This Is TASTE

What a treat! Today on the show we have Meredith Erickson. She’s a journalist, cookbook writer, cycling fan, and the co-author of the new book Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse. We talk about her many chef collaborations—she compares her writing style to that of creating a mixtape—and discuss a big project she’s been working on for years: documenting the foods of the Alps. Erickson also chats abo...

While the name Zabar is most associated with a delicatessen empire based on New York’s Upper West Side, it’s Eli Zabar (the punk rock Zabar of all in the Zabar clan) who has the most interesting story to tell. He founded one of NYC’s first specialty food stores in 1973, introducing the city to exotic imports like balsamic vinegar and fraises des bois shipped in from France. And he’s sharpened his...

Helen Rosner is a journalist, Twitter commentator, and the editorial force behind much of the New Yorker’s food coverage. This year, we were treated with her writing about iceberg lettuce, fermenting blueberries with René Redzepi, a visit to an MSG factory in Japan, and a method for preparing chicken that involves a hair dryer. I sat down with Helen to talk about her work, and to look back at some...

Before he edited Epicurious, sharply reviewed restaurants in Chicago, and wrote a cool new cookbook, Cook90: The 30-Day Plan for Faster, Healthier, Happier Meals, David Tamarkin worked as a story producer on the first incarnation of Queer Eye. David is an interesting dude! In this fun interview we discuss what it means to cook 90 meals over a 30-day period—and how this Herculean-sounding task is a...

Dirt Candy is a restaurant that has become famous over the course of the past decade on New York’s Lower East Side for making eggplant tiramisu, rosemary cotton candy, and tomato fruit leather. But its chef Amanda Cohen makes one thing very clear—it’s not about vegetarianism or health or politics. It’s just about making vegetables taste really good. On this episode, we talk to Amanda about what’s...

Maybe you’ve been making macarons your whole life, could temper chocolate with your eyes closed, and have enough cake pans to fill a walk-in closet. But maybe, more realistically, you’re like the rest of us who love cake, have no idea what mousseline is, and are still fuzzy on the difference between cocoa and Dutch process cocoa. No matter which of these categories you fall into, Rose Levy Beranba...

The chef and cookbook author Anita Lo occupies a very special place in the hearts of many in the New York City restaurant world—chefs, journalists, civilians who merely dine at restaurants (that is, most people). Lo is a supreme talent, having run one of the city’s top restaurants—Annisa—for 17 years. She’s also a mentor to many in the industry. A leading light and an example of how to do things t...

Let’s just not dwell on the fact that Flynn McGarry is only 20. He’s young. The end. This is because McGarry, the chef and owner of the ambitious and well-reviewed New York City tasting-menu restaurant Gem, is an incredibly talented dude. Period. This is a really fascinating conversation, one that surprised us in many ways. We go over his time working in Los Angeles restaurant Alma at age 13—while...

If there’s one thing Naomi Pomeroy has noticed in her years of cooking and running restaurants, it’s that people don’t seem to have time to eat anymore. Whether it’s the traffic in Portland, Oregon, where she is a restaurateur, or whether we’ve all just subconsciously sped up over time, it’s getting harder and harder to convince people to settle in for a leisurely several-hour-long dinner. This ha...

As Max Ng tells it, his start at Momofuku—where he has risen to executive chef at the restaurant group’s New York City flagship, Ssam Bar—began when he showed up, as a young CIA student, with a backpack, knives, and a chef coat. Unannounced. On a busy Saturday afternoon. Asking for a “trail”—restaurant parlance for an unpaid tryout. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, this is a fucking Saturday and you...

London chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi puts out cookbooks that meet at the intersection of cool and practical—with a recipe development process that is part Warhol Factory, part Bon Appétit Test Kitchen, and pure Ottolenghi. After tackling baking with his last book (Sweet), and before that putting Israeli cooking on the international stage (Jerusalem), he most recently tackled the concept of simp...

You may know her from her New York Times column, On Dessert, or you may know her from trying one of her unbelievably chocolaty, world-famous World Peace Cookies at a party that one time. But before Dorie Greenspan was famous for her cakes and shortbreads, she was an early pioneer of food television and a coconspirator (and coauthor) with Julia Child. On this episode, Anna catches up with Dorie to...

Let’s get this out of the way first. Jeremiah Stone and Fabian Von Hauske are sweet dudes: extremely hardworking, generous, with lots and lots and lots of friends in the food world—in the United States, France, Mexico, and the darkest corners of the Noma fermentation lab (all spots the pair have worked in their short and ambitious careers). They own a trio of influential restaurants on New York’s...

There isn’t a restaurant in New York City that’s having a bigger and brighter fall 2018 than Atomix. It’s supremely ambitious, highly polished, and uncompromisingly Korean. We love it! After it got rock-solid reviews in Eater, The Washington Post, and New York, the New York Times critic Pete Wells last week dropped 3 stars on the restaurant, anointing it as one of the city’s top tasting menus. Per...

Stay calm and…just act like Eric Ripert. Young cooks, are you listening? Ripert, a celebrated chef and TV personality, is a balancing force in this trash-fire age. And he’s also just a really good interview, as we find out. He joins the podcast to talk about communication. How one at the top of the kitchen chain needn’t yell to get his point across. “I don’t believe the pilots in the plane are hav...

Just imagine: It’s the tail end of a dinner party you just cooked for, you’re dangerously full of food, and you realize you made about three times too much food. What are you going to do with that half-eaten plate of lukewarm crab toasts? If Julia Turshen had anything to say about it, you’re going to throw them in the refrigerator until tomorrow night, when you’re going to pulverize them to bits a...

You might know him from the Eat column in The New York Times, for which he went into dozens of restaurants, home kitchens, and church basements to report on some of the untold food stories from New York’s many immigrant communities. Or you might know him as the voice you hear when you tune into The Splendid Table, interviewing everyone from activist Cecile Richards to chef Jacques Pépin. But I was...

Christina Tosi is a chef, TV personality, Milk Bar CEO and CCCO (Chief Compost Cookie Officer), and the author of a new cookbook, All About Cake. And indeed, during this lively episode taped live in front of a packed house at our offices at Penguin Random House, we talk about cake. Like, we get her hot take on what is up with the addictive boxed yellow cake flavor? Which great American classic cak...

Mike Solomonov planted his flag in Philadelphia more than a decade ago with the groundbreaking Israeli-American restaurant Zahav, and people went nuts. Two words: pomegranate lamb. He’s since won many awards, opened restaurants focusing on Israeli staples hummus and falafel, and essentially put Israeli cuisine in the American zeitgeist, sitting right next to Italian and Mexican. He’s the author of...

Daniela Soto-Innes is the chef-partner at two New York baby institutions, Cosme and Atla. These young and progressive restaurants—a modern Mexican cantina featuring supremely delicious tortillas and corn meringue firmly supplanted in my dessert hall of fame, and a Mexican/Latin all-day café—are reshaping the way the city thinks about “Mexican food” writ large. Soto-Innes, winner of the prestigious...

Deuki Hong is a San Francisco–based chef and restaurant-empire-builder in the making. He’s also the coauthor of Koreatown: A Cookbook. Here he catches up with his longtime collaborator for a wide-ranging conversation. They hadn’t seen each other in a minute! They discuss the exciting state of Korean cooking in America—and how it’s evolved significantly since the book’s release in early 2016. They...

Natasha Pickowicz is the super talented pastry chef at New York City restaurants Flora Bar and Café Altro Paradiso, where fans (and oh, does she have fans) have been impressed with her ambitious cooking. Her dessert style? Italian-ish and simple-ish and generally not overpoweringly sweet. But before she was running the show in NYC kitchens, she worked as a journalist, writing about food and music...

Is there an introduction needed here? Over her groundbreaking career, Ruth Reichl has served as the food editor of the Los Angeles Times, the restaurant critic of the New York Times, and the editor in chief of the legendary magazine Gourmet. She’s written juicy memoirs, mentored a generation of writers and editors, and still writes with regularity, curiosity, and a love for real journalism. She al...

Brooks Headley does not take vacations, read Yelp reviews, or make his burgers with beef. The chef-owner of New York City’s Superiority Burger and author of the new Superiority Burger Cookbook joined us for the latest episode to talk about vegetarian cooking, from fake meats to savory zucchini sludges that are cooked for hours. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of cooking at a resta...

The Netflix culinary travel series Somebody Feed Phil proves that food television can be both accessible and interesting. Populist and high-brow. Much of the show’s success is credited to its host, the delightful human being Phil Rosenthal. The creator and showrunner of sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, Rosenthal made a few bucks on the series and could have basically retired and traveled the world....