One of the most joyful shows on television is Max’s Julia, a sweet confection of a series that follows one of culture’s most acclaimed chefs, Julia Child (Sarah Lancashire), as she navigates the rise of her The French Chef television program in the 1960s alongside her husband Paul (David Hyde Pierce), her friends, and her colleagues at the WGBH network. Season 2 premiered in November, depicting Julia stepping into the fame her show has brought her and prepping to write her second cookbook. The show explores a changing American landscape, lending a surprising amount of depth—but, most importantly, it never skimps on the food.
That’s where Christine Tobin comes in. She is a trained fine artist who has spent 30 years in the Massachusetts food scene, first working in restaurants and then using her art background to pursue food styling. Tobin transitioned into film and television, where one of her first jobs was on Jason Reitman’s Labor Day. (Remember that sexy Kate Winslet pie? Tobin helped out with that.) Since then, she’s worked on the HBO limited series Olive Kitteridge, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and many other projects.
As a child, Tobin grew up in a home where food was a love language and Child’s voice was always present (including in a hand-painted Julia Child card she made for her father as a child). When she got the call that she’d be doing the food styling for Julia, it felt like a full circle moment. Tobin chatted with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed about starting her career in food styling, working with Greta Gerwig, and how she prepares those famous Julia Child dishes.
How did you first get involved in food styling?
I first got involved through still photography. I was a front-of-the-house worker at Oleana, a restaurant in Cambridge with Ana Sortun, for six and a half years. Watching her artistry in preparing food and plating food, something just snapped in me as a trained fine artist. I worked in restaurants to make my way through school, and I said to a friend of mine, “I think I want to get into food styling.” Ana was talking about finding a food stylist for her first cookbook Spice, that was nominated for a James Beard. I wanted to be in it. So she took me on board to work with her on it. That was my first entrance into the craft of food styling. I assisted stylists and did food styling in New York and here for many years. Then fast-forward to when I was 40, I got my first call to work on film so I’ve been straddling both still photography work and motion work.
It seems like your backgrounds in both fine art and the restaurant industry were a perfect match.
I’ve been working in restaurants since I was 17. Through college and then being a working artist and a gallery artist, that was my means of earning. So it was by watching chefs and absorbing the artistry that was happening at Oleana, not just with Ana, but Cassie Piuma, who now owns Sarma in Cambridge, and Maura Kilpatrick who owns Sofra. [I learned by watching] that team of people and the way they executed food as a practice, not just for sharing with customers, but just watching them and studying them. There was a window into how they were executing it and understanding from the artist perspective their continuity of it, their plating of what the special was that night, and how it might’ve taken two or three turns to get that one design down on the blank canvas. And then how it just repeats all throughout the night.
The food styling is just the last element. It hit me one time, on stage when I was feeling like a DJ. I just had all the hot plates going. I was plating and cooking and [doing] last kisses and all these things before it got onto the stage. There was definitely a moment this season that I was standing there saying I love the sick, crazy adrenaline that goes into the work.
How was the transition from moving to doing still food styling into film and television for you?
I think it would’ve probably been really jarring for me because the sets operate very differently. I think, again, having all that restaurant background makes that role for me an instinctual good fit because we want to see the food be the hero. But this season [on Julia] in particular really opened me to the concept of just sort of relaxing a bit. It was a pressure of a complete magnitude, just letting the food behave the way it does and be handled the way it does and live the way it does, especially in the tablescapes.
To me, I see the series as being just a lovely note to have people engage and consume. It just reads so natural to me, which is refreshing because it’s not just a solid sculptural piece of food on a surface. I’m lucky to be working with an incredible camera department on both Season 1 and Season 2. Our “A” camera operator, Gerard Sava, and I have worked really well together. He was an ally, which is what a food stylist always wants: someone to have their back and just capture something that is visually appealing or visually stunning.
Considering your relationship with food and Julia Child growing up, landing this must have felt full circle. What was your research process for the show?
It was soon after the release of Little Women. A couple months later, I got the call about the [Julia] pilot, asking me to come in and meet Patrizia [von Brandenstein, the production designer] and meet Charles McDougall who was directing the pilot. During Little Women, I was really allowed to create broadly with food, of course, with keeping the book and Greta’s script in check and working with her vision. But I always showed up with more and allowed for more breadth and scope and was very trusted in that regard. It was a very heavily researched project, beyond Little Women as a book and into that time period and to be period-correct. So my brain was already sort of in that mode when Julia landed.
In Season 1, we don’t see a lot of food. For the first couple episodes, that was something that we naturally built upon. And then we just naturally have grown and progressed into the body of work so far. I think what we accomplished in this season in particular is the ability of me and my assistant Rachel, who came to France with me, to look at each other and say, “Now we could do anything.”
What is your process with your team and your assistant when you’re creating and styling for the show?
I typically like to be left alone for a bit with the script. I absorb it. I design the elements around what foods are scripted, [like I’m] menu planning, as you would say, a catering gig. I then send out a bazillion photos to create mood boards. So then when I have everything for myself and the plan, that’s when we have our culinary meetings and I bring in the director, the writers, the actors, and potentially the prop master set decorator. We have this ability to just sit and talk things through. It gets everyone on board with the food program for each scene, so we can all prepare together as a seamless entity. But as far as my assistants go, I operate a restaurant—front of the house and back of the house.
I pitched everything, everyone agreed upon it, so now let’s start testing. There’s Rachel, my designated recipe tester that I work with. Then we have Sophia, who’s a powerhouse culinarian. So she’s banging out all the mise en place and prepping and building kits. I have baking assistants that come in every once in a while for those baking heavy scenes. And then in front of the house, I have Carolyn and Molly. They’re the ones with the walkie-talkies. And they’re there to make sure that I have everything on my landing pad, because all the food comes to me after we prepare it and I do those last kisses or sauteing or preparations that are needed, and then it goes onto the set.
What have been some of your favorite food moments in the show? I know you mentioned that Season 2 ups the ante. There are episodes where you guys shot in France that look incredible.
I just love how the food in each moment sort of sparkles. I love the retro food that we see on WGBH. It’s just so cheerful and fun. I remember those foods myself as a kid. The way that they were shooting these big feast scenes was rolling. There was beautiful beef wellington at the end of the season, and you want to see it perfectly intact. But the fact that we just see someone just grabbing it and slicing into it and just people living in the space with the food, I think that that breeds success for me because that’s how I love and prepare food for others in my life.
