Menu Talk

David Burke has been working in kitchens since graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1982, and he’s still going strong, currently running 10 restaurants up and down the East Coast, including his latest, SeaHawk Prime by David Burke at Nautilus 220, a luxury residential tower on the Intracoastal Waterway of West Palm Beach, Florida. It’s his first restaurant in the state.  Burke also...

To earn her own way through theater school in Philadelphia, Tai Ricci bussed tables at one of Stephen Starr’s restaurants. With her naturally outgoing personality and drive, she moved up the ranks to become a high-earning server and realized the restaurant business was her true calling. That calling took her to LA and eventually San Francisco, landing at one of Michael Mina’s restaurants and meeti...

Te’Sean Glass is chef de cuisine of True Laurel, a cocktail bar in San Francisco’s Mission District where he takes a farm-to-table approach to dishes such as chicken katsu topped with Caesar salad and patty melts.  Originally from St. Augustine, Florida, Glass grew up in a family of enthusiastic family cooks, but he had a dream early on of running his own restaurant. His first job in a professiona...

Our guest on this week's Menu Talk is Isabel Coss, executive chef at Pascual, a contemporary Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C. A native of Mexico City, Chef Coss actually studied ballet—not cooking—as a way to get into arts school and become a filmmaker. But once there, she realized she was more passionate about cooking than film, and enrolled in culinary school. She quickly landed an ext...

Nelson German was born and raised in the Dominican-American community of Washington Heights in New York City, but he mostly cooked classic fine-dining food until recently. After working at New York City venues such as Joseph’s Citarella, the Gramercy Park Hotel, Absinthe Wine Bar and Jerry’s Café, he moved to San Francisco in 2010, and debuted his first restaurant there, AlaMar, in 2014, serving a...

With an early focus on cold coffee, energy drinks and a flavor-forward menu, Dutch Bros has established itself as a leader in the increasingly competitive beverage segment. CMO Tana Davila joins the Menu Talk podcast to share how the brand combines menu innovation and hospitality to create a culture that connects with guests.  Customization continues to be a key trend valued by consumers, and Dutc...

Menu Talk: The sommelier also oversees neighboring restaurant Cafe Yaya

Shake Shack takes pride in being the first in its category to launch on-trend menu items, according to Nancy Combs, SVP of culinary and calendar innovation at the fast casual. Although Shake Shack was founded in New York City by Danny Meyer and his Union Square Hospitality Group in 2001 and still has headquarters in the Big Apple, the chain recently built a second headquarters in Atlanta. Combs is...

David Utterback wanted to be a punk rocker, and like many aspiring musicians he started working in restaurants to make money. He was quickly hired at Blue Sushi Sake grill, which was the coolest restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska, at the time, because, with a Japanese mother, he looked the part.  But it turns out that he also liked working in restaurants, and was good at it, so he stayed with that comp...

Zaxbys has been in the chicken finger business since 1990, six years before Raising Cain’s and decades earlier than Wendy’s. But with the competition getting fiercer with every new chicken tender or wing to hit the market, the fast casual had to build more awareness about its DNA. Enter Patrick Schwing, chief marketing & strategy officer for the Atlanta-based fast casual and this week’s guest...

Jeffrey Bank is CEO of Alicart Restaurant Group, which owns Carmine’s and Virgil’s in New York City, as well as one location of seafood concept Mermaid Oyster Bar. Carmine’s is an Italian-American concept that was founded on Manhattan’s Upper West Side 35 years ago and now also has restaurants in Times Square as well as in Las Vegas; Atlantis in the Bahamas; Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Washingt...

The Korean Wave or “Hallyu” has popularized barbecue, fried chicken, K-pop and K-dramas in the U.S., but Bonyeon in Chicago set out to elevate the trend. Kate Park, co-founder of the restaurant and the guest on this week’s Menu Talk, discusses how she and Chef Sangtae Park are introducing guests to a higher-end experience. In traditional Korean barbecue restaurants, diners cook meat, seafood and o...

Frankie Solarik’s sources of inspiration range from molecular gastronomist Ferran Adrià to Marco Moreira, the chef of Tocqueville, a fine-dining restaurant in New York City, where he was deemed too scruffy to work in the front of the house and was shunted into the kitchen.  He's the author of “The Bar Chef: A Modern Approach to Cocktails,” published in 2013, and was a judge on the Netflix seri...

Levain Bakery, a New York City obsession among cookie lovers, started as a bread shop 30 years ago. The famous gooey and crispy 6-ounce cookies came about by accident. The founders, Connie McDonald and Pam Weekes, were triathletes as well as bakers, and they developed an oversized chocolate chip walnut cookie to fuel them during training. Word got out about that cookie and lines formed around the...

Scott Conant has been working in restaurants for 40 years, since he was an eager 15-year-old teen in Waterbury, Connecticut. Since then he has opened restaurants in New York City, Miami, Las Vegas, Toronto, and elsewhere, as well as a new restaurant in the Bahamas at the Baha Mar resort slated to open later this fall.  His restaurant L’Impero won the James Beard Foundation Restaurant & Chef Aw...

Brooklyn-born Eric LeVine started cooking in restaurant kitchens at the age of 12, working the fry station at a neighborhood diner. Although that would be considered illegal child labor today, he loved the work and never looked back. LeVine fueled his passion as a student at the Culinary Institute of America and as a member of the kitchen team at Brooklyn’s renowned River Café, where celeb chef Da...

Stephanie Izard has a streak of fearlessness in her. She went from being a sous chef to a restaurateur at age 27 and hasn’t looked back. Closing that restaurant, Scylla, in 2007 after a three-year run, she went on to compete in and win season four of Bravo TV’s Top Chef in 2008. From there she launched her goat-themed restaurant empire, now comprised of two Girl & the Goat locations in Chicago...

Amanda Toups, partner with her husband Isaac Toups in New Orleans’ Toups Meatery, flew into action when COVID-19 closed the restaurant back in March, 2020. The couple cooked and handed out to-go meals for their employees and their families and anyone else who showed up in need. Within a few days, 500 people wrapped around the block. Through the end of 2020, they prepped and distributed 100,000 mea...

Jet Tila is known as a TV chef these days, thanks to his many appearances on the Food Network and elsewhere, but he has actually been working in the restaurant industry for pretty much his whole life. Having grown up working in his parents’ Thai restaurants in Los Angeles, he then attended culinary school and went on to cook at a wide variety of foodservice operations, including Compass Group subs...

Chef and restaurateur Victor Steinbrueck shook up the Seattle seafood scene when he opened LocalTide in 2020. The restaurant refuses to fall into typical seafood or restaurant categories, like fish and chips or fine dining sole. It’s serving up sustainable, sophisticated dishes that work just as well as takeout or while enjoying the hip vibes of Local Tide. Steinbrueck and guest host Gloria Dawson...

Douglas Keane originally opened Cyrus in Healdsburg, California, earning two Michelin stars and many accolades. But during the pandemic, a burned-out Keene did not want to reopen it as a traditional fine dining restaurant with an upscale tasting menu. So he sat down and figured out how to change the business model and staffing model to provide a living wage for all his team members and a distincti...

Raheem Sealey is the corporate chef of Kyu Restaurant, which has locations in Las Vegas, Miami, and New York City. Sealey is based in Miami, where he moved from the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix in 2009. He attended culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts and worked in a variety of restaurants, including Caribbean concept Sugarcane and Zuma, which offers modern Japanese food i...

The average workplace catering order size is up 12% to about $420. That’s good news for restaurants, said Cindy Klein Roche, chief growth officer for ezCater, a platform that connects workplaces with dining concepts.  But restaurants must optimize their online presence and present an appealing menu to get a piece of that growing pie. About 59% of those who place workplace orders are swayed by the...

Marc Sheehan has long been interested in the history of food. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of American in Hyde Park, N.Y., the Massachusetts native worked at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Dan Barber’s farm, restaurant, and hotbed for culinary innovation in upstate New York, before working at Menton, a French-Italian restaurant by Barbara Lynch. Previously, he earned national acclaim at Loyal N...

Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality, visited Atlantic City’s Ocean Casino Resort, which just opened two new concepts from restaurateur Stephen Starr. Bret had a chance to sample menu items from Sunny’s, a breakfast-lunch spot, and Chez Frites, a bistro offering the familiar French plate of steak and fries along with a selection of se...