This Is TASTE

Rachel Gurjar is a Mumbai-born, Brooklyn-based chef and recipe developer whose recipes have appeared in Bon Appétit and the New York Times. Her new debut cookbook, East to East: Recipes and Stories From Mumbai to New York, showcases her love for the two cities that shaped her through more than 100 innovative dishes that combine Indian staples with some New York flair. Today on the show, Rachel goe...

Elazar Sontag published a cookbook at 18, ran Bon Appétit’s Best New Restaurants list in his mid-twenties, and (last fall) succeeded Tom Sietsema as the Washington Post’s food critic—with no disguise required. He joins us to talk all about his inaugural best restaurants list, which is firmly an Elazar list and likely causing some debate in and around DC. We also talk about bringing back star ratin...

Eric Sze first joined the show amid research for his debut cookbook, Taiwanese?. The book will be released later this month, and I speak with the Wenwen chef about his deep research around lu rou fan, what “authentically inauthentic” really means on the page versus the plate, and how his sparkling book brings fresh perspective to both Taiwanese food and culture.  Also on the show, Matt shares...

Clarissa Wei is a writer and cofounder of HEYDOH, a single-origin Taiwanese soy sauce brand. Her debut cookbook, Made in Taiwan, was a cultural exploration of the island she calls home. Now she’s following it up with Sitting the Month, a study of postpartum cooking and care informed by Chinese medicine and her own experiences with zuò yuè zi. Clarissa stopped by the studio to go deep on this fasci...

Resy’s managing editor, Deanna Ting, is back to talk all about New York City restaurants. She and Matt work through the Resy Hit List, with stops at a British Indian chophouse in Hudson Yards, the Houseman chef’s seafood follow-up in East Williamsburg, Dominican-Texas barbecue in Bushwick, and a fine-dining vet’s Greenpoint bistro, plus her own guide to 31 tasting and prix-fixe menus under $100. S...

Kendal Mitchell is a chef and biomaterials designer based in Brooklyn. Her Instagram series Bringing Food Waste Back to the Table turns often-wasted ingredients like eggshells and oyster shells into stunning tableware, and she’s constantly exploring new ways to create circularity with organic materials. Today on the show, she talks about training in sushi, her design work with groups like Ghetto G...

Clara Lee and Eddo Kim are the co-founders of Queens, the San Francisco Korean American food company that started as a delivery-only deli in 2018, became a beloved Inner Sunset superette, and now makes gochujang, doenjang, and gochugaru from Northern California–grown ingredients. Their debut cookbook is Korean Soups: Recipes for Soups and Stews That Nourish, Restore, and Delight, and we absolutely...

Justin Bolois has spent over a decade helping build the iconic First We Feast media company—from features editor to VP of programming and development, shepherding popular shows like The Burger Show, Tacos Con Todo, and Hot Ones within the media empire. Off the clock, he’s chasing something equally cool: vintage restaurant staff shirts, forgotten diner ephemera, and the last physical traces of belo...

Kenta Goto is a bartender and the owner and operator of two acclaimed cocktail bars: Bar Goto on the Lower East Side and Bar Goto Niban in Brooklyn. Born and raised in Tokyo, Goto moved to New York and worked at the lauded cocktail bar Pegu Club for seven years before opening his own bar. Now he’s sharing his considerable wisdom in a debut cookbook: The Goto Bartender’s Guide. Today on the show, w...

Adrianna Adarme has been cooking out loud since 2011, when A Cozy Kitchen was just a bored-at-work blog. This fall, she’s releasing A Cozy Kitchen Cookbook—a terrific book built around not seasons or courses but moods. In this episode, Matt talks to Adrianna about her cooking style and growing her highly personal brand, online and off. And it’s the return of Three Things, where Aliza and Matt disc...

Kwame Onwuachi—the chef behind Tatiana, Dōgon, and restaurants from Miami to Las Vegas—joins Matt in the studio for the first time. We get into his big idea for the CPG game, his pull toward Ethiopian cooking, and his three books, capped by All Hours, which is less a cookbook and more a statement about what he actually wants to cook every day. And it’s the return of Three Things, where Aliza and M...

Danny Meyer built Union Square Hospitality Group on a promise: he’d never close a restaurant. Then he closed one, and it changed how he thinks and writes about leadership. Twenty years after the release of his influential book Setting the Table, Meyer returns with a terrific new memoir, What Could Possibly Go Right?, and he joins us to talk about failure, scaling culture across 700 restaurants, wa...

Everybody loves Carla Hall. Carla Hall is a chef and TV host who has appeared on many of our favorite food programs over the years, from Bravo’s Top Chef to Fox’s Next Level Baker. Her latest cookbook is also her first baking book—Carla Bakes: Sweet, Savory, and From the Heart. Today on the show, Carla stops by the studio to chat about all things baking, and what makes this book so special. Subscr...

Mohamed Attia spent nearly a decade running a food cart in Times Square before he became the person fighting to change the law that made carts like his semilegal in the first place. As managing director of the Street Vendor Project, Attia helped lead the campaign that, this past January, finally broke a New York City vending permit cap that had been frozen since 1979. He talks with Matt about his...

Olivia Tiedemann is a chef who began creating videos while working as a private chef in the Hamptons. Her signature deadpan delivery and no-nonsense techniques have won her millions of fans. Now she’s sharing her highly craveable recipes in a debut cookbook: Eat (Like) the Rich. Today on the show, Olivia talks about why everyone is fascinated by private chefs, making crab cakes for Martha Stewart,...

Joey Scalabrino is the cofounder of Apollo Bagels, a new-school bagel shop rooted in old-world techniques with nine locations across New York City and Jersey. He started making bagels in the kitchen at Leo, the Williamsburg sourdough pizza restaurant, and built Apollo through thoughtful pop-ups, design, and collabs. Today on the show, we chat about building up Apollo Bagels, its recent mega-popula...

It’s the return of Food Writers Talking About Food Writing. Every couple of weeks, Matt invites a journalist to talk about some favorite recent food writing as well as their thoughts on the industry as a whole. Dana Brown was a fixture of Vanity Fair’s Oscar-party machine and Graydon Carter’s inner circle for more than two decades before writing it all down in his memoir, Dilettante. He returns to...

Ruth Reichl reviewed restaurants for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, ran the country’s most legendary food magazine, and wrote five memoirs about all the meals enjoyed and life lived. Today she’s doing it again on her wonderful Substack, La Briffe, unfiltered and endlessly curious. Recorded live at the Traverse City Food & Wine festival, Matt talks with Ruth about her University of M...

Meherwan Irani has been sharing wisdom about Indian street food since first appearing on this show in 2019. That would be vada pav’s genius, naan’s overratedness, and his mom’s three-lentil dhansak. Now it’s all in his debut cookbook, No. 1 Best Indian Cookbook in the World, alongside the two decades’ journey of building Chai Pani, Botiwalla, and Spicewalla. In this episode, Matt catches up with h...

Ali Francis is an Australian writer and pastry chef living in Salt Lake City, Utah. She’s the author of the new book The Curious Lives of Vegetables: An Artful Exploration of the Wonderful World of Edible Plants, Their History, and Their Crucial Role in Our Future. It’s a must-read for produce lovers everywhere, with in-depth reporting and beautiful botanical illustrations that ensure you’ll never...

Zola Gregory is a writer, recipe developer, and food stylist based in Seattle. Her biweekly recipe column for TASTE, Extra Good, has yielded countless hits, and now she has a debut cookbook to enjoy: Sheet Cakes! In this long-overdue episode, Zola stops into the studio to talk about her distinct cooking point of viewpoint of view, going down the chocolate cake rabbit hole, and much more. Subscribe...

Pim Techamuanvivit left a career in Silicon Valley to become one of the most important Thai chefs working today. She’s self-taught and runs Michelin-starred kitchens on two continents at San Francisco’s Kin Khao and Nari and Bangkok’s Nahm. Her new book, Cooking Thai, is the result of writing down everything she had to figure out on her own. It’s a remarkable book, and you should pick it up. Pim j...

Maria Geyman is the founder of Masha Tea, a board-certified naturopathic doctor, and the author of With Tea: Culture, Accoutrements, and Rituals. It’s a great new book all about the wide world of tea, paired with recipes for brewing tea and desserts to serve with it. Today on the show, we go deep on all things tea. And it’s the return of Three Things, where Aliza and Matt discuss what’s interestin...

Tanya Sichynsky isn’t a vegetarian—but as the editor behind NYT Cooking’s newsletter The Veggie, she’s spent years making the case that vegetables belong at the center of the plate. Her new book, Veg Everything, curates 100 recipes from NYT Cooking’s deep bench of recipe developers, including Melissa Clark, Eric Kim, Hetty Lui McKinnon, and many more, for weeknights, parties, and everything in bet...

Polina Chesnakova’s latest cookbook, Chesnok, opens with a hard question: What do you call the food of a diaspora that has outlived the country that made it? Polina—born in Ukraine to a Russian mother and Armenian father and raised in a Rhode Island community of Soviet refugees—joins us to talk about food in the context of “post-Soviet,” the Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, her family’s uncompromis...