New Worlder

Christian F. B. Puglisi is a Copenhagen-based chef and restauranteur that closed and sold all of his restaurants in recent years to spend time with his family, but has gradually transitioned into a writer, with a memoir in the works and an active Substack newsletter called A Chef’s Perspective . He’s also active on social media and on YouTube , where he has been posting long, sort of stream of con...

Lara Espirito Santo is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and George McLeod is from New Zealand. Through their shared interest in reducing food waste and imagining a better food system they met in the UK and started working at Douglas McMaster’s closed loop, zero waste restaurant Silo. After a few years there, where George was briefly the head chef until the pandemic hit, they decamped to Portugal, openi...

María Álvarez and Isaac Martínez are the co-founders of the Mexican culinary book publisher Novo . We had María on a couple of years ago when they had just started out. They’ve put a few more books out and have some exciting projects in development, so we wanted to talk to her again alongside Isaac. Somehow, they are the first culinary book publisher in Mexico and they have already put out some be...

Abril Macías is the founder of the magazine Revista Chiú , a print and digital platform based in Ecuador. One of the most fascinating gastronomic destinations in the world, Ecuadorian food remains relatively unknown or misinterpreted. Abril often writes about understanding its place in the world. The country lacks an easily identifiable national dish like ceviche or tacos, however, we discuss duri...

Sebastian Gallucci comes from an Argentine Italian family, but grew up in Toronto, Canada. He now runs two restaurants in somewhat isolated part of Costa Rica’s South Pacific coast in the town of Uvita, called Sebas and Alma . Uvita, and neighboring towns like Dominical, are less accesible than the beach towns of Nicoya and Guanacaste much further north, so they remain relatively unknown to the ou...

There is a lot going on in Colombia right now, for those that are paying attention. There was a major earthquake that just devastated the Eje Cafetero, Colombia's coffee zone, and a new right wing president was just elected. Then there are all the issues related to the formation of the modern country after 2016 peace agreement that are still being sorted out, like the protection of natural resourc...

The village of Trancoso, Brazil is located not very far from where Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral first reached the South American continent in 1500, yet it remained mostly undisturbed for centuries. It wasn’t until the the 1970s when a group of eccentric newcomers arrived by walking there for hours along the beach from Porto Seguro. The biribandos, as they were called, were hippies, fre...

The new season of the New Worlder podcast is finally getting underway. The break was a little longer than I expected because some of the final research trips for the book I’ve been working on were delayed, then writing and edits took longer than expected. The book, called Eating the Amazon , is now finished. Many have asked already, but there are no recipes or photos. It’s a non-fiction narrative...

I want to you to try to imagine an ancient lakebed where the decomposing aquatic life at its bottom was piled up within the lake and mixed with branches and other organic material to form islands. Now imagine farming on those islands. Imagine these farms being incredibly productive. So productive that the crops grown on them could feed hundreds of thousands of people. Not only do they feed at an i...

Gregg Moore is a ceramic artist who is best known for his work with Dan Barber at the restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns . The Glenside, Pennsylvania based artist is a professor of ceramic art at Arcadia University and is also the co-owner, with his wife Jackie, of the ceramic studio Heirloom , which sells plateware influenced by agriculture and farmers’ markets. Why don’t we think of the plate w...

Shava Cueva is the Baja California, Mexico born photographer who created the book and platform Bebidas de Oaxaca . The self-published book, now in its second edition, and available in English and Spanish, documents an incredible 87 traditional drinks from the eight regions of the state of Oaxaca. They are drinks made from “fruits, seeds, rinds, leafs, sap, flowers, crusts, [and] stems,” and prepar...

Peter Tempelhoff is a chef and restauranteur in Cape Town, South Africa. While Pete lived and worked in Europe and the US, and worked with Marco Pierre White and several other well-known chefs, hell fell in love with Japanese cooking many years ago and it changed how he saw South African ingredients, which is an ongoing evolution. His fine dining restaurant Fyn combines Japanese techniques with So...

Nancy Matsumoto is the author of Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System , which will be released in October but is available for pre-order now. The book is a collection of stories about women that are creating alternative food networks. They are building out local and regional supply chains in the face of overwhelming odds and the destructiveness of industrial agric...

Elspeth Hay is the author of the new book Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food . The book helps us understand how many in Western society lost their relationship to nut producing trees. It explains how integral trees such as oaks, chestnuts, black walnuts and hazelnuts are to forest ecosystems and how their nuts were once a staple in North American diets. Hay lives on Cape Cod and has b...

Olivia Chase and Steve Sprinkel are the owners of The Farmer and the Cook in Ojai, California. What is The Farmer and the Cook? It’s a restaurant, café, bakery, farm market and community hub in the middle of Ojai, plus a 10 acre farm a few blocks away. The Farmer and the Cook opened in 2001, though Olivia and Steve have been at the center of the American organic food movement for decades, helping...

Nicolás Tapia is the chef and owner of the restaurant Yum Cha in Santiago, Chile. In the interview he talks about how he became interested in tea during a trip to China and during a family style meal where everyone was drinking tea he was reminded of the Chilean concept of once, the evening tea and meal. That’s when the idea was planted in his head to create a restaurant where food and tea could b...

Stephanie Bonin is a Barranquilla, Colombia born chef and the owner of Patio Tropical in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For years, Stephanie has been doing to legwork in Colombia. While she did work at Cosme in New York for a little while, most of her experience comes from learning not in fancy restaurant kitchens in cities, but from traditional cooks, many of them older women, in the provinces of Colomb...

Martin Rosberg is a natural cheesemaker that lives in Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, a small community across the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is Argentine and once ran a boutique hotel and restaurant in Buenos Aires but moved away to find a quieter life on a small farm with his family. He built a few stilted houses that he still rents on Airbnb , then he started making bread...

Garima Arora is the India born chef of the two Michelin star restaurant Gaa in Bangkok, Thailand. She is the only female Indian chef with two Michelin stars. Garima has been working tirelessly to awaken the transformative potential of Indian cuisine both in India and abroad for many years. She developed a non-profit called Food Forward India, that documents, discover and catalogue the diversity an...

Maru Molina lives in El Salvador, living somewhat of a nomadic lifestyle. She has a weekly pop-up event called Cocina de Jardin , where the events are held in both wild and urban settings around the country. Maru's work on the project over the past five years is very impactful. I believe it is having an impact. She has been holding weekly events that connect consumers with healthy, nutritious food...

Evan Rail is based in Prague, in the Czech Republic and is prolific food and travel writer, and has covered beer and spirits for many years. His latest book is called The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit . Evan and I have been crossing journalistic paths for many years. We both have written for the New York Times Travel section for a long...

Carolina Colque and Sergio Armella are the owners of the restaurant Ephedra outside of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Let me be clear when I say that this is a very unlikely restaurant. Two young, local Atacameños with no cooking experience, have opened a tasting menu restaurant in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. It’s not even in the main town, San Pedro de Atacama, but in an ayllu, a...

Bruna Fontevecchia and Max Wilson are the cofounders of the food magazine and platform Anchoa . The magazine, which began in Argentina, has tried to create a space for deeper stories about food in Latin America. There is little to no mention of fine dining chefs or restaurant rankings. The magazine covers anthropology and ecology with food, the things that we eat and drink and how they are made, a...

Sarah Thompson is the chef of Casa Playa in the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is a Culinary Institute of America graduate who spent many years working in New York City at restaurants like Marea and Alder, but when taking a job with Enrique Olvera and Daniela Soto-Innes at Cosme, she fell in love with Mexican cuisine. When that restaurant wanted a variat...

Based in Malmo, Sweden,Lotta & Per-Anders Jörgensen are the founders of the legendary food magazine Fool . Lotta is an art director and Per-Anders, or P.A. as I have come to call him, is a photographer. This is a magazine that launched in 2012 and has put out, thus far, 8 issues, very sporadically. It has been a few years since. The last issue, but as they reveal in the episode, there will be a #9...