Joiners

This week, we’re joined by Chef Noah Sandoval, the chef behind Chicago’s two-Michelin-starred Oriole and one of the more instinctive voices working in tasting menus today. An army brat with a Navy SEAL dad, Sandoval dropped out of high school, started washing dishes, and worked his way up through kitchens in Virginia and Chicago without much of a plan beyond getting better. He never really chased...

This week, we're sitting down with Chef Lee Wolen, the quietly pragmatic leader behind some of Chicago’s most enduring kitchens, whose approach to food rejects gimmick in favor of clarity, restraint, and great product. Equal parts craftsman and operator, Wolen has built a reputation not just for consistency at Boka, but for cultivating teams that grow with him. He joins us in the studio for a wide...

This week, we’re joined by Chef Sujan Sarkar, the chef and owner behind Chicago’s Michelin-starred Indienne and a growing group of restaurants that includes Nadu, Sifr, Swadesi, and Baar Baar. As he puts it, he’s a systems man first and a chef second, which makes a lot of sense once you hear the story: from hotel management school in India, to Michelin-starred kitchens in London, to working at McD...

This week's guest is Rodrick Marcus -- international sourcer of mystery, master tea blender, and founder of Rare Tea Cellar. If it exists somewhere in the world and it's extraordinary, he's probably already found it. It all started with a trip to London as a kid, an obsession with afternoon tea, and a locked hotel hallway. Nearly 30 years later, Rodrick has built Rare Tea Cellar into a destination...

Doug Phillips studied architecture, which -- if you've ever watched him build a program -- actually makes a lot of sense. He came up through some of Logan Square's most beloved spots -- Boiler Room, Scofflaw, Heavy Feather, The Whistler -- developing a deep fluency in craft cocktails and the particular chaos of running a bar at the center of a neighborhood's golden era. Now, as a beverage lead at...

This week’s guest didn’t grow up dreaming of restaurant kitchens -- but after finding her way into culinary school and landing an internship at Blackbird, she's become a true mainstay. Under the mentorship of friend-of-the-pod Chef David Posey at Blackbird and later Elske, Chef Tayler Ploshehanski developed her voice through rigor, repetition, and a deep respect for craft. Now, as chef de cuisine...

We round out our pair of episodes at the Friends of James Beard Chef Invitational at Sand Valley with Amanda Rockman. After helping shape Chicago’s pastry scene in restaurants and hotels, opening teams across the city, Rockman is now back in Austin, where she runs Rockman Coffee + Bakeshop. In front of a live audience, we discuss her path through some of the country’s most demanding kitchens, the...

Damarr Brown is a chef and culinary leader known for his soulful, polished take on Southern cuisine; as the chef at Virtue Restaurant, he has become one of Chicago’s most celebrated voices in hospitality, a nationally recognized talent with a deep commitment to mentorship. He joins us for our first full-on live show at the Friends of James Beard Chef Invitational at Sand Valley, where he reflects...

Before he became a corporate chef building flavors with scientists and packaging engineers, Chef Danny Espinoza was a kid from Humboldt Park working nonstop and learning the hard way in demanding Chicago kitchens. Today, he wears two hats: R&D at ofi by day, and Santa Masa Tamaleria with his wife by night, with pop-ups and long-term ambitions always in motion. In this episode, Danny walks us t...

Born in Vigo, Spain to a Basque mother and Galician father, Chef Gabino Sotelino’s path to the kitchen began early and unfolded across some of the world’s great hotel dining rooms before landing in Chicago in the 1970s. Over the decades that followed, he helped shape the city’s rise as a serious dining destination, opening and guiding restaurants that would become institutions and introducing gene...

Mark Sotelino grew up in the kitchens and dining rooms of some of Chicago's most celebrated restaurants. His father, Chef Gabino Sotelino, emigrated from rural Spain and went on to partner with Rich Melman at Lettuce Entertain You to create landmarks like Ambria, Mon Ami Gabi, and Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!. Since then, Mark has built a 28-plus-year career of his own at Lettuce, rising from teenage host at...

If you’ve been to a major concert in the past thirty years, there’s a decent chance this week’s guest had a hand in fueling the talent. Debbie Sharpe, the charming Aussie behind The Goddess and Grocer, built her culinary chops touring the globe and cooking for the likes of Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, The Rolling Stones, and Paul McCartney before jumping off the tour bus and making Chicago her perman...

Rum -- despite its exotic reputation -- isn’t an escapist novelty so much as a lived-in, agricultural spirit, grounded in real places and real work. No one makes that case more convincingly than this week’s guest, Dan Smith, managing partner of Queen Mary Tavern, a Ukrainian Village institution and longtime favorite of the Joiners boys. Dan cut his teeth at The Violet Hour, then behind the bar at...

Chef Adam Sindler grew up inside Chicago’s first sushi restaurant, Kamehachi — founded by his Japanese immigrant great-grandmother and later revived by his mother and grandmother. A next-generation operator and creative force in the family business, Sindler left home to sharpen his craft at the Alinea Group, working as Kitchen Expo at the Michelin-starred Roister, before bringing big-league system...

Our reverence for Big Star is well-documented — and for good reason. For a wide range of people coming up in Chicago’s hospitality scene, the spot represented a proof of concept: that you could take something familiar, do it with conviction, and build a culture around it. Its mythos is legend — from strong margaritas to nightly cash-only bonanzas — and this week’s guest was there for all of it. La...

This week’s guest is Rosemary Waldmeier, a true hospitality lifer -- raised in downtown Chicago in the orbit of the Drake Hotel, then pulled (inevitably) toward the dining room’s gravity. After two summers hosting at Gibson’s and a formative management internship at Shaw’s, she found her long-term home at Lettuce Entertain You, rising through Shaw’s and onto the opening team at Oyster Bah before s...

Much ink has been spilled on The Wiener's Circle as a Chicago institution -- known for late-night hot dogs, sharp tongues, and the kind of chaos you can only get away with if there’s real love underneath it. And Poochie, who joins us for this week’s episode, has been at the center of it for nearly three decades, turning that corner of Clark into something closer to a stage than a storefront. But i...

The first guest of 2026’s origins might be modest, but the results are anything but. From deciding to cook as a nine-year-old so he didn’t have to eat the same meal every night, to bootstrapping a BBQ restaurant from a single Weber grill (the small version!) into one of the NYT's top 50 restaurants in the country , Chef James Sanders is very much the real deal. His South Side BBQ hotspot, Sanders...

We round out 2025 with Bret Heiar, a true original of the hospitality world. These days, he’s the Wine Director at Avec River North, and he's gearing up to open a new Avec location in Highwood, bringing One Off Hospitality’s wine ethos north to the suburbs. Bret got his start as a teenager slinging fries at I-80’s World’s Largest Truck Stop in Walcott, Iowa, before bouncing through back-of-house g...

It didn’t always seem inevitable that Margaret Pak would end up running one of Chicago’s most thoughtful and distinctive restaurants. She studied statistics, built a long career in finance and analytics, and spent years inside corporate systems where stability and structure were the goal. But alongside that work she fostered a quieter obsession for the culture surrounding food and food service. Af...

Before he became a hospitality lifer, Paul Abu-Taleb was considering a PhD in History -- he’s the type who could absolutely have ended up teaching undergrads how to think, argue, and spot patterns. Instead, he’s applied that same mindset to restaurants: building places that don’t just serve people, but actually hold communities together. We get into how Paul went from a restaurant-family childhood...

Chase Bracamontes grew up chasing triple axels as a competitive figure skater, but these days her rink is the bar and the dining room. She is the former wine and spirits director at The Publican and now partner and beverage director at Chef’s Special Cocktail Bar in Chicago, whose path from junior-elite ice rinks to a Chinese American cocktail bar says a lot about how she thinks about pressure, co...

This week, we sit down with Martin Kastner, the award-winning designer responsible for some of the most iconic objects in modern gastronomy. From Alinea’s game-changing serviceware to the now-legendary Porthole Infuser, Martin has spent his career reshaping how we experience food and drink — and the rituals around them. He takes us from his early days as a Czech metalsmith, to conceptual art schoo...

This week, we sit down with Bailey Sullivan, executive chef of Monteverde Restaurant & Pastificio and a Top Chef: Destination Canada finalist, who seemed almost pre-programmed for a life in restaurants: raised at Goldyburgers, her family’s Forest Park burger joint, and glued to Food Network and Top Chef as a teen. She walks us through a career that runs from early gigs at Noodles & Company...

This week's guest is an icon, a chef’s chef, and a tireless culinary educator -- it's not hyperbole to suggest that the entirety of food media as we know it, a food media that respects food and the process of making it as a skill to be fostered and shared, is in his profound debt. Raised in his parents’ restaurant near Lyon, Jacques Pépin went from unpaid apprentice and presidential chef for Charl...