From PEOPLE Magazine
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Her recipe for success? Using the freshest possible ingredients and extra spices to compensate for the paucity of fat—"you have to give your palate something to respond to," Lymperis, 38, says—she custom-makes each meal to fit the client's specific dietary requests. For example, those who hew to the popular Zone diet get meals high in protein and low in carbohydrates, such as grilled salmon and grilled asparagus with a lemon-dill sauce. For Jesse star Christina Applegate, a vegan, Lymperis cooks with soy products and no animal fats. For those not following a specific diet, such as actress Carmen Electra, the chef offers low-fat comfort food, including non-fried onion rings and baked white-meat chicken nuggets. "I don't have to work out every day now to keep my weight down," Electra attests.
Lymperis's meals, which typically cost $24 to $34 per day for lunch and dinner, are especially coveted by stars getting in shape for a role. To help Kurt Russell bulk up but keep body fat low for 1998's Soldier, Lymperis stocked his refrigerator with lean meats and pasta. "The last day of the shoot," says Lymperis, "he said, 'Get me chili fries and chili burgers!' " Russell later confessed he was sick for a week, she says, adding, "His body went into shock from all that fat."
Lymperis, who cooks her four-dozen regular clients' meals with her own hands ("I want it to feel like family," she says), may be her grub's best advertisement. Depressed after her father's death in 1994, "she resorted to food," says her sister Lisa Jasky, 43. On vacation in Paris last year, Lymperis tipped the scales at 209 pounds. "I was sitting at a cafe eating brie and bread, and I was fat," she recalls. "I thought, 'What's wrong with this picture? I cook healthy food for a living, and I don't take care of myself.' " When she got home, she stuck to the same low-fat meals she serves clients—and lost 77 pounds in eight months.
Food has been central to Lymperis since childhood. When she and her sister were young, parents Dorothy and Ed ran a chain of family-style restaurants near Detroit. "We were a big Greek family," she says, laughing. "We all cooked."
After graduating from a Catholic high school in 1978, Lymperis worked as an assistant and chef to Ruth Pointer, whom she had met when her father's restaurant catered a Pointer Sisters concert. She moved to L.A. in 1985, determined to learn how to make healthier food for her then-cancer-stricken father. Within a year she had earned a license from the Pritikin Center (which taught late diet-guru Nathan Pritikin's principles of low-cholesterol cooking), bought a gourmet deli and persuaded her parents to work with her. "After 50 years of fatty food," she says, "my father started cooking great health food."
With a prime location in Santa Monica, Lymperis's deli gained a Hollywood following that included Dudley Moore (who introduced her food to Oprah Winfrey), Sean Penn and Barbra Streisand. But when her mother died in 1990, she closed up shop; following her father's death, Lymperis says, "I was in a fog." Then one day she visited her old deli. "I could feel my mom and dad's presence everywhere," she says. "It was very comforting." Within days, she had bought back the shop. Lymperis moved operations to Santa Monica's Beach Front Café in July.
Over the past five years her gourmet empire—she also co-owns Big Screen Cuisine, which supplies noshes for TV and movie sets, with restaurateur Scott Floman—has quadrupled in business, with profits in the six figures. "I work around 100 hours a week, and it's all worth it," says the never-married Lymperis, who lives in a two-bedroom Spanish-style bungalow in Santa Monica. "Cooking is my way of bringing happiness into people's lives."
Julie K.L. Dam
Ulrica Wihlborg in Santa Monica
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