Sunny Hostin has so many meals and snacks that have a special place in her heart.
While on set of The View, Hostin, 55, can’t keep her hands off a bag of Funyuns, much to her cohosts’ chagrin.
“My cohosts at The View make fun of me, but I eat Funyuns,” Hostin exclusively reveals in the latest issue of Us Weekly while promoting her new Ama’s Blend rosé. “I think it’s kind of a strange thing, but I eat Funyuns. It’s not great for the breath, so I have mints.”
Hostin enjoys the onion ring chip — a go-to childhood snack — the best when she dips them into hot sauce, which gets her some odd stares on set.
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“Ana Navarro‘s right next door and she just looks in at me and she’s just like, ‘Are you eating that again?’ I am,” she teases.
In addition to her deep love of Funyuns, Hostin also has a deep appreciation of her mom’s home cooking which includes a lot of authentic Puerto Rican cuisine. The TV personality is an avid lover of orzo con calamari (rice and calamari) and alcapurrias, which are a kind of fritter.
“It’s made with yuca and it’s, like, a fritter and it can have anything inside. So you could put crab meat inside, you can put beef inside, you can put chicken inside,” Hostin explains. “My mom will make that for me on my birthday to this day.”
Another sentimental dish for Sunny is the entree she shared with her husband, Emmanuel Hostin, on one of their very first dates.
“When we first started dating, we started a movie date on a Friday night. So we would have margaritas and a movie, and so we would eat at Mexican restaurants,” she tells Us. “We would try every single Mexican restaurant around us.”
At the time, Sunny and Emmanuel, who have been married for 25 years, had just graduated from their respective law and medical schools. While the duo were getting started in their careers, they looked for more affordable options for night outs.
“We were both kind of public servants [who] didn’t make a lot of money, but there would be Taco Tuesdays, not Taco Fridays,” she says. “So sometimes our date would be on Tuesdays and we would have a margarita and tacos. That was our thing.”
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Now, if Sunny could choose only one meal as her final dish, she’s hands down going with a lobster roll but more specifically one from Nancy’s Restaurant in Martha’s Vineyard.
“I would probably eat about four of them when I’m on the Vineyard, which is where [my] first book [Summer on the Bluffs] takes place,” she reflects. “It’s my first stop when I get off the ferry. I get a lobster roll.”
To go with her lobster roll, Sunny can’t help but pair it with a glass of wine. She adds that her new Ama’s Blend rosé “goes really well” with the crustacean sandwich. Sunny was inspired to create her own wine while she was writing her Summer on the Bluffs novel series — the blend is even named after the book’s main character.
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“I really didn’t know much about winemaking. I know a lot more now. It’s actually not that easy,” she tells Us. “I went to Bel Gloss and visited with the owner there, which was just absolutely incredible. And in making this wine, I really made the wine. I was tasting different blends and blending different things and asking for very little sugar actually, because a lot of roses have too much sugar. I wanted something dry.”
Sunny shares that she wanted the wine to reflect Ama and added some personal touches to the process. She used her own handwriting on the bottle’s label and inscribed a special message to her customers.
“If you turn the label around, it says, ‘I hope you enjoy Cher,’ which is something that [Ama] uses as short for Cheri because she’s from New Orleans,” she explains. “And so it’s really all about summer, summer beach reads, and my hopefully one-day fantasy of owning a vineyard in France.”
Ama’s Blend costs $30 and is now available for purchase on Sunny’s website.
For more on Sunny, watch the video above and pick up the latest issue of Us Weekly, which now includes 12 additional pages, on stands now.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
