New Worlder

Episode #84: Niklas_Ekstedt

April 12, 2024 11:00 - 1 hour - 62.3 MB

Niklas Ekstedt is the owner of the Michelin starred restaurant Ekstedt in Stockholm, Sweden. It’s a restaurant that was designed around live fire cooking, but it started doing this when it opened in late 2011, well before this was a trend. He had spent years working in modern kitchens, everything from Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago to El Bulli in Spain, and he opened a very successful restaurant focused on molecular food when he was just 21. When New Nordic cuisine started to take off and he be...

Episode #83: Andrea Moscoso Weise

March 29, 2024 06:30 - 1 hour - 59.6 MB

Andrea Moscoso-Weise, the restaurant manager and beverage director of the restaurant Gustu in La Paz, Bolivia. Born in the highland town of Cochabamba, Moscoso was trained as a sociologist, and during the pandemic created a digital platform there called De Raíz, which connected artisan producers of vegetables, wine, beer and other foods with the public. Later, after a meal at Gustu, having never worked in a restaurant before, she dropped what she was doing and decided to move to La Paz for an...

Episode #82: Jaime Duque

March 15, 2024 06:40 - 1 hour - 66.7 MB

Jaime Duque (no relation to co-host Juliana Duque by the way) is the founder of Catación Pública, 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 mo...

Episode #81: Cyrus Tabrizi

March 01, 2024 07:15 - 1 hour - 72.1 MB

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 mill...

Episode #80: Andrea Petrini

February 15, 2024 06:25 - 1 hour - 82 MB

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...

Episode #79: Melissa Guerra

January 26, 2024 07:15 - 1 hour - 62.6 MB

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 Hors...

Episode #78: Juliana Duque

January 11, 2024 07:10 - 1 hour - 55 MB

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 d...

Episode #77: Sebastian La Rocca

December 08, 2023 07:15 - 1 hour - 67.6 MB

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 José, which was one of...

Episode #76: Mariano Carranza

November 24, 2023 07:35 - 1 hour - 60.7 MB

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 Pachacútec, The Improbable School, which recently had its premier at the San Sebastián International Film Festival’s Culinary Zinema section, organized with the Basque Cul...

Episode #75: Giovanni Marabese

November 10, 2023 06:55 - 1 hour - 66.4 MB

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 I...

Episode #74: Danny Childs

October 27, 2023 06:40 - 1 hour - 67.5 MB

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 mak...

Episode #73: The Matey Seafood Festival

October 25, 2023 18:37 - 1 hour - 82.9 MB

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 Reykjavík Grapevine, and some of the visiting chefs that came for the festival, Cúán Greene of Ómós in Ireland and Adam Qureshi from Kol in London. I spent much of the summer of 20...

Episode #72: René Frank

October 13, 2023 06:45 - 1 hour - 63.5 MB

René 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 René 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 disc...

Episode #71: Luiz Filipe Souza

September 29, 2023 10:00 - 1 hour - 63.5 MB

Luiz Filipe Souza, the chef restaurant Evvai, in São 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 São 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 a...

Episode #70: Andrew Wong

September 08, 2023 06:35 - 1 hour - 65.9 MB

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 start...

Episode #69: Robert Bradley

September 01, 2023 06:10 - 1 hour - 70.9 MB

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 ingesti...

Episode #68: Deepanker Khosla

August 24, 2023 05:10 - 1 hour - 56.1 MB

Deepanker Khosla, or DK as he is often called, is the chef of the Michelin starred restaurant Haōma 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 th...

Episode #67: Juan Sebastián Pérez

July 24, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 72.6 MB

Juan Sebastián Pérez 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 ...

Episode #66: Katie Parla

July 14, 2023 05:05 - 1 hour - 55 MB

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.

Episode #65: Atsushi Tanaka

June 16, 2023 05:25 - 1 hour - 58.5 MB

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 f...

Episode #64: Vaughan Mabee

June 02, 2023 06:15 - 1 hour - 57.6 MB

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...

Epsidoe #63: Meyling Tang

May 22, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 63.6 MB

Meyling Tang is one of the founders of Fundación 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 Valparaíso. 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...

Episode #62: Natalia Burakowska

May 12, 2023 05:00 - 48 minutes - 44.6 MB

Natalia Burakowska is the founder of Terratela, which uses food loss and waste to create a line of sustainable clothing. She is using things like seaweed, corn husks, banana fibers and spoiled milk to create fibers that get transformed into clothing. She is trying to start a conversation within the fashion industry about transparency, in the entire line of production from product to packaging, about where the clothes you wear comes from. It’s funny, many of us that think about sustainability ...

Episode #61: Joris Bijdendijk

April 19, 2023 20:19 - 1 hour - 58.1 MB

Joris Bijdendijk is the chef and owner of the restaurants Rijks, inside of the Rijksmuseum, and Wils, which has an open fire restaurant and a café and bakery. A few years ago he started a foundation called Low Food in 2018 with a group of people that work in the culinary industry. Their aim is to change Dutch cuisine. I know there are a lot of other organizations doing something like this around the world, though often times its just some weird ploy for 50 Best votes. This isn’t that. They ar...

Episode #60: Luis Fabini

April 03, 2023 07:05 - 1 hour - 55.5 MB

Uruguayan-Peruvian photographer Luis Fabini lives in New York and is the author of the books Gauchos and Cowboys of the Americas, for which he spent more than 10 years shooting different cowboys from South America to Alaska. Gauchos come up a lot in our conversation. Their way of life and way of looking at the world. They are what lead him to the project he is working on now, called Harvests, exploring the relationship between humans, food and the land. He has a vision for the world that I th...

Episode #59: Alberto Landgraf

March 17, 2023 06:00 - 1 hour - 66.7 MB

Alberto Landgraf is the chef of Oteque in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. During our conversation we discuss how he has created a healthy work environment at his restaurant. For him, the culture of the staff, giving them growth opportunities and having a work life balance is integral to how good of an experience the diners have there. It’s a lot of common sense, but it’s refreshing to hear a chef really think about it and understand something so obvious. We also discuss how he is opening a Brazilian ...

Episode #58: Jeremy Chan

February 24, 2023 07:15 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MB

Jeremy Chan is the chef of the London restaurant Ikoyi, a two Michelin star restaurant built around spice. Jeremy just came out with a book from Phaidon, called Ikoyi: A Journey Through Bold Heat, which describes at length his Chinese-Canadian background, his youth in Hong Kong and England, studying language at Princeton, working in finance, shifting his focus to cooking and how he jumped from kitchen to kitchen asking loads of questions and absorbing as much as he can. We discuss how Ikoyi,...

Episode #57: Nayan Gowda

February 16, 2023 12:00 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MB

Nayan Gowda is the British born winemaker of Indian descent for Jardín Oculto, which makes wines from grapes grown from ancestral, ungrafted vines in the Cinti Valley of Bolivia. I haven’t met Nayan before, but I’ve wanted to speak with him for a long time and understand how he arrived in Bolivia. He’s a fascinating guy and the wines they are making in this corner of Bolivia, not far from Tarija, are really special. From what I’ve seen, the vineyards look more like a forest. Many are 200-year...

Episode #56: Marko Ayling

January 23, 2023 07:00 - 1 hour - 61.2 MB

Marko Ayling is the American born, Mexico City based writer of the Substack newsletter The Missive. It’s a dispatch of his life in Mexico and world travels. He is a former Youtuber, who built up a following of more than a million subscribers to his channel Vagabrothers, which he created with his brother more than a decade ago. He talks about what that life was like, how exhausting it was, the ups and downs of YouTube, and what he is trying to do on Substack. He has a lot to say about making a...

Episode #55: José Gonzales

January 16, 2023 06:30 - 1 hour - 66 MB

José Gonzales is the chef and owner of the restaurant Al Mercat Dota in the mountains of Costa Rica, which is attached to a small ecolodge. It’s a big change for Jose. He is one of the most talented chefs in Latin America and spent years cooking in France, but for many years Al Mercat was in San Jose. He is someone that could have very easily focused on 50 Best rankings and media attention, but he has consistently chosen his happiness and making a life for himself that was sustainable. He gre...

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