Special Sauce with Ed Levine

Every now and then on Special Sauce, I just hit it off with a guest, feeling immediately as if I've known them all my life. That's what happened when I talked with Eggslut  founder, chef-restaurateur, and ruckus-causer Alvin Cailan. Cailan, who grew up in an LA suburb, got his first kitchen job while still in his teen years, washing dishes at a retreat house run by the Catholic Church. His very re...

Welcome back for the second part of Special Sauce with Ed Levine, featuring Ed Levine! This week we pick up where we left off, with Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group and Ed's longtime friend, serving as a special guest host, asking Ed about many of the events that are described in his memoir, Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption , which has been na...

At the end of every week, Ed Levine- a.k.a. Serious Eats founder, a.k.a. Serious Eats overlord, a.k.a. "missionary of the delicious," a.k.a. Ed "The Good Ones Eat Through the Pain" Levine- hosts intimate conversations with food lovers of all kinds , diving deep into the ways in which eating and sharing meals has shaped his guests' lives. For this and next week's episodes of Special Sauce, we turne...

This week, in part two of my conversation with chef and food writer Nik Sharma, we dug into the science-based approach to cooking that informs his terrific new cookbook, Seasons: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food .  Given Nik’s background in medical research, it made sense to learn that he thinks of his kitchen as just another lab. All of us, he pointed out, experiment in one way or another in the kitch...

Cookbook author ( Seasons: Big Flavors, Beautiful Food ), blogger ( A Brown Table ), and newspaper columnist ( A Brown Kitchen ) Nik Sharma made the perfect Special Sauce guest. Why? He has a great, dramatic story, and he isn't afraid to tell it like it is (or was). Sharma grew up in India, and as a man who recognized that he was gay at a young age, he had a tough childhood. "At least back then, i...

In part two of my delightful conversation with Priya Krishna, she delves into her book I ndian-ish : Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family  in so many unexpected and revealing ways. "Indian-ish" is not just the name of the book; it also describes her mindset and worldview. "For my whole life I always felt Indian and American but not quite fitting into either of those molds," Krishna say...

I knew that Priya Krishna, author of Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics From a Modern American Family  (I am predisposed to like any book with the word antics in the title), was smart and funny and focused, since I'd read her book. But I still wasn't prepared for the delightful, incisive, and revealing chat we had on this week's Special Sauce. Perhaps the most obvious question to ask was what "Indian-...

In part two of my far-ranging interview with Washington Post food editor Joe Yonan, we talked about his career in journalism and the ever-evolving world of food media. Joe told me about his winding path to food journalism. After years of reporting local news, he eventually made his way to the Boston Globe . There, he became travel editor, but found himself yearning to write about food, instead. Ho...

It's always fun to have a longtime friend on Special Sauce because I always learn so much about the person sitting across from me, no matter how long I've known them. And that's just what happened when I sat down with Washington Post  Food Editor Joe Yonan. Yonan spent the first ten years of his career writing, reporting, and editing for suburban newspapers in the Boston area, during which time he...

In part two of my conversation with Xi'an Famous Foods cofounder Jason Wang, he and I talked mostly about the struggles and challenges involved in first getting the business off the ground, and then expanding. The restaurant's original location, in a subterranean food court in Flushing, Queens, had a napkin problem. Money there was so tight, Wang said, "We had to cut back on things.... Back in the...

One of the many reasons I love doing Special Sauce is I get to interview people who shed light on various parts of the food culture I know very little about. People like Jason Wang. Wang and his father, David Shi, are the co-propietors of Xi'an Famous Foods , the fast-casual Chinese food concept that introduced New Yorkers to dishes like as lamb burgers, liang pi "cold skin" noodles, and the legen...

When we l ast left  chef and memoirist Kwame Onwuachi, he had dived back into his catering business in New York City. Business was decent, but he’d begun to see holes in his game. "The food tasted good, but was it completely hot when it hit the table? I would roast the meat perfectly, but by the time I got to the table it'd be a little overcooked. The sauce that I thought would be really good, whe...

This week's Special Sauce guest, chef-restaurateur (Kith/Kin in Washington, DC) and memoirist ( Notes From a Young Black Chef ) Kwame Onwuachi, has led an interesting life, to say the least. How interesting? By the time he was 21, the now-29-year-old had already started a catering business and cooked on a ship cleaning up oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico- all after discarding a previous life that...

When we last left the irreverent Robicellis in the first part of their Special Sauce interview, they had decided to leave Brooklyn, their beloved hometown. I wondered why Allison and Matt decided on on Baltimore. "It feels like the New York I grew up in," Allison says. "It is an inherently broken city. Everything is broken and if you're a creative type like me, there's nothing more electric than t...

Sometimes our Special Sauce guests are just so idiosyncratic, so entertaining, so thoughtful, and so zany, I find myself alternately laughing and near tears for an hour and a half straight. That's what happened when I had Matt and Allison Robicelli on the podcast. Allison is a longtime baker, cook, and James Beard- nominated food writer; Matt is a graduate of the French Culinary Institute who has...

In part two of my wonderful conversation with Tommy Tomlinson, author of the impossible-to-put-down book The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America,  we talk about how he decided he was going to have to do more than just diet to successfully deal with his weight issues. Tomlinson describes asking his friends and family about what they thought about his eating...

It's pretty rare for a Special Sauce interview to speak so directly to me that it feels like I've been hit in the gut. But that's exactly what happened when I talked with Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Tommy Tomlinson, whose book The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America  is a moving memoir about struggling with eating and weight issues. As someone who has...

The superb young food and culture writer Osayi Endolyn is back again for this week's episode of Special Sauce. This time our far-reaching conversation includes a discussion of a brilliant piece on fried chicken Endolyn wrote for You and I Eat the Same: On the Countless Ways Food and Cooking Connect Us to One Another , a fascinating anthology edited by former Lucky Peach editor Chris Ying and Noma'...

On this week's episode of Special Sauce, Ed speaks to Osayi Endolyn, a Florida-based food writer whose work regularly appears in major food publications across the country, and whose column in Gravy , the journal published by the Southern Foodways Alliance, earned a James Beard Award in 2018. Ed and Endolyn's conversation starts off exactly where most Special Sauce conversations start off, namely...

Welcome back to part 2 of Ed Levine's Special Sauce conversation about pizza in the wake of the revelation by pizza historian Peter Regas about the true origins of New York City pizza. If you recall from last week , Regas has demonstrated that Lombardi's, which was long thought to have been the first pizzeria in New York, was in fact not the first. This week, Regas shares a little bit of what he's...

We rarely deal with breaking news on Special Sauce, but when said news concerns pizza's US origins, exceptions must be made. As soon as I learned that Peter Regas, a Chicago-based statistician by day and pizza obsessive  by night, had discovered that there were pizzerias operating in Brooklyn and Manhattan years before Gennaro Lombardi opened what has long been thought to be the country's first pi...

On this week's Special Sauce, Doug Crowell and Ryan Angulo talk a lot about a lot of things, including their cookbook, the aptly titled Kindness and Salt: The Care and Feeding of Your Friends and Neighbors. I asked them to dissect the unusual title, starting with "kindness." Doug explained, "It's a big part of what we do...We try to be kind in everything we do, in our relationships as a staff and...

I am constantly on the lookout for good neighborhood restaurants. The kind of restaurants that treat me like a regular even if I'm not; where the host greets me warmly even when it's really crowded; where the food is consistently serious and reasonably priced; and, most of all, where I feel well taken care of at all times.   So when I read Kindness & Salt : Recipes for the Care and Feeding of...

On this week's Special Sauce, Chef Anita Lo talks about her new cookbook, Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One. To Anita, cooking for yourself is a journey of self-discovery. "I think cooking can be self re-affirming," she says. "I mean if food is culture and you're cooking what you like to eat, it's about you. It's about who you are...Food is identity." She also says cooking for yourself is...

This week on Special Sauce with the terrific chef and fine writer Anita Lo. Anita had Annisa, a great restaurant in Greenwich Village, for 16 years before closing it in 2017. She was part of the first wave of women chef-restaurateurs in New York. Anita was also the first woman who cooked a State dinner for the Obamas at the White House. Finally, she is the author of the recently published elegant...