New Worlder

Melissa Guerra is an author and food writer that lives on a working cattle ranch the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas near the Mexican border. She is someone I have wanted to have on since this podcast started, but the timing never quite aligned. I have known Melissa for more than a decade and she has been doing incredible work writing about the foodways of southern Texas. She used to have a PBS s...

Today’s episode is an introduction to Juliana Duque as the New Worlder podcast’s new co-host. Juliana, or Juli as I tend to call her, was born in Colombia and now lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of the book Sabor de Casa and is a writer, editor, consultant, producer and many other things. She has a Ph. D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University and for many years has been ver...

Sebastian La Rocca , who is the Argentina-born chef at the restaurant FYR in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. It’s a Latin American live fire restaurant that opened inside of a new Hilton Columbus Downtown Hotel right on High Street in the middle of the city in late 2022. I have known Sebastian for years from his work in Costa Rica, where he ran the restaurant at the El Mangroove Hotel in Guanacaste...

Mariano Carranza is a Lima, Peru born Emmy award nominated documentary filmmaker that lives in Brooklyn, New York. You may have seen some of his work, such as the Miami episode of the Netflix series Street Food , which he directed, or some of the mini-docs he made for Vice and CNN’s Great Big Story. His latest film is called Pachacútec, The Improbable School , which recently had its premier at the...

Giovanni Marbese, or Gio, as I know him, is an Italian food anthropologist and owns Tone Bread Lab , an experimental bakery in Milan. It’s a funny story how I know this guy. I was staying in Milan, close to the bakery, a year ago and a friend recommended I go there for breakfast. I went in and ordered a coffee and a pastry and there was one table open to sit and I sat down and the Slippurinn book...

Danny Childs is the author of the phenomenal new cocktail book Slow Drinks . It’s a book about incorporating the ingredients that are growing around you into the bar. I was sent an advanced copy of the book in the Spring and it has been one of my most used recipe books. Maybe ever. First of all, Danny, prior to becoming a bartender, has done a lot of ethnobotanical work with indigenous communities...

This episode is something I haven’t done before. It’s a special episode recorded during the Matey Seafood Festival on Iceland’s Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, also called the Westman Islands . There are a number of interviews and soundbites from people that live there, as well as Shruthi Basappa , a food writer from the Reykjavík Grapevine, and some of the visiting chefs that came for the festival, C...

René Frank is the chef and owner of the two Michelin star restaurant Coda in Berlin, Germany. Coda is a dessert restaurant, but what that means is probably not what you expect it to mean. It doesn’t mean that everything on the menu is sweet. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t savory courses. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t umami elements in the dishes. What René is doing is re-imagining dessert a...

Luiz Filipe Souza , the chef restaurant Evvai , in São Paulo, Brazil. Evvai, is a Brazilian restaurant with Italian influences, though sometimes that gets lost in translation and it’s just called an Italian restaurant. Brazil, and São Paulo in particular, has a massive Italian heritage. I don’t think a lot of people really understand how extensive it is. There was as much Italian migration there i...

Andrew Wong is the chef of the two Michelin star restaurant A.Wong in London, England. Andrew grew up working in his parents’ restaurant, a straightforward Cantonese restaurant called Kym’s, and had no desire to go into the restaurant business.  He went to Oxford to study chemistry, then switched to social anthropology, and then his father passed, so he jumped back into to the restaurant business...

Robert Bradley is a professor at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and is the author of the book Eating Peru: A Gastronomic Journey . Robert, or Bob as I have come to know him, was born in New Jersey, and after working in the wine world, started studying art history and archaeology and he followed his curiosities to Peru. There, he started to become interested in Peruvian food and why certain...

Deepanker Khosla, or DK as he is often called, is the chef of the Michelin starred restaurant Haōma in Bangkok, Thailand. He was born in Allahabad, India and breaks a lot of misconceptions of who an Indian chef is supposed to be and what Indian food is supposed to look like. Khosla has managed to make the sustainability of his restaurant something more than just a marketing ploy. Right in the midd...

Juan Sebastián Pérez is the owner of the restaurant Quitu in Quito, Ecuador. I was there for the first time earlier in the year and what I liked the most about it was that it felt like Quito, at least to me. There are a lot of ambitious restaurants in Latin America, that feel like they could be anywhere. Like they equate quality by looking international. At Quitu – the wood tables, the walls, the...

Katie Parla is the New Jersey born, Rome based food writer, cookbook author, tour guide , podcast host and frequent television show guest for anything that happens to include Italy. I have been following her work for many years and it was really great to finally get to hear from her face to face. She has a new book out called Food of the Italian Islands: Recipes From the Sunbaked Beaches, Coastal...

Atsushi Tanaka is the Japanese born chef of the restaurant A.T. in Paris, France. Despite being one of the most talented people I know, he has somehow managed to stay off the radar. His restaurant has a Michelin star and he often will go and cook at restaurants around the world, though he doesn’t give a lot of interviews. He’s quiet and elegant rather than in your face and loud, which is refreshin...

Meyling Tang is one of the founders of Fundación CocinaMar , a non-profit organization based in Chile that promotes the well-being of the country’s fisheries and the people that work within it, as well as the seafood restaurant Tres Peces in the port city of Valparaíso. She is also a journalist, specializing in the research into global fisheries. She is perhaps the best person to speak with regard...

Joris Bijdendijk is the chef and owner of the restaurants Rijks , inside of the Rijksmuseum , and Wils , which has an open fire restaurant and a café and bakery. A few years ago he started a foundation called Low Food in 2018 with a group of people that work in the culinary industry. Their aim is to change Dutch cuisine. I know there are a lot of other organizations doing something like this aroun...

Nayan Gowda is the British born winemaker of Indian descent for Jardín Oculto , which makes wines from grapes grown from ancestral, ungrafted vines in the Cinti Valley of Bolivia. I haven’t met Nayan before, but I’ve wanted to speak with him for a long time and understand how he arrived in Bolivia. He’s a fascinating guy and the wines they are making in this corner of Bolivia, not far from Tarija,...

Chiara Pavan and Francesco Brutto run a pair of restaurants, a fine dining restaurant and an osteria, at Venissa , a hospitality project on the island of Mazzorbo in Venice, Italy. Mazzorbo is in the northern part of the Venetian lagoon. It’s a small island connected to Burano, another small island with colorful houses where most tourists come on a day trip from the tourist core of Venice. Venissa...