Communal Table

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made them who t...

Like many of us, Nigella Lawson has spent the last 13 months hunkered at home, in an endless cycle of cooking, eating, washing up (reluctantly), and doing it all again just hours later. Unlike the rest of us, she's adapted her practices into a glorious cookbook—called Cook, Eat, Repeat—that celebrates and elevates this cycle into something contemplative and pleasurable. The renowned author and TV...

We're living in a golden age of Preeti Mistry and the world is so much more delicious for it. The Juhu Beach Club chef, cookbook author, speaker, and podcaster (among other things) can currently be seen teaching kids and puppets alike about the marvelous universe of herbs and spices on the Netflix show Waffles and Mochi; heard on their new podcast Loading Dock Talks in conversation with food and j...

When chef Sam Fore sees something she can fix, she jumps in to help. As the restaurant industry was devastated by COVID-19, she joined The LEE Initiative to help make sure that workers were being fed—and help create a system where the whole community could benefit in the long term. That's just who she is as a person, but it wasn't until recently that she offered that kind of care to herself, in th...

When it comes to calling out cruddy behavior, chef Sam Fore has never been afraid to speak her mind. Growing up as a first-generation Sri Lankan American in North Carolina, she had a supportive community (and a mom who always warned her about how her mouth would get her in trouble—not that she listened) but outside of it, she began to question why the rules and standards were different for her tha...

Pinky Cole has always known that she would lead an extraordinary life. As a girl growing up in East Baltimore, she wasn't sure what form that would take, but when her friends were outside playing, she was setting goals for herself, like "earn my first million by age 30." Which she did. Next goal—a billion by 40. She's got time. The restaurateur and philanthropist joined Communal Table from her sec...

When city planner and architect Adrian Lipscombe visited a cafe in La Crosse, Wisconsin for a business meeting, little did she know she'd end up moving her family up all the way from Austin, Texas, running the cafe herself, and revitalizing a whole section of the city. And if running a restaurant during a pandemic isn't a full-time-plus job, Lipscombe also developed an initiative—40 Acres and a Mu...

The day Matt Jennings woke up on his bathroom floor, he knew something had to change, or else he'd die. Five years later, the chef and cookbook author is sober, happy, healthy, and on a mission to help other people in the industry find their way forward—even if it looks nothing like they'd imagined. Jennings joined Communal Table to talk about the obsessions that drove him, what "chef" means now,...

The day after Vinny Eng was named as one of Food & Wine's 2019 Somms of the Year, he said his thank yous for the accolade, then promptly announced that he was stepping away from the industry for a while to work on a political campaign. For those who know Vinny, this wasn't a surprise, because the industry veteran has always made it his business to act with intention, infusing every act of hospital...

Little did she know at the time she was writing it, but Anita Lo's Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One became, for many, the ideal guide for this time in history. The 2001 Food & Wine Best New Chef and much-lauded chef, author, and TV personality joined Communal Table from her home on Long Island to talk about the ever-changing role of chefs, cooking for pleasure, coping in a tough kitchen,...

When Claudette Zepeda was at her most stressed-out, as she puts it, "my neck went away." Her shoulders were in a permanent state of hunch and she'd been advised at a new job to bring her "knives and anti-anxiety medication." But she learned along the way to advocate for herself, for people who'd always been marginalized in the world of food, and for the Mexican dishes that generations of her famil...

It's hard to open a restaurant. It's indescribably stressful to have to open your restaurant four separate times, for reasons (earthquake, local government corruption, pandemic) out of your control. But Norma Listman and Saqib Keval believe in the vision of Masala Y Maiz, their Mexico City restaurant and co-op, so fiercely that they keep on working. They joined Communal Table for a fascinating con...

January is a particularly cruel month. The days are short, the holidays past, and hey—we're still living in a freaking pandemic. But we've all got to find joy where we can, and this comes in the form of the recipes and stories we're running this month, celebrating the particular pleasure of sopping up stews and soups with bread, making perfect flank steak (and other things) under the broiler, and...

Restaurateurs live their lives by the numbers, and when Carl Sobocinski saw COVID-19 case rates racking up in Greenville, SC, he knew he had to take action. Even though it wasn't mandated by local or state law, he voluntarily closed down all but one of his restaurants for a period after the holidays in an effort to keep his team and his diners safe. It was a tough decision that carried a price tag...

A year ago, Kiki Aranita was in Hong Kong for a cousin's wedding when she heard the first rumblings about a virus that was highly contagious and beginning to spread. There's no way she could have known that just months later, she'd have to shut down her much-loved Philadelphia restaurant Poi Dog because of its impact. It was an agonizing decision, but the multi-talented chef, writer, and artist is...

No one on earth needs to be told that this is a holiday season unlike any other because we're all living it. If you're a listener of this podcast you are painfully aware of the kind of year it's been, and that no one quite knows the way forward. In this year, more than any other, joy, rituals, and traditions matter—especially if we can't be together to celebrate. In this episode, the Food & Wine t...

In 1999, Food & Wine named Rocco DiSpirito as one of its Best New Chefs—a vote of confidence in the future of a brilliant young cook who earned the esteem of his peers as well as a rabid fanbase of diners captivated by the handsome fella who quickly became a staple of the gossip pages. Just a few years later at the height of his fame, DiSpirito walked away from the restaurant world, leaving collea...

Bryan Washington's extraordinary new novel 'Memorial' shares the story of two men in love and at a crossroads in their four-year relationship, when some family dynamics shift and they have to reevaluate who they are in the world, and to one another. There's also a ton of great food on every other page. Washington joined Communal Table on a call from Houston, TX to talk about the care and feeding o...

The holidays this year will look a lot different. With COVID-19 still raging across the country, celebrations will be smaller, sometimes huddled around a Zoom screen or FaceTime, but there are still things to celebrate. In a special episode of Communal Table, Food & Wine's Senior Food Editor Mary-Frances Heck, Food Editor Josh Miller, Associate Food Editor Kelsey Youngman, and longtime (we're talk...

It took leaving home for Vivian Howard to appreciate where she'd come from. The chef, restaurateur, TV star, and author of the new cookbook This Will Make It Taste Good is the daughter of an Eastern North Carolina tobacco farmer, and everything she saw on TV told her that she shouldn't be especially proud of that, that southernness was somehow the butt of a joke. She moved away to New York City, s...

In what feels like a different lifetime, The Final Table star and vaunted chef Timothy Hollingsworth sat down in the Food & Wine studio to talk about his path from dishwasher to chef de cuisine at The French Laundry to striking out on his own as a restaurateur (Otium LA, CJ Boyd's, and Freeplay LA)—as well as using food to connect with a parent who has dementia. So much has shifted since then as a...

Before COVID-19 brought life as we know it to a halt and people started hunkering down at home, stirring up comforting stews, Joe Yonan stopped by Food & Wine headquarters to talk about his gorgeous—and prescient—new cookbook, Cool Beans. The Washington Post food editor opened up about his decision to eliminate meat from his diet, how he decides what and whose stories to tell, and the effect that...

In July 2019, which seems like a lifetime ago, beverage pros from around the world converged on New Orleans for the annual Tales of the Cocktail conference—an annual event highlighting and celebrating the best of bar culture past, present, and future. Veteran bartenders Dale DeGroff and Julie Reiner have had something to do with every step of that, and together are a walking library of modern bar...

For years, people had been poking at Kelly Fields to write a cookbook, but she resisted. She'd been perfecting her craft as a pastry chef in some of New Orleans' most lauded restaurants, and expanded her scope into the savory realm at the wildly successful Willa Jean, winning a James Beard Award in the process. But she still doubted herself, wondering what worth her voice and expertise had in the...

When COVID-19 sent the hospitality industry into a tailspin, Eric Rivera had already charted a course to the next destination. His restaurant, Addo, has always been a venue for innovations both cultural and culinary, so a sudden shutdown of indoor dining was a chance to explore new ways of serving their customers and their community. First items on the menu: caring for the wellbeing of workers, an...