This Is TASTE

We’ve been covering the nonalcoholic beer scene at TASTE for a minute, and it was a lot of fun having one of the most exciting names in the industry, Tate Huffard, in the studio. Tate is the founder of Best Day Brewing, which makes one of our favorite NA beers available today. Tate shares the story of the company, and how he’s bringing NA versions of Kolsch and IPAs to the masses. We also zoom out...

It’s the return of a special video podcast series: Food Writers Talking About Food Writing. It’s available on the TASTE YouTube channel, so make sure to subscribe and check out the video version of this podcast. 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. On today’s episode, we have an amazin...

Woldy Reyes is a New York–based chef and founder of the boutique catering company Woldy Kusina. He’s become known for creating modern, fashionable, plant-based food, and now he’s sharing it in a debut cookbook: In the Kusina: My Seasonal Filipino Cooking. Today Woldy talks about the inspiration behind In the Kusina, his Filipino pantry essentials, karaoke, and more. And, at the top of the show, it...

Today we have a very fun episode highlighting one of the country’s emerging culinary cities: Traverse City, Michigan. Located in Northern Michigan on the stunning shores of Lake Michigan, Traverse City has a restaurant and wine scene that attracts visitors from around the globe. And this August marks the debut of the Traverse City Food & Wine, running August 20–24. In this episode, we speak with s...

Adam Roberts is back on the show, and we couldn’t be happier to speak with him about his terrific debut novel, Food Person. You may know Adam from his pioneering food blog (now on Substack), The Amateur Gourmet, but we know him now as a fiction writer digging into the world we talk about often here on the show: food media, cookbooks, collaborations, and all the behind-the-scenes drama that can pop...

Mehreen Karim a Brooklyn-based pop-up chef, recipe developer, and food writer. You may know her from seeing her compete on Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef, but today she’s coming back on our show to talk about writing her first cookbook, Make It Plant-Based! Southern, and editing a larger plant-based cooking series. I always have so much fun catching up with our friend Mehreen, and this episode is...

Thank you to all of our listeners for helping us get to 600 episodes. If you like what we are doing, drop us a review on Apple or Spotify.  Besha Rodell is a restaurant critic, columnist, and freelance reporter based in Melbourne, Australia. She is a James Beard Award winner and served as a critic at Creative Loafing, LA Weekly, and The Age. It was really great to have Besha in the studio to talk...

What is queer food? Today we’re having a special roundtable discussion with the authors of two great new books unpacking the topic in exciting and unexpected ways: John Birdsall is the author of The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard and the wonderful new book What Is Queer Food?: How We Served a Revolution. Erik Piepenburg is a reporter and the author of Dining Out: First Dates, Defian...

It’s the return of a special video podcast series: Food Writers Talking About Food Writing. It’s available on the TASTE YouTube channel, so make sure to subscribe and check out the video version of this podcast. Every couple of weeks, Matt Rodbard invites a journalist to talk about some favorite recent food writing as well as their thoughts on the industry as a whole. On today’s episode, we have a...

Ali Domrongchai is a writer, recipe developer, and baker in Brooklyn. She’s passionate about researching and uplifting Thai culinary traditions, from teaching luk chup workshops to popping up with pandan lemongrass mochi cake and other treats at restaurants around the city. It’s so fun having Ali on the show to talk about the exciting state of Thai food in NYC, including her upcoming Thai Takeover...

Tasteland is a very cool podcast that offers creative takes on media, marketing, and technology from Daisy Alioto and Francis Zierer. Daisy is the CEO of Dirt Media, a next-generation entertainment brand using emerging technology to tell the coolest stories about culture and collecting. Francis is the editor of Creator Spotlight, a weekly newsletter about creators across the world of newsletters....

Betsy Andrews is a James Beard Award–winning journalist who edited at Saveur magazine during some of its most fruitful years. She’s been traveling the Central California coast and staying there with family since childhood, and these travels are the topic of the terrific book she coauthored with the chef Scott Clark. Coastal: 130 Recipes from a California Road Trip is a wonderful read, and we talk...

We had a great time catching up with Leah Cohen. She’s the chef-owner of the terrific Pig & Khao restaurants in New York City, with locations on the Upper West Side and Lower East Side. On this episode, we talk about her career and appearing on an early season of Top Chef. We also get into her struggles with identity as a kid, and how her Filipino and Jewish upbringing made her the chef she is tod...

Casey Elsass is a food writer, recipe developer, and cookbook author living in Brooklyn, New York. Known among his collaborators as the cookbook doula, Casey has helped birth over twenty titles, as co-author, ghostwriter, friend, and unlicensed therapist. He is the author of a terrific new cookbook, What Can I Bring?: Recipes to Help You Live Your Guest Life. Also on the show is chef and TV fixtur...

Meera Sodha is a cook and food writer based in London. Meera’s best-selling cookbooks and weekly Guardian column, The New Vegan, are some of my favorite sources of cooking inspiration, but like many people, she experienced burnout that led her to fall out of love with food. Today on the show, Meera talks about finding her way back into the kitchen and how that experience inspired her new book, Din...

Meredith Hayden is the author of the new bestselling The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook and she has quite the story to tell, which we get into in this great conversation. While working at Conde Nast, Meredith attended night culinary school and lived a double life of sorts—publishing worker during the day, line cook at night. We get into how she walked the tightrope and eventually landed as a private ch...

Nina Compton is the chef and owner of three highly regarded restaurants in New Orleans: Compère Lapin, BABs, and Nina’s Creole Cottage. Born in Saint Lucia, she honed her chops at many notable restaurants before appearing as the fan favorite on season 11 of Top Chef. Nina’s new cookbook, Kwéyòl / Creole, written with Osayi Endolyn, is a true standout, tracing her culinary journey from growing up i...

It’s the return of a special video podcast series: Food Writers Talking About Food Writing. It’s available on the TASTE YouTube channel, so make sure to subscribe and check out the video version of this podcast. Every couple of weeks, Matt Rodbard invites a journalist to talk about some favorite recent food writing as well as their thoughts on the industry as a whole. On today’s episode we have an...

It was really amazing to have Enrique Olvera in the studio. Olvera is the acclaimed Mexican chef behind Pujol in Mexico City, Cosme in New York (celebrating its 10th anniversary), and other acclaimed restaurants around the world. In this episode, Enrique shares his honest thoughts on how a global chef stays fresh, especially in the highly competitive restaurant scenes of New York and Mexico City....

Hawa Hassan is a chef, the founder of Basbaas Foods, and the author of the James Beard Award–winning cookbook In Bibi's Kitchen. She’s spent the past several years writing an ambitious new book, Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community from Eight Countries Impacted by War, and we had her in the studio to talk about her research and reporting process. ...

Is Scarr’s the best pizza in New York? Some may debate this, but if you ask anybody in the industry, Scarr Pimentel’s shop on Orchard Street takes the prize. In this episode, Scarr joins us in the TASTE studio to talk about his deep NYC pizzeria history, his dedication to ingredients (to an extent many may not recognize), and his new cookbook, The Scarr’s Pizza Cookbook. Also on the show, we have...

Giovanni Cervantes and Tania Apolinar are partners in life and in two amazing New York City taquerias: Taqueria Ramirez in Greenpoint and Carnitas Ramirez in the East Village. Formerly professional photographers, the duo is dedicated to making some of the most delicious tacos in New York’s ever-expanding scene, and it’s so fun to have them on the show today to talk about how it all happens. And, a...

Our friend Jamie Oliver returns to the show, and we could not be happier to talk with him about so many things. He’s currently appearing on Netflix as part of the Chef’s Table: Legends series. In addition to the Netflix show, he will be launching his 10 Cooking Skills for Life platform in the United States, a free curriculum available for schools and organizations that is designed to teach young c...

It was really fun having Michele Norris in the studio. Michele is the host of the great podcast Your Mama’s Kitchen and the founder of the Race Card Project. A respected journalist, Michele cohosted National Public Radio's evening news program All Things Considered from 2002 to 2011 and was the first African-American female host for NPR. In this episode, we talk about Michele’s journalism career a...

It’s the return of a special video podcast series: Food Writers Talking About Food Writing. It’s available on the TASTE YouTube channel, so make sure to subscribe. Every couple of weeks, cohost Matt Rodbard invites a journalist to talk about some favorite recent food writing as well as their thoughts on the industry as a whole. Our next guest is Kat Kinsman, executive features editor at Food & Win...