspiration (Be that art, film, etc.)?

Messinger: There's a couple themes. But the first right out the gate was definitely this feeling of luminosity. The luminosity of jello, right? It feels like glass. You can reflect and refract light with it. From an art perspective, Salvador Dali was one of the first ones that was playing with the crazy nature of Aspic, like meat gelatin. He has a whole cookbook. It's an amazing cookbook. And he does all these crazy gelatin aspic, you know, like floating langoustines and meat things. Hilma af Klint, her very psycho­spiritual [work.] I think there's always been this really deep spiritual part of me. I also love Irving Penn, a huge inspiration for still lifes. Creating these food­-based still lifes, though he was a photographer, that feel almost more like art than food. Pina Bausch, huge inspiration to me. She's a dancer. Her work is just…It is unbelievable, and it's so authentic. And I think dancing feels also really prevalent to Gelée and the sensuality of the jiggle. I have a laundry list of people, but what all of my inspirations have in common is that they are so authentic. They showed up in their lifetime, whether they're dead or alive, 1,000% authentic and magnetic in who they are. And I think that drives me as an individual.

Edible: What led you to incorporate the idea of play and joy in creating food? Was it always a part of your ethos as a chef, or was it in response to something? 

Messinger: I think throughout my life, [I’ve been] getting closer and closer to this idea of ease and of tapping into joy. [For example,] going to the farmer's market and touching everything and only buying the things that light me up, not buying what I think I'm supposed to buy, right? Or creating a menu based solely on literally whatever makes me smile. Especially with something like joy or how we navigate our lives, that's changing every single day.

Hopefully, as individuals, we can all get to the place where we really listen to our bodies and what we need in every moment…And when you are, I think there's so much joy that can come through. And the true healer is joy.