Florida Foodie

Executive pastry chef Josh Cain credits his great aunt with fostering his sweet tooth. “For me, chocolate and sweets is something that I didn’t realize until I got older, that I did this a lot with my great aunt,” Cain said. “My grandmother was cooking, but my great aunt was the one who always made all of the desserts and I was right there, helping her out.” Cain later graduated from Johnson and W...

Wess St. Victor started making barbecue the same way many people do, right in his backyard. “What happened was my backyard — love my wife, she just kept buying me different types of smokers, different types of grills,” St. Victor said. “So it got to the point that my backyard started looking like ‘Sanford and Son.’” At the time, he was working as an exterminator, but St. Victor was also bringing h...

Food Network star Guy Fieri made a stop at his Winter Park restaurant Chicken Guy! on Wednesday, announcing a big expansion of the businesses footprint. The mayor of Flavortown had several pieces of business to attend to while making his visit. “I live in Northern California, I also have a house in West Palm Beach — So, I’m going to be spending a lot more time in Florida,” Fieri said. “This (Winte...

Katherine Franco has experienced food insecurity in her own life. She spent the first ten years of her life in the Dominican Republic, where she said members of the community always watched out for each other and ensured no one went hungry. “And then coming here (to the U.S.), my mom didn’t have much,” Franco said. “(It was) just my mom, her two kids — we were having issues with housing. My mom ha...

As egg costs soar across the country, Mussette Gonzalez is keeping her prices right where they are. “I haven’t changed my prices since I started,” Gonzalez said. “I didn’t get into selling eggs to make a huge profit.” Gonzalez is the owner of Lé Koopé, a small egg farm in Clermont that she runs with her mother. “We started with four chickens. My mother used to work for the Department of Correction...

Florida Foodie is bringing you an update on Dino Ferri, the owner of Hotter Than El hot sauces. Ferri now runs an international food market specializing in spicy foods called "Spice is Nice" in Sanford, Florida. Candace Campos and Lisa Bell check in with Ferri and learn all about this next chapter in his career. After the update, you can hear our original interview with Ferri. Learn more about you...

Bill Caldecutt is primarily an academic, working as a professor at Polk State University, but he also grew up working with his father doing pool repairs in New York. “I think a lot of the things that are good about me — there are some good things — I think most of that stuff stems from the experiences that I had out working with (my dad) learning responsibility, dealing with people, learning how t...

Sevarestt Allen, the chef and owner of Kitchen Savior, started learning how to cook at the age of 8. “My grandmother is I say who kind of you know taught me the ropes,” Allen said. “(I would) kind of go in the kitchen with her and she’s like, ‘Sevarrest, watch the pots. Don’t let my food burn.’” That was his introduction to cooking, but he did not always plan to pursue it as a career. “So what hap...

Jordan Eichenblatt will tell you that he is not the owner of Cholo Dogs. He credits the business to Franco Furtero. “We (Eichenblatt and his business partner Chris Delahoz) went on a trip to Mexico for one of our clients, and we came across this hotdog cart,” Eichenblatt said. “And he had the hot dogs, we’re talking to him and he said he’s moving to Orlando. We’re like, ‘We’re from Orlando.’ His n...

Chris Chen, Phil Nguyen and Mike Cho all met in college as members of the same fraternity. “After graduating, we hung out a lot. We went to eat at different places. And you know, our brotherhood went further than UCF,” Chen said. After college, Chen and Nguyen began working in corporate jobs, but they weren’t happy with it. “Chris, and I just started talking — (I) wanted to do a restaurant, he wan...

NOTE: This is a re-release of the most popular Florida Foodie episode from 2022. Florida Foodie will return with new episodes on Jan. 24 Dr. Amber Orman likes to practice what she calls “true healthcare.” “We are treating, preventing and reversing chronic disease with the way that you’re living rather than relying wholly on pills and procedures and tests and things like this,” Orman said. She is a...

Eliot Hillis has thought a lot about noodles. “(Noodles are) a vehicle for so many options,” the chef said. “In much the same way that a pizza can have like an infinite number of combinations of toppings, you can have a noodle that’s expressed upon a myriad of ingredients and, depending on the time of year, this could be a cold noodle, it could be a hot noodle, this could be spicy or creamy or any...

Billy Trudsoe spent 20 years as a chef in New York before making his way to Central Florida. “The winters are long in the Adirondacks, so my wife and I said why not give Florida a shot?” Trudsoe said. The chef came down south to work as an executive chef for a restaurant in Brevard County, but the gig did not end up working out in the long run. “So I went all in on Hell’s Kitchen,” Trudsoe said. T...

Bruno Zacchini is best known in Orlando as the owner of Pizza Bruno, but he did not always have a love for pizza. “Pizza was always like an afterthought for me, especially in the restaurant world,” Zacchini said. “I didn’t like doing it. I’ll be honest, I didn’t have any joy of doing it or whatever.” That started to change for Zacchini when he was working as a chef consultant for Third Wave Cafe i...

Dreyton McDonald runs his own business, but he’s not quite his own boss just yet. The 12-year-old runs the food truck Ice Ice Dreyton, which he uses to sell snow cones around Ocala. “My dad just, he asked me one day, would I like to do a mini-donut business or a snow cone business,” Dreyton McDonald said. “And I said snow cone.” His dad, Dominic McDonald, helps him run the business and make sure h...

Sean “Sonny” Nguyen spent a lot of his childhood inside his family’s restaurants. “I was brought to the restaurants with my parents, just out of like, you know, they needed to continue watching me,” he said. “So I was always in the back room. My aunts and uncles also owned restaurants, primarily Chinese buffets, and there would always be a back room where all the kids and cousins would be hanging...

When Mike Daquino moved to Florida from New York, he did not plan on running a restaurant. “No, not at all,” Daquino said. He had previously worked with Brother Jimmy’s BBQ for 15 years in New York City, where the chain started in 1989. Daquino was a New York native and had lived there most of his life, but his family was looking for a change of pace in 2019. “So my family and I moved down (to Flo...

Jae Lee and Jason Rom spend their days as software engineers, but in their downtime, they have two passions: jiu-jitsu and making and selling hot sauces and chili oils. The pair run Tapped Sauces out of their homes in Satellite Beach. The name comes from jiu-jitsu, where the goal is to get your opponent to submit or tap out. “We wanted people to get tapped out,” Lee said. Not on the spice, but on...

Carling Ponder, the owner of Rollin’ Dough and The Knot, always has her hands full. “It’s a nonstop job, but honestly, I couldn’t ask for a better thing,” Ponder said. With her husband, Ponder runs three food trucks, along with monthly pop-ups at the University of Central Florida and she is getting ready to open a brick-and-mortar shop in New Smyrna Beach, all while wrangling two children. “We sta...

Florida Foodie has been running since May 2019, sharing thoughtful conversations about the food we eat and how it affects our lives. Over the course of 78 episodes, hosts Candace Campos and Lisa Bell have spoken with some of the state’s premier chefs, small business owners, activists and CEOs who work daily to feed Floridians. On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, hosts Candace and Lisa take a...

Chef Lewis Lin did not plan on being a restauranteur. “I moved here in 2006,” Lin said. “I was coming for my master’s degree.” Lin came to Florida from Taiwan, pursuing a master’s in finance. Unfortunately, he graduated in 2008, just as the recession hit the U.S. “I gotta find a job and I love food. I love food — always have. Old foods connect me to family and friends,” he said. So, Lin started wo...

Dave Manuchia may not be a household name, but he has played a big role in the restaurant industry for the past 40 years. Among his many accomplishments, Manuchia was one of the founders of the Olive Garden franchise. “(I) got a degree in business, got an MBA and ended up working for General Mills — General Mills restaurants back then — here in Orlando, when I moved to Orlando in 1981,” Manuchia s...

When you work in a kitchen and the tickets are piling up, a mistake can cause a panic. For Count and Jessica Foreman, it was the start of a 23-year-long relationship. The couple met while working at a Don Pablo restaurant. She was working in the front of the house, waiting tables, while he was a cook in the back of the house. “Her tickets were falling behind,” Count Foreman said. “Something happen...

A little more than a decade after opening a small ice cream cart in Portland, Oregon, Kim and Tyler Malek have built a small frozen treat empire that stretches from coast to coast. Kim and Tyler Malek are cousins and co-founders of Salt & Straw. “We had this dream of creating space for people to get together,” Tyler Malek said. “They get to meet their friends and neighbors, learn about the food ar...

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