Episodes

  • Jaime Duque (no relation to co-host Juliana Duque by the way) is the founder of CataciĂłn PĂșblica, a brand of specialty coffeeshops, roasters and educational centers in Bogota and Quindio, Colombia. Throughout his career, Jaime has worked every part in the value chain of Colombian coffee. He started his work in the fields, as an agricultural engineer, working with farmers to fine tune their process to attain higher levels of quality. He has worked to encourage more specialty growers and for more coffee to be roasted and consumed inside the country. He has become leading coffee educator in Colombia and CataciĂłn PĂșblica offers a wide variety of workshops and certifications that are sought out by those in the coffee industry throughout the region.

    In the interview, we discuss how, even as the rest of the world had been exposed for half a century to the general quality and story of Colombian coffee through the emblematic and imaginary future of Juan Valdez, it has only been until recently that you have been able to actually drink good coffee in Colombia. When I first went to the country, in 2005, most of what you find was tinto, these little cups of coffee loaded with sugar to offset the low quality. All the good stuff was exported. Tinto is still around, but there has been a gradual transition towards a more dynamic coffee culture in the country. Today you see specialty coffeeshops like CataciĂłn PĂșblica all over Colombia. There are world class baristas and roasters, and the growers can actually see how their coffee is being consumed, which gives them additional insight into how they should grow it. We also talk about why he thinks fermentation processes like carbonic maceration will remain niche, while cold brew still has enormous growth potential.

    Find out more at New Worlder.

  • Cyrus Tabrizi is the founder of Caspian Monarque, a producer and distributor of fine Iranian caviar. I first met Cyrus last year when we happened to be seated together at a dinner in Udine, Italy during an event called Ein Prosit. After spending a few minutes with him, I began to realize how little I actually understand about caviar and where it comes from. I know it’s considered a luxury product. That caviar is usually expensive. That Russians are known to eat a lot of it. That suddenly millennials are putting it on fried chicken and tater tots. But if you asked me what distinguishes good caviar from great caviar, I couldn’t tell you.The world of caviar has changed dramatically since 2008 when a global ban on caviar from wild sturgeon was enacted by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species after sturgeon were being severely overfished. Now, nearly all of the world’s caviar comes from farmed sturgeon. There are 26 different types of sturgeon and each kind produces unique tasting roe, but the conditions in which each are being raised can vary drastically. The most coveted caviar comes from the Beluga, followed by the Ossetra, sturgeons, which are originally from the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Farmed caviar, however, is coming from anywhere now. There are hundreds of farms all over the world. There’s lots of caviar being farm raised in the United States. It’s being raised in Uruguay. A ton of it is being raised in China. Much of it is not Ossetra and Beluga, but from other species. There is also fish roe from other kinds of fish, such lumpfish, flying fish or even salmon, that are called caviar, though technically they do not fit the definition.
    I tried Cyrus’ caviar in Italy and it is indeed the great stuff. That much I know. He explains why Caspian Monarque stands out, in his words. They are a sustainably minded sturgeon farm in the Caspian Sea, the origin of the finest grades of caviar. As they are being farmed within the Caspian Sea, the natural environment they are from, eating the same food they eat in the wild, they can get the highest quality caviar. However, I cannot even get his caviar, Iranian caviar, in the United States because of a ban on Iranian products in the U.S. He explains why that is and how Iranian caviar industry has a history of legal issues despite being historically sustainable and well managed. That’s why he started the business. He was a lawyer and he liked the challenge.The caviar industry is one ripe with fraud. There are scandalous producers and misleading labels, though there are ways to know if you are getting caviar from a good source. On Caspian Monarque’s website they actually have a way to check the origin of a tin of caviar by the CITES number on the label, and it’s not just for their caviar, but any legally traded variety. For the most part, it’s up to the consumer to know the difference and understand what they are buying. We talk about how blockchain might be used in the future to help make caviar even more transparent. Who knew there was so much to know about caviar?

    Read more at New Worlder on Substack.

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  • Andrea Petrini, or Andy as I know him was born in Italy but has lived for many years in Lyon, France. He is a writer, author and founder of Gelinaz!, an always evolving culinary performance concept that aims to push the boundaries of culinary art.

    I was first exposed to Gelinaz! in 2013, during one of the initial events in Lima, Peru. It was a 22-course, 8-hour dinner beside a Pre-Columbian pyramid with some of the world’s best known chefs where all of them made some variation of octopus and potatoes. It was wild and debaucherous, to say the least. I wrote about the experience for the website Roads & Kingdoms, and the story quickly went viral. After that I had the opportunity on many occasions to get to know Andy. I was involved in various Gelinaz! performances during the Gelinaz! Shuffle, where I helped chefs like Ana Roơ and Niko Romito behind the scenes when they had to cook meals at Boragó in Chile and Central in Peru, respectively. I was also a part of several other Gelinaz! events in New York and elsewhere in one form or another. I’ve had the opportunity to travel and dine with Andy on many occasions. A couple of years ago I was on a television show with the chef Victoria Blamey that Andy was hosting about Emilia Romagna for Discovery Plus in Italy, where I got to experience his driving skills and lived to tell about it.

    Andy is one of my all-time favorite people and I think he wildly misunderstood sometimes. What he stands for has always been, at least in my eyes, is pushing gastronomy to break free of its shackles. To take chefs out of their comfort zone and do something creative. To strive for art and love and soul. It doesn’t always work out that way, as you will hear him explain, but I’m grateful there is someone out there like him that keeps pushing, because its needed more now than ever. For the past year he has been working to help restaurants collaborate with different musicians, to rethink the relationship between food and music. Different events will be occurring throughout the year, so follow Gelinaz! on Instagram to find out more.

    Read more at New Worlder.

  • Melissa Guerra is an author and food writer that lives on a working cattle ranch the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas near the Mexican border. She is someone I have wanted to have on since this podcast started, but the timing never quite aligned. I have known Melissa for more than a decade and she has been doing incredible work writing about the foodways of southern Texas. She used to have a PBS show called the Texas Provincial Kitchen, received a James Beard nomination for her book Wild Horse Desert: Norteño Cuisine of South Texas and also wrote a series about her life on the border for New Worlder in 2017. Today she has a blog called Kitchen Wrangler where she writes recipes inspired by her surrounding landscape, as well as a YouTube channel.

    Melissa’s family has been living in the region since the 1700s, long before Texas was a part of the United States. She sees the food of Texas and the U.S,. rather than divided by a political border, but united by ancient trade routes and modern culture. During the interview we talk about the influence of mesquite in the region’s food, how watering holes were the foundation for human habitation there, what real Tex-Mex cooking is and the migrant crisis and how the people in the borderlands view it, rather than through vapid political gestures by politicians.

    Read more at New Worlder.

  • Introducing the Colombia-born author, writer & editor as our new co-host.

    Today’s episode is an introduction to Juliana Duque as the New Worlder podcast’s new co-host. Juliana, or Juli as I tend to call her, was born in Colombia and now lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of the book Sabor de Casa and is a writer, editor, consultant, producer and many other things. She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University and for many years has been very involved in various development projects that relate to Colombian and Latin American gastronomy.

    Juliana is someone that understands the magnitude and vastness of cuisine in Latin America, but also that gastronomy in the region is still very much developing. When I say developing I don’t mean commercially or that there are more fine dining restaurants yet to come, I mean the infrastructure to connect rural producers with consumers, to maintain foodways, preserve agricultural and cultural diversity and give people access to nutritious food that doesn’t destroy landscapes and give them terrible diseases.

    When I started this podcast a couple of years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t to some extent. It was still the middle of the pandemic and I just started to have conversations with people and record them. I have learned a lot from the people I have had on. A lot of interesting things have been said that I think you won’t hear anywhere else. Maybe you are thinking this podcast is already perfect. That I’m perfect. That’s obviously not true and I’m actually quite bad in general at conversation, as you may have noticed. I think I’m a very good listener and creating an atmosphere that lets the guest’s guard down and allows them to open up, however, I often struggle with asking the right questions. Juli and I have very different backgrounds. Her work is generally more analytical, while mine is more about storytelling, so for this podcast I think we complement each other well. It's a new year, so this is as good a time as any to take this show in a new direction. I hope you enjoy what is yet to come.

    Read more at New Worlder.

  • Sebastian La Rocca, who is the Argentina-born chef at the restaurant FYR in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. It’s a Latin American live fire restaurant that opened inside of a new Hilton Columbus Downtown Hotel right on High Street in the middle of the city in late 2022. I have known Sebastian for years from his work in Costa Rica, where he ran the restaurant at the El Mangroove Hotel in Guanacaste, and then opened up an open fire restaurant called Botanika outside of San JosĂ©, which was one of New Worlder’s Best New Restaurants when it opened. When he told me he was moving to Columbus I was completely surprised, but I immediately thought that it was one of the smartest decisions any chef I’ve ever met has made. I can tell just from my interactions with him over the past year that he is happier. He went to cook in a city that appreciates what he can do and not to win awards and recognition, though he is getting it anyway. It was a decision to move his family there so they could live a happier life. So many young chefs tell me they want to open in New York or somewhere because it is their dream. Really, that’s your dream as a cook? Shouldn’t it be to make good food that people enjoy and provides you a comfortable life? That can be New York or San Francisco or London or Tokyo, but it doesn’t have to be. You can cook from anywhere. There are cities like Columbus everywhere. Why not open in Trujillo, Peru instead of Lima? Or Manaus instead of Sao Paulo? Every cook I know that’s moved outside the centralized media market, outside of the industry bubble and found their place has been a thousand times happier and they are cooking better food for it. Fyr, Sebastian’s restaurant, has been getting great reviews in local media and he has been bringing a lot of prominent Latin American chefs to Ohio to cook at the restaurant, such as Costa Rica’s Pablo Bonilla and Panama’s Mario CastrellĂłn. It’s kind of weird. These are guys I know from Latin America an have written about a lot that are suddenly in Columbus. It’s kind of two worlds colliding for me.

    I grew up here and went to college here. It’s basically all I knew until I was in my 20s. I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about growing up completely disconnected from where the food I ate was coming from. On the episode with Farmer Lee Jones, who runs Chef’s Garden in northern Ohio, I talk about how there weren’t any farms around. There were just corn and soy fields you drove past on the highway. And all of the restaurants were chains and concepts. I started writing about food in Ohio when I was 19, I think, and it wasn’t really until then that I started questioning things. A culinary movement was just beginning there then, with Jeni’s, now a well-known ice cream purveyor, opening in the North Market. There were a handful of fine dining restaurants that were being vocal about supporting local farms, and after I left it just kept kind of evolving. There are really great restaurants there now, both at the high and low end. My old neighborhood is full of Nepalese, Mexican and Salvadoran restaurants, and there has been a lot influence from North Africa and Southeast Asia elsewhere in the city. There are still too many concept restaurants for my taste, but there are more restaurants that are created organically and have creative food with good ingredients and nice drinks to balance it out. It’s a very different place from where I grew up and it’s because of people like Sebastian moving there and bringing new ideas.

    Read more at New Worlder.

  • Mariano Carranza is a Lima, Peru born Emmy award nominated documentary filmmaker that lives in Brooklyn, New York. You may have seen some of his work, such as the Miami episode of the Netflix series Street Food, which he directed, or some of the mini-docs he made for Vice and CNN’s Great Big Story. His latest film is called PachacĂștec, The Improbable School, which recently had its premier at the San SebastiĂĄn International Film Festival’s Culinary Zinema section, organized with the Basque Culinary Center. The film is about three students that trained at FundaciĂłn PachacĂștec, a culinary school in the desert hills of Ventanilla outside of Lima, Peru and where their lives have led since enrolling. The school was built with the help of chef GastĂłn Acurio and is said to get 350 applications every six months, though can only admit 25 people per semester. Over the last 20 years it has had more than 400 graduates and many of those graduates have gone on to accomplish incredible things. It’s a great culinary film that hopefully everyone will get to watch very soon. Find out more about Mariano’s work at his website.

    Read more at New Worlder.

  • Giovanni Marbese, or Gio, as I know him, is an Italian food anthropologist and owns Tone Bread Lab, an experimental bakery in Milan. It’s a funny story how I know this guy. I was staying in Milan, close to the bakery, a year ago and a friend recommended I go there for breakfast. I went in and ordered a coffee and a pastry and there was one table open to sit and I sat down and the Slippurinn book I co-authored just happened to be sitting there. Aside of it being me that sat there, this is an Icelandic cookbook on the table of a bakery in Milan. Think about that. Then, I was in Iceland this past July and I went to Slippurinn, the restaurant from the book, and Gio was there and I got to know him better. He has done a lot of work with food in the Nordic region, so it wasn’t that odd that he was there, but, another strange coincidence. Anyway, Gio has worked with Slow Food within the Ark of Taste project for years. It’s an online catalogue of endangered food around the world, and he was also co-coordinator of the Nordic Countries communities of Slow Food. He has come up with all sorts of creative ideas about safeguarding cuisines and disappearing ingredients and foods that are disappearing. Tone is an offshoot of that. He regularly uses endangered ingredients and inside the bakery he has this traditional Georgian bread oven, called Tone. We discuss everything he has going on at the bread lab, as well as everything else he has going on, like the Milano Food Project, Phantom Bread and Food Emotions.

    Read more at New Worlder.

  • Danny Childs is the author of the phenomenal new cocktail book Slow Drinks. It’s a book about incorporating the ingredients that are growing around you into the bar. I was sent an advanced copy of the book in the Spring and it has been one of my most used recipe books. Maybe ever. First of all, Danny, prior to becoming a bartender, has done a lot of ethnobotanical work with indigenous communities such as the Shipibo and Mapuche in South America, and that has influenced how he thinks about making cocktails, so he already had my interest there. But applying that knowledge to where he lives in New Jersey with local flora is really something, I think, is quite revolutionary. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think this is where the world of cocktails is heading. Some cocktail bars will be run more like restaurants rather than nightclubs and rather than just relying on branded spirits, the bartenders will make their own, not to mention all of the other pieces that go into making a cocktail, using the flavors they are growing all around wherever they are. It will lead to cocktail bars with a sense of place.

    Danny took over the drinks program at a tavern in the suburbs of New Jersey at The Farm and Fisherman Tavern in Cherry Hill, not far from Philadelphia, and did this very thing. His work there has received a lot of attention and that’s why he wrote Slow Drinks, which is as much of a foundational book about building your bar as it is a collection of recipes. He’s no longer with the restaurant and building a bigger concept around the idea of Slow Drinks, so I expect to see him giving lectures and leading workshops, among other things. Follow @SlowDrinks on Instagram to stay up to date with everything he is doing.

    When I say it’s building a foundation for your bar, it’s not just syrups. It’s seasonal amaros. It’s spruce beer. It’s making amaretto from peach pits or root beer from sassafras. It’s a transformational cocktail book and I hope a lot of people read it. Danny is by no means the only person doing these things, but creating this book is something that allows a lot of different people to do them. People like me, for instance. You don’t have to live in the northeastern United States for the recipes to make sense either. They are flexible enough that you can swap in ingredients from wherever you are.

  • This episode is something I haven’t done before. It’s a special episode recorded during the Matey Seafood Festival on Iceland’s Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, also called the Westman Islands. There are a number of interviews and soundbites from people that live there, as well as Shruthi Basappa, a food writer from the ReykjavĂ­k Grapevine, and some of the visiting chefs that came for the festival, CĂșĂĄn Greene of ÓmĂłs in Ireland and Adam Qureshi from Kol in London. I spent much of the summer of 2019 on the island of Heimaey, the only inhabited island there, there while writing the book about the restaurant Slippurinn with the chef there, GĂ­sli MatthĂ­as AuĂ°unsson, aka GĂ­sli Matt. I’ve a relationship with Iceland that extends far prior to this book, however, and I’ll explain that a little more later on. It was quite fun to put this together so, I hope you enjoy it. I might do some more in the field recording in the future.

  • RenĂ© Frank is the chef and owner of the two Michelin star restaurant Coda in Berlin, Germany. Coda is a dessert restaurant, but what that means is probably not what you expect it to mean. It doesn’t mean that everything on the menu is sweet. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t savory courses. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t umami elements in the dishes. What RenĂ© is doing is re-imagining dessert and fine dining.

    I love sweet things, but in terms of fine dining, I always feel they are so disconnected to the rest of the meal. You have all these savory courses and at the end this, rich sugary finish. And a lot of the time it is too much. It doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious, but it often leaves your body feeling awful. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the pastry chef, it’s just a lack of cohesiveness of the menu and trying to understand what a diner needs as opposed to what the restaurant wants to show them or what historically contemporary pastry is supposed to be. RenĂ© uses the pastry kitchen to showcase natural flavors, not just techniques, and uses the best ingredients possible. So that means he cuts out all the industrial things that are normally found in pastry kitchens, such as refined sugars. Even though it is a dessert restaurant, so to speak, he has probably thought more about balance and what goes into every dish than 99.9 percent of the chefs in the world.
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  • Luiz Filipe Souza, the chef restaurant Evvai, in SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil. Evvai, is a Brazilian restaurant with Italian influences, though sometimes that gets lost in translation and it’s just called an Italian restaurant. Brazil, and SĂŁo Paulo in particular, has a massive Italian heritage. I don’t think a lot of people really understand how extensive it is. There was as much Italian migration there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as there was in Buenos Aires or New York. The influences are many. You see it in the mortadella sandwiches. You see it in the service of fine dining restaurants. Some of my best meals in the city have been Italian leaning, like Marco Renzetti’s Pettirosso, which transformed into Fame Osteria, and Fasano, inside the hotel of the same name. Evvai’s cuisine is called Oriundi, which refers to a migrant centered idea of Italian food. So, it’s not trying to replicate Italian cuisine, but use it as inspiration. Luiz and I talk a lot about how he doesn’t feel quite as boxed in with the concept as he once did, especially since the pandemic. Some dishes on the menu might look completely Brazilian and he’s fine with that. If you like at Evvai’s Instagram you’ll see a lot of dishes that definitely do look lie traditional Italian food. There is some pasta, but lots of non-Italian restaurants have pasta. The line is very blurred between what is Italian and what isn’t. There is freedom in that and I think his food, and I cannot say for sure as I haven’t been there, is probably better for that.

    Read more and find a full transcript at New Worlder.

  • Andrew Wong is the chef of the two Michelin star restaurant A.Wong in London, England. Andrew grew up working in his parents’ restaurant, a straightforward Cantonese restaurant called Kym’s, and had no desire to go into the restaurant business. He went to Oxford to study chemistry, then switched to social anthropology, and then his father passed, so he jumped back into to the restaurant business to help his mother. He started to think about the relationship between food and culture and started visiting China and exploring its regional cuisines. Eventually, he re-imagined the restaurant around these cuisines. In our conversation, we discuss how this all came to be, and what his mindset was going into it. He continues researching regional Chinese recipes, texts and artwork through SOAS University, much of which he talks about alongside food anthropologist Dr Mukta Das on his podcastXO Soused.

    Read more and find a full transcript at New Worlder on Substack.

  • Robert Bradley is a professor at University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and is the author of the book Eating Peru: A Gastronomic Journey. Robert, or Bob as I have come to know him, was born in New Jersey, and after working in the wine world, started studying art history and archaeology and he followed his curiosities to Peru. There, he started to become interested in Peruvian food and why certain aspects of it was the way it was. He wrote papers for academic journals on things like the ingesting of alkaloids in coca chewing and on the northern Peruvian dish sudado de raya.

    His book, Eating Peru, provides a good understanding about the history of Peruvian food and how certain recipes have evolved over centuries. It’s definitely not a restaurant cookbook, though there are some recipes in it. It goes into a lot of depth about coca, a lot about the food of the north coast, a lot about chicha and just the general study of Peruvian food. I don’t agree with every point being made, but as far as academic books about Peruvian cuisine go, it’s very fair and nuanced. We talk about this a little bit early in the interview and he writes about it in the book. In terms of academia, there seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to Peruvian food. One side is within Peru, where it is primarily driven by preserving culture and the books can be a touch nationalistic, which is expected. Then there is the side published by universities outside of Peru, where it is much more critical of the way Peruvian food has been developing and who benefits from it, especially in the last couple of decades. Both sides make some good points, but there lacks a middle ground sometimes. It feels like you’re either with us or against us. It can be very polarizing.

    From my experience with Peruvian food, I think there is plenty to criticize, but there is far more to celebrate. The good far outweighs the bad, especially from within the culinary community. The future of Peruvian food, the future of any type of cuisine really, is going to be messy. We’re trying to feed the planet in a healthy way without destroying it, amidst conditions that are rapidly changing. There are difficult decisions to make so we can all move forward. And for that to happen, we have to share our thoughts with love and kindness. And we have to listen to each other. We don’t have to agree all the time, but we can try to understand where someone else is coming from and why they feel the way they do.

    Read more at www.newworlder.com.

  • Deepanker Khosla, or DK as he is often called, is the chef of the Michelin starred restaurant Haƍma in Bangkok, Thailand. He was born in Allahabad, India and breaks a lot of misconceptions of who an Indian chef is supposed to be and what Indian food is supposed to look like.

    Khosla has managed to make the sustainability of his restaurant something more than just a marketing ploy. Right in the middle of chaotic, polluted Bangkok, surrounded by glass and steel, he’s created an oasis on less than an acre with an aquaculture system that supplies all of his freshwater fish based off a YouTube class he took part in. He also harvests rainwater that he purifies and serves to guests as still or sparkling. He grows all of his garnishes, he houses honeybees and has planted all kinds of different trees. He has actually been able to improve the air quality of the restaurant and, importantly, he has been effective in lowering his overall costs in running the restaurant, which allows him to pay his employees better and make them happier.

    We discuss how he lived in his food truck prior to opening the restaurant and how he drove it all over southeast Asia, from beer garden to beer garden, as well as where his ideas come from and how he defines what Neo-Indian food is. We also talk about how limited the idea of Indian cuisine has been around the world and how people like himself and Unapologetic Foods in New York are changing that. There is so much going on we didn’t even have time to talk about how he turned his restaurant into a soup kitchen during the pandemic, feeding more than a hundred thousand people.

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  • Juan SebastiĂĄn PĂ©rez is the owner of the restaurant Quitu in Quito, Ecuador. I was there for the first time earlier in the year and what I liked the most about it was that it felt like Quito, at least to me. There are a lot of ambitious restaurants in Latin America, that feel like they could be anywhere. Like they equate quality by looking international. At Quitu – the wood tables, the walls, the woven light fixtures, the kind of rooms of various shapes and sizes – it feels like Ecuador, and it made for a far more interesting experience. To me, at least.The restaurant is now in its fourth incarnation over a ten-year period and Juan has learned a lot about life and the restaurant business along the way. We have a very honest discussion about running restaurants, hospitality and sourcing, which has become one of the central components of how his menu is built and what he is trying to achieve in the long term. He’s reached a place where he is a bit wiser and happier working in a restaurant and has really tried to understand the full breadth what that means.This is my first interview from Ecuador on this podcast. I’m not even sure how that happened. I used to go there all of the time and I know lots of people there. I love the country and vastness of its biodiversity within the smallness of its borders, but until this year it had been a while since I was there. The pandemic is mostly to blame. In terms of gastronomy, there is a lot happening there right now on a lot of different levels, so I’m eager to go back with a bit more time. See more at New Worlder.

  • Katie Parla is the New Jersey born, Rome based food writer, cookbook author, tour guide, podcast host and frequent television show guest for anything that happens to include Italy. She has a new book out called Food of the Italian Islands: Recipes From the Sunbaked Beaches, Coastal Villages and Rolling Hillsides of Sicily, Sardinia and Beyond. Read more about her at New Worlder on Substack.

  • Atsushi Tanaka is the Japanese born chef of the restaurant A.T. in Paris, France. Despite being one of the most talented people I know, he has somehow managed to stay off the radar. His restaurant has a Michelin star and he often will go and cook at restaurants around the world, though he doesn’t give a lot of interviews. He’s quiet and elegant rather than in your face and loud, which is refreshing to see, and his food is a reflection of his personality. I was there in Paris last summer and finally had his food after meeting him a couple of years before. It’s a small, minimalist space in the Latin Quarter, a block from Pont de la Tournelle. It’s one of those places I could go again and again. There’s good music playing. The wines, always natural, are beautiful. The food is very ingredient driven, though there aren’t long drawn out stories about anything. It’s not French. It’s not Japanese. It’s not Nordic. It’s not Latin American. It’s just him and he’s a lovely person. It’s my favorite restaurant in Paris. Also, he breaks the news that he’s probably going to open in New York in the not too distant future. It’s something he has been wanting to do for years and it looks like it will finally happen.Disclaimer: We talk about cats a lot. We are both cat people. Check out the Instagram of his cats. I think the first 10 minutes of this episode is just two grown men talking about their cats. Don’t judge.

    Find a transcript of the episode at New Worlder.

  • Vaughan Mabee is the chef of Amisfield in Queenstown on the South Island of New Zealand. It’s an out of the way restaurant in an already out of the way country. Yet, it seems like he is on to something. Everyone is always looking for the next big thing in fine dining. That restaurant that can bring an element of surprise. An extraordinary experience in an extraordinary place. And New Zealand has all of that and then some. It has pristine oceans, forests, mountains, and plenty of endemic flora and fauna. Vaughan is a hunter and forager and uses a lot of wild foods, so we end up talking a lot about strange ingredients he encounters, like the PĆ«keko, this wild pheasant with frightening claws and tahrs, a sort of wild goat from the Himalayas that has populated the area. The presentations of his dishes evoke the original animal, and he occasionally gets shit for allegedly glorifying hunting on social media. So, we talk about that and his idea of honoring the animal in this way rather than buying from factory farms. This is a guy that you are probably going to hear a lot about in the coming years. See a full transcript and subscribe to the newsletter at New Worlder.

  • Meyling Tang is one of the founders of FundaciĂłn CocinaMar, a non-profit organization based in Chile that promotes the well-being of the country’s fisheries and the people that work within it, as well as the seafood restaurant Tres Peces in the port city of ValparaĂ­so. She is also a journalist, specializing in the research into global fisheries. She is perhaps the best person to speak with regarding seafood in Chile and I have been following her work for probably a decade. She has a lot going on with all of her projects and I’ve had the chance to see many of them up close while traveling in Chile. We speak a lot about her restaurant and how she really is breaking with tradition in terms of sourcing and logistics, opting to work directly with fishermen in a way that is mutually beneficial. We also touch upon this idea of the restaurant as a hub of storytelling, something I think can be incredibly powerful.

    For a transcript and additional details, subscribe at New Worlder.