This Is TASTE

Chloe Frechette spent nearly a decade as executive editor at Punch, the James Beard Award–winning drinks media brand, writing seriously about cocktails and the culture around them. Then she did what most drinks writers most certainly do not do: she opened a bar. Echo Lake and Undercurrent, her two-story rum destination in Williamsburg with partner Paul McGee, opened this spring—one a breezy daiqui...

Bartender and author Toby Maloney has made somewhere north of half a million cocktails over thirty-plus years, from Milk & Honey and Pegu Club to the Violet Hour in Chicago and the Elbow Room in Vancouver, Washington. His new book with coauthor and drinks journalist Emma Janzen, The Classic Cocktail Sessions, is a deep-dive master class on 61 classic drinks: not their histories but their inner wor...

Hasung Lee spent a decade cooking inside other people’s restaurants—Gramercy Tavern, Geranium, Atomix, the French Laundry—before Netflix viewers met him as Culinary Monster, the mysterious “black spoon” who muscled his way into the final round of Culinary Class Wars season 2. While he lost in the finale, he opened Oyatte anyway and is clearly shooting for Michelin stars. In this episode, we talk w...

Vikas Khanna grew up in Amritsar cooking beside his grandmother, arrived in New York with $3 and a dream, and became one of the first Indian chefs in the city to earn a Michelin star. His restaurant Bungalow—now one of NYC’s most coveted reservations—tells India’s culinary story through its 28 states. We talk about Vikas’s early cooking career in NYC, the rise of Junoon and later Bungalow, and wha...

The Specialty Food Association's Summer Fancy Food Show is where the next year of grocery shelves gets decided, and Dan Frommer, founder of The New Consumer and one of the sharpest minds tracking how people spend their money, was there for all of it. Dan joins Matt to unpack the trends and new products they spotted on the floor of the Javits Center this week in New York. We talk about sparkling wa...

Jason Stewart, cohost of How Long Gone and one of food media’s sharpest outside voices, returns to the studio. We talk about his early vegan days, his current London dining life, and what he’s enjoying in his hometown of Los Angeles. We also revisit some of his past TASTE writing, including a review of Noma in Copenhagen. Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ...

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. Luke Fortney went from covering New York’s restaurant scene at Eater to contributing weekly to the terrific New York Times food newsletter ⁠Where to Eat⁠. In this episode, we talk about the...

Tadashi Ono spent nine years as executive chef of La Caravelle, one of America’'s great French restaurants—twice earning a three-star New York Times review—before walking away to cook the Japanese food he actually wanted to cook. Since then, he’s run Matsuri and Maison O; written four cookbooks with Harris Salat on Japanese hot pots, grilling, and comfort food; and opened Teruko, a sushi bar and J...

Rita Gigante is not your average food influencer. She’s a psychic medium and healer and the author of The Godfather’s Daughter, an autobiography about growing up as the daughter of notorious Genovese crime family boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante. Rita is passionate about creating videos that showcase the old-school Italian restaurants and food businesses of her childhood, creating a new generation of f...

Becca Millstein built Fishwife into one of the buzziest brands in food, turning a sleepy pantry category into something people actually want to talk about. This time, we didn’t talk to her in our New York City studio—we followed her to Santoña, Spain, to board boats, participate in an anchovy auction, and visit the processing plants where tins of fish get packed by hand. Welcome to our new series,...

Toshi and Yasu Kizaki opened Sushi Den on Christmas Eve in 1984 on South Pearl Street in Denver. Little did they know how the opening would impact Japanese food in America. Over the next four decades, they built a supply chain that flies fish from a market in Kyushu to Denver in under 24 hours, took over a corner of Platt Park with a cluster of Japanese restaurants, and earned a Michelin star — at...

Kim Vallejo is the business director at She Wolf Bakery in Brooklyn, NY. She Wolf produces exceptional sourdough and sweet treats made from regional heritage grains that are sold at 12 greenmarkets across NYC, plus their cafe in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and over 70 restaurant wholesale clients. Today on the show, Kim goes deep on the serious logistics that makes all this possible, working with regi...

Maggie Hoffman is the writer and host behind The Dinner Plan, a podcast and Substack where she talks to a cookbook author every week about weeknight cooking realities, kitchen burnout, and what people actually cook at home. She joins Matt for a look back at the standout cookbooks of spring 2026. Here are the spring books mentioned, and listen at the end for our early fall favorites. And it’s the r...

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. Nadia Chaudhury is the deputy editor of Eater New York and Eater Northeast, a born-and-raised New Yorker who spent a decade running Eater Austin before coming home. Her family is behind Kal...

Jena Derman and Jack Schramm are the Brooklyn-based cofounders of Solid Wiggles, the cocktail jelly company that turned the Jell-O shot into a legitimate art form—and a legitimate cocktail. Their debut book is a full system for making layered, clarified, beautifully decorated cocktail jellies at home, from quick party animal shots to three-day party pro cakes with injected flowers and glitter. Jen...

Brendan Chareoncharutkun is the founder of Uncle’s Thai Food, a freeze-dried curry brick brand based in New York. He got his start in food by working on farms around the world, learned to cook by working in restaurants in Bangkok, then came to New York to work in marketing, all while doing food pop-ups on the side. That experience and wisdom is combined in Uncle’s, and today on the show, we go dee...

Josh Scherer didn’t set out to make an expansive and deeply heartfelt show about mortality. He set out to make a funny YouTube video about a carne asada burrito. A hundred episodes of Last Meals later—with Tom Hanks, Jason Kelce, and Elijah Wood having sat in the chair—he’s built the best food talk show online. The executive director of culinary content at Mythical Entertainment and NYT best-selli...

Jess Shadbolt cofounded King in SoHo in 2016 with almost no money and no restaurant experience—and built it into one of the best restaurants in New York City. Now she and partner Annie Shi have opened Dean’s, a British seafood pub that features stargazy pie and pork scratchings on the menu as well as a Guinness challenge where 500 pints earn you an engraved tankard. We talk about why British food...

Today we’re doing something a little different—a special episode all about writing romantic fiction, featuring two food people: Eliza Dumais and Julia Turshen. Eliza is a wine writer based in New York, and Julia is a cookbook author and part-time farmer in the Hudson Valley, and they’re both authors of new romance books from 831 Stories: Grape Juice, set amid a sweaty summer wine harvest in France...

Today’s episode is really special: a deep eating, drinking, and food culture tour of Colorado, a state that has been quietly (and then not so quietly) building one of the most exciting culinary scenes in America. From Denver’s Michelin-starred restaurant boom to the peach orchards and wine country of the Grand Valley, we went to find out why Colorado is a serious food destination—and came back con...

El Califa de León is a family-run Mexico City taqueria that’s been in business for over half a century. It was opened by butcher Juan Hernández González in 1968, who created the now-legendary gaonera tenderloin taco. In 2024, it became the first-ever taqueria to receive a Michelin star, sparking a global surge of recognition that has paved the way for expansion outside of Mexico, led by the new ge...

The anonymous British chef behind @RateMyChives has spent years judging the knife skills of home cooks and professional chefs alike—and amassed 107,000 followers doing it, including some of the biggest names in the business. In his first-ever podcast interview, we finally get the man on the record. We talk about how a forgotten Instagram handle became a cult institution, what a properly cut chive...

Dr. Ashanté M. Reese is a writer, anthropologist, and associate professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her new book, Gather, looks at expansive forms of nourishment, care, and Black food through four kinds of gatherings: gardens, family reunions, repasts, and protests. Today on the show, Ashanté shares about the years of conversations and reporting...

On this very special episode, we traveled to Ondarroa, a fishing port in the Basque Country of northern Spain, and followed a team of Whole Foods Market buyers and sourcing experts to find out how they interact with partners at the source—in this case, the legendary Spanish tinned seafood producer Ortiz. Joining us was AnaMaria Friede, who oversees grocery merchandising strategy and has spent two...

Alan Delgado is the chef-owner of Los Burritos Juarez, a norteño-style burrito restaurant in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. After an impressive career of working in restaurants in Austin, Texas and New York City, he began making flour tortillas in his apartment and operating a small burrito pop-up out the window. Los Burritos Juarez was born. Nine months ago, a brick-and-mortar followed alon...