This Is TASTE

Maxine Sharf is a culinary creator and recipe developer who is passionate about bringing comfort, confidence, and community to cooking. She takes inspiration from her diverse background as Korean, Chinese, Russian, Romanian, and Polish with a California upbringing. She left her ten-year career in tech to pursue her mission to help others feel less intimidated in the kitchen, and she writes about i...

It was so great having Marcus Samuelsson in the studio. Marcus is one of America’s finest chefs, born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden before, at age 24, being named executive chef of New York’s Aquavit and soon becoming the youngest ever to receive a three-star restaurant review from the New York Times. That was 1995. Today Marcus runs restaurants around the world, including the iconic Red Rooste...

Ifrah F. Ahmed is a Somali-born, Brooklyn-based writer, chef, and artist whose work centers around food, history, culture, memory, and migration. For years, she’s been sharing Somali food through her pop-up Milk and Myrrh and as a contributor to New York Times Cooking—and now, she’s releasing a gorgeous debut cookbook, Soomaaliya. It’s a pleasure to have Ifrah on the show to talk about the joys an...

Michelle Rabin is a Canadian food stylist and recipe developer who has worked as a culinary producer on shows like MasterChef Canada. She also appears in the terrific fever dream of a cooking show Just a Dash alongside Matty Matheson, now playing on Netflix. We love this show, and I love how Michelle speaks about making the leap from working behind the scenes to being on camera. Just a Dash is wei...

Elyssa Heller is the chef and owner of New York’s remarkable sandwich shop and slushie seller Edith’s, with locations in Williamsburg and the West Village. I love these restaurants for their singular point of view. They’re part modern Jewish deli, part downtown all-day café, and fully Elyssa. I really enjoyed catching up about her journey to opening Edith’s, her time working in professional candy...

Alex Raij is the chef and co-owner of New York’s Txikito, Saint Julivert Fisherie, and La Vara, restaurants singular in their approach and wide reaching in their fandom. On this episode Alex takes the Resy Questionnaire, and we learn about her journey as a chef, what inspires her Spanish-inflected cooking, and her big hopes and dreams for the industry she cares so deeply about.  The views expresse...

Fidel Caballero is the chef-owner of Corima in New York City, a progressive Mexican restaurant located in Chinatown with one Michelin star. Fidel is also behind the hit burrito shop and bakery Vato, which has become the talk of brownstone Brooklyn and well beyond. In this episode, Fidel shares his journey from Mexico and El Paso to China, the Basque region, and finally New York City. Fidel is a ri...

It was really great having Ben Liebmann in the studio. Ben is a television executive (we love his show Omnivore) and writer who spent seven years as chief operating officer at Noma, growing the business from a single restaurant to a diversified hospitality group. We really respect Ben’s take on restaurant trends, hospitality tensions, and the media landscape. We talk about it all, as well as going...

Eric Kim is a writer and columnist at the New York Times, and he’s working on some exciting new projects. Eric is one of our favorite guests, and we cover many topics of the day in our conversation, including some of his latest writing, what he’s cooking, where he’s dining out, and his essay collection Spaghetti Junction, which will be released next year. We also discuss Food52, which recently ann...

Luca Servodio is a guy who knows his way around Los Angeles restaurants. In 2021, he reviewed 100 Los Angeles pizzas in 365 days through his LA Countdown Instagram account, and he followed up by taking on 100 taquerias in 2022, 100 epic LA sandwiches in 2023, 100 iconic LA noodle dishes in 2024, and 100 burgers in 2025. Today the LA Countdown is a community that is home to The LA Food Podcast and...

Jerrelle Guy is an award-winning author and celebrated food photographer. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she received her master’s in gastronomy from Boston University and was nominated for a James Beard Award for her debut cookbook, Black Girl Baking. She is back with a terrific new book, We Fancy, and we hear about her interpretation of fancy, as well as how she thinks about de...

Scott Conant is a James Beard Award–winning chef, TV personality, and pasta sauce savant. Matt still dreams about the Scarpetta spaghetti. It was a lot of fun having Scott in the studio to talk about his time coming up in New York City restaurants and why he decided to launch a food company, Martone Street, and compete for attention on the highly competitive tomato sauce shelf.  Subscribe to This...

Brooks Reitz writes the wonderful newsletter A Small & Simple Thing, which has become one of our favorite reads. He also runs restaurants in Charleston and New Orleans, including Leon’s Oyster Shop, Little Jack’s Tavern, Melfi’s, and the Bell. In this conversation we talk about Brook’s unique worldview, built around restaurant hospitality, tastemaking (the not annoying kind), and design. We talk a...

Ella Quittner is a journalist, screenwriter, and humorist who writes about obsession, culture, and food. She’s the author of a terrific new cookbook, Obsessed with the Best: 100+ Methodically Perfected Recipes Based on 20+ Head-to-Head Tests. On this very fun episode we talk about those tests, and finding the absolute best recipes for biscuits, pancakes, cookies, yellow cake, roasted chicken, and...

Preston Clark is the executive chef at Lure Fishbar and Bar Mercer in New York City, and he joins us in the studio to talk about his unique career. Clark’s father, Patrick Clark, was the original chef at the Odeon and the first Black chef to win a James Beard Award. Tragically, Patrick passed away in 1998 at the age of 42. Preston has picked up the Clark legacy while writing his own chapters, and...

Rick Bayless joins us in the studio for a truly memorable conversation. Rick is a chef, TV personality, cookbook author, and great advocate for Mexican cooking and culture. He joins us in the studio for a candid talk about his deeply personal history with Mexican cuisine, including the opening of his pioneering restaurant Frontera Grill in Chicago and his life in and out of the kitchen.  Subscribe...

Natasha Pickowicz is a New York City–based chef and the author of More Than Cake, which was named a New York Times Best Cookbook of 2023 as well as a James Beard Award finalist. She’s also a hot pot obsessive who regularly hosts pop-ups of the communal East Asian dining experience in NYC. Now she’s sharing all her family hot pot wisdom and the techniques she’s adapted as a chef in a new book: Ever...

What a fun time having Nathan Thornburgh in the studio. Nathan is a former Time magazine foreign correspondent editor and is the CEO of Roads & Kingdoms, which he cofounded with writer Matt Goulding and at which Anthony Bourdain was a partner. We’ve long admired Nathan’s journalistic muscle and great feel for a story. We talk about the founding of Roads & Kingdoms and how the company’s pivot to or...

Sam Lawrence is the chef-owner of Bridges, an ambitious and stylish restaurant on the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown. Formerly the culinary director of Ignacio Mattos’s restaurant group, he opened Bridges in 2025. It won a Michelin star in its first year. Today on the show, Sam shares about bringing Bridges to life, Michelin recognition, and his plans for year two of the restaurant.  Before that, M...

Chef and restaurateur Marc Vetri is behind the legendary Vetri Cucina in Philadelphia, among many other restaurants. He’s also the author of several cookbooks, including the terrific The Pasta Book: Recipes, Techniques, Inspiration. I really enjoyed having Marc in the studio to talk about his deep love for both pasta and pasta cookbooks. We discuss the early days of Vetri Cucina as well as how a f...

Nikko Cagalanan is the chef-owner of Kultura in Charleston, South Carolina. Born and raised in the Philippines, Nikko began cooking in 2017 while still working as a nurse, discovering that the kitchen offered the same sense of purpose—to nurture, care for, and bring comfort to others. In 2019, he moved to Charleston to fully pursue his passion for cooking and launched Kultura to great acclaim, inc...

Tamar Adler is the James Beard and IACP Award–winning author of An Everlasting Meal; Something Old, Something New; and the best-selling Everlasting Meal Cookbook. Currently living in Madrid, she stopped by the TASTE studio to talk about writing her new book Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day. It’s a thoughtful collection of dispatches from a daily life anchored by food, and toda...

Snaxshot, the curatorial and slightly mercurial grocery newsletter and community, has grown into an industry force, read by consumer packaged goods executives and members of the food media on a near-religious level. (We are among these readers.) Andrea Hernández returns to the show to go over the big headlines from the year at the grocery store and in the CPG trenches. We talk about shorting prote...

It was a blast having Dan Souza in the studio. Dan is the chief content officer of America’s Test Kitchen and the former editor in chief of Cooks Illustrated. Dan has such a great style in the way he talks about home cooking, and we discuss his time working in food media before digging into a very cool and ambitious new drinks book: Cocktails Illustrated: 400+ Recipes for the Home Bartender, from...

Laurel Kratochvila is an American-born writer and baker based in Berlin and trained in France. She runs the iconic Fine Bagels bakery, and her first book, New European Baking, was a finalist for a James Beard Award in 2023. Laurel joins us in the studio to talk about her incredible new book, Dobre Dobre, which focuses on both the modern and traditional baking of Poland, a country with deep culinar...