Special Sauce with Ed Levine

Listening to Roads and Kingdom co-founder Matt Goulding talk about the food culture in Italy on this week's Special Sauce was a real treat for me. Matt spent months eating his way through the country for his extraordinary new book, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture , and he explains that what he found in his travels was a vibrant and evolving food culture, not one that i...

In part 2 of my conversation with the remarkable chef and writer Edward Lee, we take a deep dive into his terrific new memoir-with-recipes Buttermilk Graffiti: A Chef’s Journey to Discover America’s New Melting-Pot Cuisine .   Lee writes in the book, "Much of what we think of as traditional American cuisine is being challenged. We're witnessing a reshaping of the food landscape, and it is thrillin...

  Having chef and memoirist Edward Lee on Special Sauce was the happiest of accidents. Sitting on top of a pile of books on Special Sauce associate producer Marissa Chen's desk was Lee's evocative and moving memoir, Buttermilk Graffiti . I read a chapter, was knocked out by it, and emailed his publicist asking if Lee–chef/owner at three   restaurants in Louisville , Kentucky, and culinary director...

In part 2 of the Special Sauce interview with artist and author Maira Kalman, we were joined by Barbara Scott-Goodman , who co-authored Cake , and, of course, we talked cake. What else would we talk about? The first question I asked was how the book came to be. Scott-Goodman said that she had always wanted to write a book about cake, but not one that dipped into the realm of baking bibles or took...

I don't know how many serious eaters have heard of the brilliant, food-loving, and thought-provoking artist and writer Maira Kalman, but I've been a huge fan of hers for a long time now. So when I heard that she had recently co-written (with Barbara Scott-Goodman) and illustrated a cookbook, Cake , I knew I had to have her on Special Sauce. Kalman worked with her late husband, Tibor, at the influe...

In part two of my terrific interview with Smitten Kitchen 's Deb Perelman, we move from the creation of her blog into book writing (her second book Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites was just published in October 2017), and how social media has (or hasn't) changed what she does. The first thing I learned was that writing books was never part of Deb's grand master plan:...

  A week after sitting down with Elise Bauer  of Simply Recipes , I got to reminisce with another seminal food blogger: Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen . Deb started Smitten Kitchen in 2006, the same year that Serious Eats launched. Twelve years later, Smitten Kitchen has millions of readers who come to the site for both her fine recipes and her realistic portrayal of her insanely busy city life,...

At the end of part 1 of my Special Sauce interview with Elise Bauer, she had just described starting Simply Recipes in 2004 after coming home to live with her parents in Sacramento to recover from a serious case of chronic fatigue syndrome, and in this week's episode we pick up where we left off. At the outset, Elise says she was making enough money to splurge on movie tickets, but then things sta...

My guest on this week's Special Sauce is Simply Recipes founder Elise Bauer, who was a veteran of Silicon Valley start-ups long before she started her blog. "In the late '90's I worked with a start-up and helped raise $35 million on Wall Street for what was similar to what is now Skype. But it was also in the late '90's when, what do they say, what's that great saying of venture capitalists, 'In a...

In part 2 of my Special Sauce interview with Sara Moulton, she plunges headfirst into the issues women face as chefs. "When I first moved to New York...I couldn't get a job. But not only that, about every five years there'd be an article in the New York Times saying, "Where are all the women chefs?" It pissed me off, because I'd be like, "I know where they are. Being kept down or going to Californ...

This week's guest on Special Sauce is food television personality and pioneering chef Sara Moulton, who is as unpretentious as she is accomplished. And when I say accomplished I mean accomplished . Sara is currently the host of the PBS series Sara's Weeknight Meals  and the co-host of Milk Street Radio . She previously was the host of the live television show Cooking Live on the Food Network for a...

As you can probably tell, I love interviewing people for Special Sauce. That's because we book guests who have compelling food-related stories to share with us. But Roads & Kingdoms co-founder and author Matt Goulding had so many interesting things to say about food and life that I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I probably enjoyed the time I spent gabbing with Matt more than any othe...

In part two of my interview with Andrew Friedman, the author of Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll , he and I take a really deep dive into the book. Here's Friedman talking about the origins of the American chef culture: "If you were an American kid [in the 1970s]...it was all but unheard of to come from a "good home" and turn to your parents one day and say, 'Hey, you know what, guys? I think I mi...

No writer has spent more time working and hanging out with great chefs than Andrew Friedman. So when I heard that his long-awaited book chronicling chef culture in the US— Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll —had finally been published, how could I not invite him on Special Sauce?  Friedman has collaborated with outstanding chefs on more than two dozen cookbooks, and he's not even as old as me. What...

It's been several days since the Oscars, and I'll admit it: I was keenly disappointed when  Knife Skills  didn't win for Best Documentary Short. But now that I've had a few days to reflect on the Oscars as a whole (go, Frances McDormand, go!), and now that I've listened to part two of my interview with  Knife Skills  filmmaker Tom Lennon and Cleveland chef-restaurateur Brandon Chrostowski, I've re...

We don't usually make a big deal about the Oscars on Special Sauce, but when I saw the brilliant Oscar-nominated documentary short  Knife Skills , I knew I wanted to talk about it. The film shows what happens when Cleveland chef/restaurateur Brandon Chrostowski opens Edwins, a white-tablecloth French restaurant staffed almost entirely by recently released convicts who are reentering the workforce....

Back in the day, we used to say that Serious Eats was a website focused on celebrating and sharing our enthusiasm for food with the online community. In Part 2 of my interview with fellow food enthusiast Phil Rosenthal, he reveals that Somebody Feed Phil , his new Netflix show, is really about the same thing, if you just added "travel" to food and substituted "family" for the online community. Foo...

My friend Phil Rosenthal, the creator and host of the new Netflix show Somebody Feed Phil  is as much fun to talk to as he is to eat with. When I asked him how the show ended up on Netflix, he replied, "The way I sold the show...I said, 'I'm exactly like Anthony Bourdain if he was afraid of everything....I mean, I'm the guy watching him, not really wanting to go to Borneo and have a tattoo pounded...

In part 2 of my interview with JJ Johnson, the charismatic chef and co-author of Between Harlem and Heaven: Afro-Asian-American Cooking for Big Nights, Weeknights, and Every Day , I had to ask him to explain the book's lengthy subtitle word by word, and to explain what he and his co-author Alexander Smalls set out to do with it. The book, JJ says, "represents who we are and the food we cook. And t...

My guest this week on Special Sauce is chef and cookbook author Joseph "JJ" Johnson. When I say he gravitated to kitchen work at an early age, I mean really early. He started cooking with his grandmother when he was four: "I didn't really watch cartoons...I'd step on like a milk crate. She would give me a peeler, which was probably like a phony play peeler, like Fisher-Price, and I would peel vege...

Here's how the delightful and brave Jenny Allen describes the food at her family table in Part 2 of her Special Sauce interview: "Such bad food...and so little of it." As that quote can attest, you can be sure there's no shortage of pithy insights or jokes as Jenny and I talk about everything from the food at gallery openings ("Please, don't invite me to an art opening with the only food being pea...

Jenny Allen, the humorist and author of the guffaw-inducing new book Would Everybody Please Stop: Reflections on Life and Other Bad Ideas , derives as much pleasure from eating as anyone I know. Consider this anecdote she shared with me about her food-loving stepmother: "One day she said, 'I made you something. I thought you'd like it.' It was an entire mixing bowl full of chocolate mousse...It wa...

When Resy 's Ben Leventhal, who has been involved in at least five food-related start-ups, speaks about entrepreneurship, I am all ears. Here are just a couple of the pearls of wisdom that came out of our in-depth conversation: "What I do try to say to people that haven't been through a couple of cycles is you got to understand how hard this is about to be. People say, 'Oh, I want to start a compa...

The members list of the non-existent Digital Food Entrepreneur's Club would be quite small, but it would have to include Ben Leventhal, who is both this and next week's guest on Special Sauce. Ben cofounded  Eater in 2005 and is now one of the cofounders of Resy , the popular restaurant reservations app. On this week's episode, he and I reminisce about the good and bad and definitely crazy old day...

This week we've got a special holiday episode of Ask Special Sauce. With Kenji and Stella serving as my co-pilots from the comforts of their own homes, we endeavored to answer some of the questions Serious Eaters and Special Sauce devotees have about holiday cooking and baking. Though we were thousands of miles apart, the exchanges crackled with energy and holiday cheer, with more than a heaping h...