Pass the Plate

Sydney Lynn Carlson. Photography by Meka Boyle.

Lana Del Rey is playing in the background as Sydney Lynn Carlson flips through vintage cooking pamphlets at home in Los Angeles, wearing a leopard print jacket, blue jeans, and a white tank top. A large sectional hints at the many late night dinner parties that transform her sanctuary into a warm space for friends to gather. Her open-concept kitchen-dining-living room is spacious and airy, and atop every shelf and countertop are various trinkets and objects that she's collected over the years. Upon closer look, a green dome of fake peas is actually an ashtray. She picks up a plastic stick of butter and flicks it to reveal it is a lighter. There are bread candles and various other fake food replicas. A little pile of vintage cooking pamphlets that she collects, often writing her favorites down in her notebook. “It has so many stains on it,” she says holding the book to her chest, “I love it.” And on her stovetop sits a bubblegum-pink pan from her cookware brand Lynnee.

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Carlson has always dreamt about hosting dinner parties but it wasn’t until quarantine, while she was loving at home with her parents, that she dove into her life-long love for food, first trying out recipes for her family and later making it a career. She started simple, with childhood comfort meals like grilled cheese and tomato soup: “It's one of my favorite foods, which is so simple but it never crossed my mind to make it all from scratch.” When she finally did it, there was no turning back. “It was 100 times more rewarding knowing I made it myself.”

Sydney Lynn Carlson. Photography by Meka Boyle.

When she moved out, she realized she had no cookware to her own name. “I just wanted a pink pan, something good quality that I could cook with but also something cute that I could keep out in my kitchen. And that's what started it,” she recalls. “Now it's this little centerpiece,” she adds, eying the pan on her stovetop. But this wasn’t the first time the 28-year-old has turned an interest into a business. Back in 2012, her and her sister Devon Lee Carlson, put Wildflower Cases on the map, turning their blinged out cutesy phone cases into a successful family business. “I looked up to my dad a lot as a mentor,” she says. Then it was time to take a leap of faith with an idea all of her own: “I thought, what if I turn this passion of mine into a career?”

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Today, Carlson might spend all day in the kitchen perfecting recipes and making content (think heart-shaped burgers or a big pan of shakshuka), or she’ll be tucked away in her home office working on her computer. But she still makes time to visit her family home. “I’ll never show up empty-handed to my parents' house,” she says, listing cookies, banana bread, hummus, and pita. “My friends’ most requested is a vegan bolognese,” she adds. “We became so obsessed that we have bolognaise nights all the time now,” she says with a smile. “And garlic bread of course.”

Sydney Lynn Carlson. Photography by Meka Boyle.

A child of the Internet, social media is much less toxic when your entire feed is cooking content, Carlson shares with a laugh. Rather than doom-scrolling, she is taking notes from other creator-chefs. “I study the angle that they filmed it and the actual editing behind it, the lighting,” she shares. “So much went into that, and I appreciate it all—on top of cooking something beautiful and delicious. It's like an art piece, and it's so fascinating to me.” 

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She sorts through a row of cookbooks.“I would definitely have Julia Child at my dream dinner party,” she says as she flips through the pages of one. “Nathan Fielder, Anthony Bourdain, Martha Stewart, too.” In her cupboard: a jar of chili oil if half-empty. “I've been adding something spicy on top of everything,” she explains. “My new hyper fixation lately is trying to spice up a simple kind of pre-made stuff like ramen I made the other—I added a soft-boiled egg and cheese and like extra spices to try and just see what I could do to it.”

Sydney Lynn Carlson. Photography by Meka Boyle.

She puts a cookbook down and picks up a vintage animal figurine as he looks across the room to her all pink bar cart, then to her shelves of various objects. With summer around the corner, Carlson is busy making plans: beach picnics with super-sized sandwiches and a new Lynnee collaboration in July with a popular women’s apparel brand. With every project her vision expands. “If I could look into the future, a dream of mine would be to be able to look at a kitchen and create everything that goes in it from a fridge to a napkin,” she muses. “I would love to have an all-pink one,” she adds with a laugh, “just because that'd be really cute.”