Lindsay Marie Morris

Set on West Hollywood's hip and colorful Santa Monica Boulevard, Pura Vita is a beacon for foodies, Italians, and Italophiles alike. Its low-lit, cozy, contemporary New York City wine bar vibe is as inviting as the food, which is both innovative and delicious.

Start with arancini or eggplant parmigiana, before digging into cacio e pepe or spinach and mushroom lasagna, paired with wine sourced from organic and biodynamic farms. Then, treat yourself to the tiramisu. It's a Grand Tour of the boot and its stones, influenced by chef and owner Tara Punzone's Italian New Yorker roots.

 

Take one look at the restaurant's arresting logo—a chef's knife pierces through a dripping tomato—and it's suddenly clear: no animals were harmed in the making of your meal. In fact, it was the first 100% plant-based Italian restaurant and wine bar in the United States when it opened its doors in 2018. That doesn't stop Pura Vita's largely omnivorous customer base from coveting reservations for brunch, lunch, aperitivo, and dinner.

 

Drawing from the Costa Rican phrase "pura vida," Tara called her restaurant Pura Vita to reflect an Italian version of the pure life. It's also among her many tattoos. She designed the concept, menu, and interior herself, drawing from her master's degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. 

Born in Brooklyn to second-generation Italian American parents, Tara grew up in Long Island, influenced by her grandparents' Neapolitan and Calabrian traditions. But after watching a video about slaughterhouses in her fifth-grade class, she found herself rethinking her culture's foods, especially once she became vegan at age 12.

Mom's lasagna was no longer an option, but Tara took to the kitchen, reinventing her favorite family foods in a way that celebrated their rich history.

She documents that journey from plant-based dinners at Manhattan's Angelica Kitchen to opening Pura Vita and releasing her first cookbook, Vegana Italiana (Rodale Books, October 2025), which she co-wrote with Gene Stone. She was also kind enough to share more about navigating that path, from the spark that ignited her Pura Vita vision to her ultimate goal of serving and sharing beautiful, compassionate Italian food. 

Pura Vita Chef and Owner Tara Punzone
Photo by Heidi Calvert

What led you to embrace veganism?

I write about it in the book because it's part of my whole experience that got me here to where I am today. As a kid, I loved animals. Every little kid does, and I was always very finicky about the things that I would eat. But of course, as a child, you don't make the connection to how the food gets on your plate, what the process is from a beautiful doe-eyed cow standing there to a dish that's in front of you. It doesn't occur to you what goes on from one place to the other. So there was no connection for me.

But then in the fifth grade, when I was 10 years old, I had a teacher who showed the class a video of a slaughterhouse, and it was just appalling. It affected me in a very, very profound way.

That was it for me. I didn't eat my lunch that day. I gave it away to somebody else. And I told my parents when I went home that night that I didn't want to eat meat anymore. And that was the beginning of it.

 

How did your family respond?

They were completely perplexed, and I'm sure they thought it was going to fade out after a couple of weeks. I mean, I was 10 years old, but it didn't because I meant it.

Thankfully, I have really amazing, supportive parents. And what happened was my mom said, "OK, well, there's this place, Angelica Kitchen. Let's eat there. Let's make it a positive experience."

She wanted to understand as well. And in front of Angelica, there used to be a little area where all the pamphlets would be from groups like PETA and information about factory farming for people who were interested enough to take it. And I took all of it, and I just went down the spiral of learning about all of the different segments of that industry, and one by one, how revolting it was. And I didn't want to be a part of any of that.

It took me a couple of years to figure out the whole vegan thing. By the time I was about 12, I had given away my leather motorcycle jacket and my Doc Martens, and I was ready to be vegan to make that full commitment. And it was the best. I have zero regrets.

 

How did that affect the way you participated in Italian traditions?

I'm proud of my heritage. I love my family traditions, and I really wasn't enthusiastic about having to let go of that part. So it became my focus to have both things. I wanted to be able to not eat animals and not hurt animals. But I also wanted to be Italian American and participate in all the things that my family was doing, cooking, and celebrating.

The very first thing that made me realize was that I needed to start learning how to make the foods that my grandma and mom made, particularly for Easter. My mom would always make lasagna on Easter, and I couldn't have it.

My mom made meat-free lasagna because, for many years, I was still eating dairy, and I still was able to participate. But then one day I realized, "No, now I can't have any of it at all."

And so I started trying to figure out how to make the lasagna. That's where my spark started flying. It was terrible at first. It was just a big fail on the first of many times that I made it. But that's what got me excited to figure these things out. That was the first dish.

 

Tara draws inspiration from family recipes and traditions. 

How did that spark lead to Pura Vita?

I always had the dream of having my own restaurant. You never think it's ever going to happen in real life.

I'd been working in restaurants forever, sharpening my skills and learning about business. When I came to L.A., I was the culinary director for a vegan place that had several locations. So I had the opportunity to learn about business, which is the part of being a chef that you don't necessarily learn. That was extremely helpful for me because I learned all the things not to do, which is sometimes more important than what you're supposed to do.

Then, the original owner sold it to new people, and I decided it was time for me to do my own thing. So I started searching for locations. I found a place that was so fitting in my mind for what I wanted. I fixed it completely, but I wanted it to have a certain feel. I got very lucky with the location. And I was also lucky because I wasn't somebody that people knew.

It was just the absolute right moment in time, in the absolute right place. And I'm so grateful for that. It was a success from the very first night, and thank God we're still there.

 

"I have an amazing staff and people I really trust, who helped me make things happen," says Tara.

How did Vegana Italiana come about?

I always had the idea in my mind that I wanted to write a book. As soon as I opened the restaurant and it was successful, every single person asked me if I had a book. But I was running a restaurant and there for 16 hours a day every day. You can't write a book like that. It's not possible.

So many years went by of me wanting to do it, and then I just got to a place with the restaurants where I have an amazing staff and people I really trust who helped me make things happen.

 

It was super difficult because on my one day off, I was just working on this book. If it weren't for Gene Stone, my co-author, I would never have finished it.

Tell us about the writing process.

Luckily, he lives a couple of blocks away from me and from the restaurant. It was very convenient. There was no driving involved. It was pretty great. We would just spend the day together.

 

I wrote the recipes, but I had to write them for smaller servings. But the stories about my life and my childhood—all the recipes have little anecdotes or little stories to go with them—that was me just recording an idea on my phone.

 

I would just tell the story—for example, Easter lasagna—into my phone and then just send it to him, and he would transcribe my words and then make it a little bit more cohesive. That was fun because it felt free. I was just speaking it out, and he was making it readable. We were a really good team.

 

How did you select the recipes you share?

I wanted this book to be accessible. People who live in L.A. come to the restaurant every day and get to eat my food. That's great because that's the whole purpose I want to share with my community. But so many people can't get here, and I want it to be accessible to those people. So you can't have recipes with wild ingredients that no one can find.

 

So I immediately eliminated anything that included ingredients like that. For example, truffles. It's not easy to get truffles; they're extremely expensive. They're delicious, but that's not what this book is about.

 

I want people to be able to make food for their family—really good old school Italian food that happens to be vegan, whether you're fully vegan, you would like to be fully vegan, you haven't figured out a way to do so yet, or you're just trying to add more plant-based food into your life.

A lot of the recipes are things my family has always eaten, and it turns out a lot of those things were already vegan. For example, in Calabria, it's peasant food: Swiss chard, beans, potatoes, and peppers.

 

Cheers to healthy, plant-based Italian food.

With your restaurant and this book, what is your ultimate goal?

It's always been the same. My grandpa and grandma owned an Italian hero shop in Brooklyn. When I was a kid, I wanted to be my grandpa so much. All he did was make simple food for the community, but it was so wildly popular that they needed to hire a security guard. And I thought that was so cool: the impact that he had on his community, and that's always been my goal: to replicate that in a plant-based way.

 

Providing that community feeling and support, and making people happy through clean, healthy food, has always been my goal. It's very simple. I just love the idea of making people happy through food.

 

 

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2024 was a busy year for Rita Prisco, and for once, it wasn't just because of family life for the Queens, New York-based mom of 22-year-old triplets. Somehow, between serving up regular (and frequently viral) TikTok videos to her nearly 500,000 @cucinapalermo fans, she managed to publish not one but two cookbooks—Cucina Palermo: My Homemade Cookbook and Cucina Palermo: Savoring Sicily—and Piccola Francesca, which she envisions as the start of a children's book series.

It all began with a simple spaghetti recipe and a desire to present Sicilian cuisine authentically. She never imagined she'd be competing with professional chefs and cookbook authors. And that homemade approach has proved to be a winning formula. 

Rita shared with me her connection to Sicily, how her incredible journey started, what makes a viral recipe, her future plans, what's been most rewarding, and more. 

  

 

What is your connection to Sicily?

Both my parents are from Sicily. My father grew up in the city of Palermo. He passed away, but I have family in Balestrate, which is more of a beach area, so we would go there when I would go to Sicily. My mother's from a small town called Bisacquino, which is a couple of hours from Palermo. I also have family there still. 

Can you share more about your journey?

Like any other kids, my kids were obsessed with TikTok, but it was more of them doing the dances and all that stuff. And I saw that they were obsessed with it, and it annoyed me that every time I looked for my kids or needed them for anything, what were they doing? They were on TikTok. So I would be upset about it a bit, like, "What the hell? What's going on? You just got to get off of TikTok."

 

And they were like, "Ma, you should watch it. It's not just dancing." They were like, "There's so many other things on TikTok. There are cleaning hacks, and there's cooking."

 

So I started watching the cooking because I am obsessed with cooking, and I noticed that there was no Sicilian food. It was all the food you would see at restaurants on the Italian American menu.

 

I was telling my kids, "Girls, this is not how I ate growing up." And they're like, "Well, why don't you post a video?" I was like, "No. Mommy doesn't do that."

 

It took them months and months of encouraging me that I could do it. So, I just did one to see what would happen and make my kids happy. Literally overnight, it went viral, and it was the foundation recipe, like a staple in my house that I cooked.

 

In a week, I had a hundred thousand followers, and I said, "You know what? Obviously, there's a want for this."

 

People enjoyed it. It was a refreshing thing to them, something that is easy, we could all make, and it looks delicious. It was like people were thirsty for food that actually was real.

So I did another one, and that went viral. Then, another one went viral, and from then on, most of my videos went viral.

 

Rita Prisco with her first cookbook

 

You're now also a published author. Tell us about that experience.

It took a year of people telling me, "You should have a cookbook." And that was another thing that was out of my league mentally. Never in a million years did I think that I would be able to do that! 

I spoke to publishers who were reaching out to me, and it was very intimidating. I didn't want the whole process of writing the cookbook with a publisher. I didn't want any part of it. It was too professional. That's not me. I'm not a chef. I'm not a writer. I'm just a wife and a mom who learned how to cook from her mom and her grandmother. I'm just doing those recipes and having a professional cookbook with professional photos and writers and bloggers, and all that was not a representation of who I am. 

So I said to myself, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it my way. I called my first cookbook My Homemade Cookbook because I didn't want to compete with professionals and be criticized. So, I just laid it out there from the beginning.

 

I did it at home with my daughter, and I warned everybody that that's what they were going to get. So if they were looking for anything different, look someplace else, not in my book. And that's another thing that people enjoyed and were drawn to. They were like, "Wow, that's what we want. We don't want a professional cookbook."

 

How many cookbooks do we have in our house that we never use? Because the minute you open them, they're so intimidating, like, "Oh my God, is this the Bible? What are we doing here?" It's like too much. 

I did my second cookbook because there are so many recipes. I do 50 at a time; it's what I can handle.

 

Then, when I saw the response that I had from people, the connection… I always dreamed of writing a children's book about my childhood and growing up with Sicilian parents in America. But obviously, that couldn't have been done because without a following, without people knowing who you are, it's hard to start writing a book, and then who will buy it if you don't have the exposure.

 

Once I had the exposure, I saw I could do it. So that's where Piccola Francesca came in, and I'm so proud. I feel like I'm more proud of it than I am of my cookbooks because Piccola Francesca is a story of my life. And it's going to continue. That was the first of many to come.

 

It's been amazing with that book because so many people also related to it. And you don't only have to be Italian or Sicilian to relate to it. It's something that other cultures could relate to. 

So many schools are calling me; they want me to come read. And I've been doing that.  

 

How has your Sicilian heritage influenced your cooking and the recipes you share?

They're the recipes that my mom made growing up: peasant food. My mom grew up during the Depression, when there was no steak. It had to be a holiday to have meat. So there was a lot of pasta and potatoes; everything was made with homemade flour. They would turn a piece of old bread into a dessert. (I have one recipe in my cookbook where you take stale bread and turn it into a cookie.)

 

When I was growing up, my parents weren't poor the way they were when they grew up. They had money, but it didn't matter because even though it was peasant food, per se, it was food that we loved that was delicious, like beans, lentils, and split peas.

 

And the same thing with my kids. If you introduce these foods to your children from when they're born, they grow accustomed to them. So that's what happened to me. 

 

Which of your recipes has received the most attention, and why?

There are a few recipes that have exploded. My first one has over 5 million views. That's my spagetata. People were shocked that you can make delicious pasta like that with just a few ingredients. It costs almost nothing to make. Every region makes it its own way. They put a little twist to it, and it's theirs. So, that is a staple in all of Italy.

 

Another one of my recipes that just blew up with millions and millions of views was my chicken cutlets. I think that those weren't as traditional. What happened is that I have a different way of cutting a chicken cutlet, which is fork tender because you're cutting against the grain. And nobody ever saw that in their life. 

You would think a butcher would know this. I actually now have a butcher in my town who takes orders of chicken cutlets "Rita's way," cut the way I cut them because when you cut a chicken cutlet my way, it becomes so tender, and it's so much better. And now they know and say, "We would never cut chicken cutlets the way we used to."

 

People also love my pasta dishes. My pasta dishes all go viral because there are only three or four ingredients. And people like simplicity. They're tired. They work very hard. And if you can make their life easier, they could feed their family without the extra work. That's what they're looking for. 

That's what I focus on every day. When I know I'm going to show somebody a recipe, I ask, "Is this going to make their life better and easier?" And that's all I'm going to do. Can I make complicated stuff? Of course. But I don't even show that to people.

 

My mom's fig cookies for Christmas take hours and hours of work, but I made a recipe that tastes just like my mom's fig cookies, and it's done in a half hour. That's what I look for when I'm looking for a recipe. I'm looking for something simple with a few ingredients that's going to taste good. It has to have those three components. And I feel like once you have those three components, you have a winner. 

 

What are your plans for future projects?

I'm going to continue putting out a new children's book, always with the same character. I'm going to focus on Francesca. I want to introduce other stories of growing up with immigrant Sicilian parents and the differences between that and being an American child with American parents and grandparents. So many things make us different, including our traditions. And I have a lot of stories from my childhood. 

 

What has been the most rewarding part of your journey?

I think the most rewarding part for me is the people who reach out to me. I try my best to read as many comments and emails as I possibly can. I have people who are in hospice. I have people fighting fourth-stage cancer that I communicate with often who tell me that while they're doing their chemo, they watch me, and it brings a smile to their faces. The fact that I could distract somebody a little from their suffering, even for those few minutes, is all worth it to me.

 

So many people lost their moms or their grandparents at a younger age. They miss their grandmothers or their moms who used to cook for them like this, but they never thought of writing things down. I'm giving them recipes for food they never thought they would make, and they're so happy because I remind them; I bring them memories of their childhood. That is the most rewarding thing in the world.

 

@cucinapalermo Make spagetata with me!🇮🇹 #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #cooking #italiancooking #pasta #goodeats ♬ original sound - Rita

 

 

 

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