New Worlder

I want to you to try to imagine an ancient lakebed where the decomposing aquatic life at its bottom was piled up within the lake and mixed with branches and other organic material to form islands. Now imagine farming on those islands. Imagine these farms being incredibly productive. So productive that the crops grown on them could feed hundreds of thousands of people. Not only do they feed at an i...

Gregg Moore is a ceramic artist who is best known for his work with Dan Barber at the restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns . The Glenside, Pennsylvania based artist is a professor of ceramic art at Arcadia University and also co-owns the ceramic studio Heirloom alongside his wife Jackie, which sells plateware influenced by agriculture and farmers’ markets. Why don’t we think of the plate with as mu...

Shava Cueva is the Baja California, Mexico born photographer who created the book and platform Bebidas de Oaxaca . The self-published book, now in its second edition, and available in English and Spanish, documents an incredible 87 traditional drinks from the eight regions of the state of Oaxaca. They are drinks made from “fruits, seeds, rinds, leafs, sap, flowers, crusts, [and] stems,” and prepar...

Peter Tempelhoff is a chef and restauranteur in Cape Town, South Africa. While Pete lived and worked in Europe and the US, and worked with Marco Pierre White and several other well-known chefs, hell fell in love with Japanese cooking many years ago and it changed how he saw South African ingredients, which is an ongoing evolution. His fine dining restaurant Fyn combines Japanese techniques with So...

Nancy Matsumoto is the author of Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System, which will be released in October but is available for pre-order now. The book is a collection of stories about women that are creating alternative food networks. They are building out local and regional supply chains in the face of overwhelming odds and the destructiveness of industrial agricu...

Elspeth Hay is the author of the new book Feed Us With Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. The book helps us understand how many in Western society lost their relationship to nut producing trees. It explains how integral trees such as oaks, chestnuts, black walnuts and hazelnuts are to forest ecosystems and how their nuts were once a staple in North American diets. Hay, lives on Cape Cod and has b...

Olivia Chase and Steve Sprinkel are the owners of The Farmer and the Cook in Ojai, California. What is The Farmer and the Cook? It’s a restaurant, café, bakery, farm market and community hub in the middle of Ojai, plus a 10 acre farm a few blocks away. The Farmer and the Cook opened in 2001, though Olivia and Steve have been at the center of the American organic food movement for decades, helping...

Nicolás Tapia is the chef and owner of the restaurant Yum Cha in Santiago, Chile. Nicolás talks about how he became interested in tea during a trip to China and during a family style meal where everyone was drinking tea he was reminded of the Chilean concept of once, the evening tea and meal. That’s when the idea was planted in his head to create a restaurant where food and tea could be paired tog...

Martin Rosberg is a natural cheesemaker that lives in Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay, a small community across the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is Argentine and once ran a boutique hotel and restaurant in Buenos Aires but moved away to find a quieter life on a small farm with his family. He built a few stilted houses that he still rents on Airbnb, then he started making breads...

Garima Arora is the India born chef of the two Michelin star restaurant Gaa in Bangkok, Thailand. She is the only female Indian chef with two Michelin stars. Garima has been working tirelessly to awaken the transformative potential of Indian cuisine both in India and abroad for many years. She developed a non-profit called Food Forward India, that documents, discover and catalogue the diversity an...

Maru Molina lives in El Salvador, living somewhat of a nomadic lifestyle. She has a weekly pop-up event called Cocina de Jardin, where the events are held in both wild and urban settings around the country. Maru's work on the project over the past five years is very impactful. I believe it is having an impact. She has been holding weekly events that connect consumers with healthy, nutritious food...

Evan Rail is based in Prague, in the Czech Republic and is prolific food and travel writer, and has covered beer and spirits for many years. His latest book is called The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit . Evan and I have been crossing journalistic paths for many years. We both have written for the New York Times Travel section for a long...

Carolina Colque and Sergio Armella are the owners of Ephedra Restaurant outside of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Let me be clear when I say that this is a very unlikely restaurant. Two young, local Atacameños with no cooking experience, have opened a tasting menu restaurant in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. It’s not even in the main town, San Pedro de Atacama, but in an ayllu, a tra...

Bruna Fontevecchia and Max Wilson are the cofounders of the food magazine and platform Anchoa . The magazine, which began in Argentina, has tried to create a space for deeper stories about food in Latin America. There is little to no mention of fine dining chefs or restaurant rankings. The magazine covers anthropology and ecology with food, the things that we eat and drink and how they are made, a...

Sarah Thompson is the chef of Casa Playa in the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is a Culinary Institute of America graduate who spent many years working in New York City at restaurants like Marea and Alder, but when taking a job with Enrique Olvera and Daniela Soto-Innes at Cosme, she fell in love with Mexican cuisine. When that restaurant wanted a variat...

Based in Malmo, Sweden,Lotta & Per-Anders Jörgensen are the founders of the legendary food magazine Fool . Lotta is an art director and Per-Anders, or P.A. as I have come to call him, is a photographer. This is a magazine that launched in 2012 and has put out, thus far, 8 issues, very sporadically. It has been a few years since. The last issue, but as they reveal in the episode, there will be...

Dave Pynt is the Perth, Australia born chef of the restaurant Burnt Ends in Singapore. Burnt Ends, open since 2013, which followed a pop-up in London the year before, is has been one of the restaurants driving the global conversation around modern barbecue, which, as Pynt explains, is barbecue where anything goes. It’s not attached to tradition, to history or to borders. It simply means a focus on...

Meghan Flanigan & Mario Rosero are the owners of the restaurant Prudencia in Bogotá, Colombia. Prudencia is a timeless restaurant in La Candelaria, an old building reformatted by the architect Simón Veléz. It’s only open for lunch and when you eat there it feels like you’re hanging out at a friend’s house. You are free to move around the place. To take a snack off their homemade grills in the...

Olivier Bur is the chef and owner of the restaurant Casarré in the city of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Casarré is unlike any other restaurant I’ve heard of in the Caribbean. It’s a fine dining restaurant, at least in the sense that it serves 7 to 10 courses and a pairing, even though it does it in a casual way. There are of course many other fine dining restaurants in the Caribbean to...

Bryan Ford is the author of the new book Pan Y Dulce: The Latin American Baking Book . Bryan is a baker and a very good one, and I think he’s looking at Latin American breads unlike anyone else. His first book, New World Sourdough , released right in the middle of the pandemic was a giant hit and it’s one of my most used baking books. It’s good practical advice at making better sourdough and as I...

Food in the year 2125 with Giuliana Furci, Nephi Craig & Andrea Petrini. This is a very special 100th episode of this podcast. That’s not something I ever expected to say. I really had no understanding of what it takes to launch a podcast when I started. I just recorded conversations with friends and colleagues and posted them online. That’s still basically what it is, but I think I’ve become...

Alejandro Osses is a food photographer from Bogotá, Colombia who recently moved to Madrid, Spain. He recently published a book of his work documenting food in Colombia over the past decade, called De Cero a Cuatromil Ochocientos , with Colombian publisher Hammbre de Cultura. He's a great photographer, that focuses on the human element behind the food as much as he does about the art of cooking, an...

Shane Mitchell is the author of the book The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots , which is a history of food in the American South, often reflecting on her family’s three centuries of history on Edisto Island, South Carolina connects with it. While told through stories that center around 11 different crops, the book isn’t directly about food, but how we center it as a way to understand cycles of...

Rather than a straight forward interview, this episode is a report from on the ground in Barranquilla, Colombia during the city’s annual gastronomy festival,  Sabor Barranquilla . The 17th edition of the festival occurred at the end of August and we were there to capture the sounds of the city and speak with local cooks, event organizers and people in the street, while exploring the region’s diver...

Gilberto Briceño is the owner of RLT Cuisine , or Road Less Traveled Cuisine, in Playa Potrero, a small beach town in Guancaste, Costa Rica. RLT Cuisine is not a restaurant, but it’s also not not a restaurant. There is a restaurant element to it. Inside his food lab in a commercial building, nowhere near the beach, he has 4 seats inside of the main kitchen. Whenever someone wants to come in, he cr...