This Is TASTE

There are some restaurants where skipping dessert is just not an option—and if you’re in New York City, Gage & Tollner is at the top of that list. Pastry chef Caroline Schiff has created an all-star lineup of sweets that nod to the chop house’s historic past—it dates back to the late 1800s—while feeling totally fresh. On today’s episode, she shares with Aliza her pastry philosophy, her take on the...

Chanie Apfelbaum is the author of a really cool new book, Totally Kosher, and the force behind Busy in Brooklyn, a go-to resource for kosher recipes and thoughts on modern Jewish living. We wanted to have Chanie into the studio to talk about the many nuances of modern kosher cooking, and to ask her some pointed questions about her modern Orthodox life. Chanie was super game to talk about many topi...

Today is a special episode devoted to our love of the SPAM® brand—the multifunctional and influential canned meat that is used creatively in kitchens around the world every day. Whether it’s Korean budae jjigae or musubi rolls spotted in the 7-Eleven in Hawaii, SPAM® is an American heritage food brand that we want to celebrate. Up first, we speak with New York City chef and Iron Chef competitor Es...

Nobody makes cake—or cookies, or tarts, or anything else in the pastry case—quite like Natasha Pickowicz. The former pastry chef at Flora Bar and Altro Paradiso, who now helms the acclaimed pop-up Never Ending Taste and organizes mega bake sales raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for reproductive health justice, Natasha makes extremely cool pastries, like crackly shoyu peanut cookies and cak...

Alex Prud’homme’s new book, Dinner with the President, is a history of American food, politics, and 26 presidents, from George Washington starving at Valley Forge in 1777 to Donald Trump’s burger banquets. It was such a good time having Alex on the show to talk about how food has been used as a diplomatic tool since the founding of the United States, as well as some underrated cooks living in the...

Delia Cai is a journalist, the newsletter savant behind the popular Deez Links send, a Vanity Fair staffer, and the author of a great debut novel, Central Places. On this episode, we cover many excellent topics, including her Midwestern upbringing, her thoughts on the state of the Food Internet, and learning about the customs of dining out the hard way.  Also on the show, international food and tr...

The name Maya Kaimal may be familiar to many. She runs an amazing packaged foods company that sells delicious premade South Asian sauces and dals in more than 10,000 stores across the United States. She is grocery store royalty. But we wanted to have Maya on the show to talk about her time working at Saveur in the early 2000s and how she transitioned from that job to launching her eponymous food b...

Rich Torrisi is a prolific New York City chef and empire builder behind some of the most buzzed-about restaurants in the United States, including Parm, Sadelle’s, The Pool, Carbone, and his newest and most personal venture, Torrisi. Matt was a fan of Rich’s breakout restaurant, Torrisi Italian Specialties, when it opened at 250 Mulberry St. in 2009. What a restaurant. That mozzarella! In this epis...

Grabbing ingredients off a moving platform to cook a dish for Gordon Ramsay to judge truly sounds like a stress dream we’ve had before—but for Mehreen Karim, it’s a good time. Mehreen is a recipe developer and home cook who is competing on the current season of Next Level Chef, a high-stress cooking show designed to conjure up culinary brilliance from serious constraints. She’s also a close friend...

It’s a great day when our friend Alison Roman turns up at our New York City studio. We’ve really enjoyed reading and cooking through her new baking book, Sweet Enough, and we wanted to ask her about what it’s like to write three cookbooks in five and a half years, as well as talk about the TV show she made, her spirited newsletter writing, kosher salt wars, sheet pan shortcake, and where to eat in...

There is no food writer we would rather talk to about Italy—and, really, talk to about food in general—than Katie Parla. Her mind, her spirit, and her willingness to drive around the wonderfully off-the-grid cow towns of Puglia for the sake of a book project—it’s all really special. In this episode, we talk about her decades-long obsession with Italian food and culture, and what has gone into her...

How does a venture capitalist working in and around food actually grocery shop? Elly Truesdell, founder and managing partner of New Fare Partners, joins us on the show to tell us all about it. Elly got her start working in the corporate office of Whole Foods, and we find out about her nearly 10 years there discovering some of our favorite food brands. We also find out what a VC actually does, and...

Gail Simmons is a very cool human being—had to say that from the jump! While many know her best from Top Chef, Gail’s career in food expands way beyond a judge’s table. She trained at culinary school and went on to assist legendary food writer and columnist Jeffrey Steingarten. She also worked the line in busy New York City restaurants and is the author of two books, including her latest, Bringing...

Chef and budding TV personality Daniel Harthausen is one of the most exciting voices in food, having just won the first season of HBO’s very good cooking competition show The Big Brunch and running the roving pop-up Young Mother in Richmond, Virginia. Harthausen was raised by a Korean mother and a half-Korean father and “had a baseline of what really good Korean food tasted like, without really kn...

Trigg Brown is the chef and co-owner of Win Son and the coauthor of a really great new book, Win Son Presents a Taiwanese American Cookbook. Trigg and Matt share many mutual friends, and it was really cool for them to meet for the first time on the mic. We talk about Trigg’s early cooking career in Charlottesville, Virgina, and working in New York City with the Colichio crew at Craft and Colichio...

How cool to have our old friend and former colleague Talia Baiocchi on the show. Talia has one of the sharpest minds in food media, and we talk about the publication she has run for nearly a decade, PUNCH. We wanted to ask Talia about so many topics related to modern drinking culture, including the explosion of nonalcoholic drinks, the issues with natural wine, and her take on the future of the co...

Yay, it’s Smitten Kitchen day, and we’re really, really excited to welcome back our friend Deb Perelman. Deb is the writer, photographer, recipe developer, and driving force behind one of the internet’s most popular home cooking destinations. We talk about what she’s been cooking and how she’s been living her best life with two kids in New York’s East Village, and we discuss her wonderful new book...

Indian chef and Unapologetic Foods cofounder Chintan Pandya is a James Beard Award–winning chef and runs some of the best restaurants in NYC, including Adda, Dhamaka, Semma, Rowdy Rooster, and his latest Bengali triumph, Masalawala & Sons. We invited Chintan into the studio because, dude, we wanted to know how he keeps opening hit after hit. We wanted to talk about regional Indian cooking and how...

Yes, Bill Addison is back on TASTE. We’ve long been a fan of Bill’s writing, going back to his well-considered restaurant criticism in Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, Eater as a roving national critic, and for the past three-plus years as the head restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times. Bill is our favorite critic, writing about our favorite food city in the United States, and we talk about wh...

For years, Ryan Sutton was the chief restaurant critic at Eater New York, before his position was recently eliminated. Ryan is one of the most respected critics in the game, and we wanted to invite him to the studio to talk about his career and some of the memorable stories he’s worked on. Does Ryan have any reviews that he regrets? How does he stay excited about dining out each and every night? A...

After working as a fact checker for years at the New Yorker and contributing to the magazine’s Tables for Two column, Hannah Goldfield was named the magazine’s first full-time restaurant critic in 2018. We welcome Hannah back to discuss her life as a New York City restaurant critic. We talk about some of her recent reviews and get some of her thoughts on that little film called The Menu—where a bi...

On this very special episode, we catch up with the one and only Cathy Erway. Cathy is a prolific writer and cookbook author behind the great new book Win Son Presents a Taiwanese American Cookbook, which she wrote with the cofounders of Brooklyn restaurant Win Son. During this wide-ranging conversation, we find out about Cathy’s cookbook writing career and her James Beard Award–winning work on TAS...

Justin Smillie is the chef of Il Buco Alimentari and the author of the now-classic live-fire cooking book Slow Fires: Mastering New Ways to Braise, Roast, and Grill. We wanted to have Justin on the show to talk about his life in and out of the kitchen and what is currently exciting him while running one of New York’s most popular restaurants. We also discuss his previous restaurant, Upland, and wh...

We’re thrilled to welcome Sohla El-Waylly to the show for the first time. Sohla is a prodigious recipe developer, a fixture of food YouTube, and a judge on HBO’s cooking competition The Big Brunch—plus a friend of Aliza’s. This week, Aliza and Sohla unpack Sohla’s background before becoming one of the most viral stars in food media today, her thoughts on the ever-controversial brunch, the concept...

On this episode, we catch up with Ben Van Leeuwen, the cofounder of a namesake chain of ice cream shops with an accompanying grocery store freezer section line. We invited Ben on the show to talk about what inspires his exacting, hypercreative flavor creation. We also talk about the ups and downs that come with running a growing consumer food brand. Was he freaked out about the Halo Top takeover a...