Special Sauce with Ed Levine
363 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 days ago - ★★★★ - 324 ratingsSerious Eats' podcast Special Sauce enables food lovers everywhere to eavesdrop on an intimate conversation about food and life between host and Serious Eats founder Ed Levine and his well-known/famous friends and acquaintances both in and out of the food culture.
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Episodes
Small Businesses Need More Help Now, Says Ovenly Co-Founder Agatha Kulaga
April 30, 2020 18:24 - 30 minutes - 56.2 MBIn 2010, Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin founded Ovenly, which they originally envisioned as a bar-snack business, providing bars with better alternatives to beer nuts and potato chips. Over the course of ten years, Ovenly transformed into a combination wholesale/retail bakery, with four retail locations and a healthy wholesale business selling to coffee bars and upscale grocers. By March of 2020 it had grown into a business with more than fifty employees and a new, about-to-open lo...
Special Sauce: Will Xi'an Famous Foods Survive the Coronavirus Lockdown?
April 23, 2020 21:43 - 33 minutes - 61.6 MBAs part of our special Special Sauce series on the pandemic's effects on the various constituents of the food community, I reached out to Xi'an Famous Foods co-founder Jason Wang. Jason had told his remarkable story previously on Special Sauce, so I was confident that his experiences as a Chinese-American, his knowledge of financial matters, and his experience as a restaurateur serving his justifiably famous hand-pulled noodles would give him a unique vantage point on the pandemic. ...
Special Sauce: Tom Colicchio on How to Save Restaurants
April 16, 2020 21:19 - 28 minutes - 51.5 MBAs we all try to deal with the crisis confronting us, I thought we'd follow up on the Special Sauce episodes that focused on Kenji's stories with other voices from the food and beverage industry. In the coming weeks you're going to hear the stories of farmers, bakers, cheesemakers, bartenders, servers, chefs, and anyone else in our food supply chain that should be heard from in these troubled times. This week, food activist, chef-restaurateur, and Top Chef co-host Tom Colicchio giv...
Special Sauce: Kenji on His Food Safety Article
April 02, 2020 19:56 - 16 minutes - 15.2 MBIt's obviously still not business as usual at Serious Eats (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), so we're going to continue to produce Special Sauce episodes that deal with the coronavirus pandemic. On this week's episode, we once again hear from Serious Eats's Chief Culinary Advisor Kenji López-Alt. Kenji has been pitching in mightily on so many coronavirus-fighting efforts, both on Serious Eats and off. On Serious Eats, he published an epic post on coronavirus and foo...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Coronavirus and Its Impact on Restaurants
March 26, 2020 13:46 - 24 minutes - 22.5 MBEditor's note: The Coronavirus story is unfolding at a breakneck pace. That means that something said that was true at the time may no longer be so. On this episode please note that Lola, the Tom Douglas restaurant in the Hotel Andra in Seattle, is now closed, as is the hotel itself. Before the sh*t hit the proverbial fan, I had the next several episodes of Special Sauce all queued up. They were going to feature Susan Spungen, the founding food editor of Martha Stewart Living and a...
Special Sauce: Claudia Fleming on the Pitfalls of Your Passion [2/2]
March 05, 2020 22:09 - 36 minutes - 41.8 MBOn this week's Special Sauce, I continue my conversation with visionary pastry chef Claudia Fleming. But before we get to Claudia's captivating story, Kenji fields a question from Serious Eater Joan Moore, who wants to know how long the blade on her Cuisinart food processor should last. After Kenji delivers his characteristically thoughtful answer, Claudia and I pick up where we left off last week, and talk about her harrowing and moving journey. We start off by examining why she a...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Vegetarian Chile Verde, Claudia Fleming on Lego Desserts [1/2]
February 28, 2020 02:50 - 31 minutes - 36.2 MBThere are forgotten giants in the food world, people who have profoundly influenced what we eat, but whose names we barely know. James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Claudia Fleming is one of those people. She is the author, along with Melissa Clark of the New York Times, of The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern, which you'll find on the bookshelf of anyone who's serious about dessert. She is also my guest on the next two episodes of Special Sauce, and man does she have...
Special Sauce: Misha Collins on Pasta With Jam Sauce and Random Acts of Kindness [2/2]
February 14, 2020 00:55 - 45 minutes - 51.5 MBIn part two of my conversation with Supernatural star Misha Collins, we dive into his family's eating habits, which eventually lead to The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Meal Time, which he wrote with his wife, Vicki. Their children Maison and West had adopted the chicken nuggets-centric diet typical of many children in America until West, seemingly at random, put some Jerusalem artichokes into the shopping cart. From that moment on their food lives changed for...
Special Sauce: Supernatural Star Misha Collins [1/2]
February 06, 2020 21:45 - 32 minutes - 37.6 MBOne of the things I love about Special Sauce is how often I am surprised and moved by my guests. And this episode, in which I interview Supernatural star Misha Collins, who, with his wife Vicki, just published The Adventurous Eaters Club: Mastering the Art of Family Mealtime, is a perfect example. Collins had a peripatetic childhood- "I think I lived in 15 places by the time I was 15," he tells me—and often found himself living in parks and teepees. Yet his "idiosyncratic and eccen...
Special Sauce: Maangchi on Being the Korean Julia Child [2/2]
January 31, 2020 00:37 - 35 minutes - 40.4 MBThis week's Special Sauce features part two of my conversation with the online cooking star Maangchi, but first we get to hear from Kenji, who answered a question from Serious Eater Kyle Johnson about whether or not you can freeze the base for his white chili with chicken. Kenji being Kenji, he doesn't just limit himself to yes or no, but he offers a few pears of food-freezing wisdom, like "Flat things freeze faster and they defrost faster." Maangchi and I mostly discussed her new ...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Cooking for His Kid, and Maangchi on Becoming a YouTube Sensation [1/2]
January 23, 2020 21:36 - 42 minutes - 48.4 MBMaangchi. Maangchi. Maangchi! Need I say more? On this week's Special Sauce I had a chance to sit down with YouTube cooking sensation Maangchi, who, in addition to being an inspiration to all of us here at Serious Eats, is our associate producer Grace's hero. And I discovered she's an impossibly engaging woman, as charming and disarmingly forthright as anyone we've had on. And her path to success was definitely unorthodox: Maangchi went from living in a room in the back of her fat...
Special Sauce: Sean Brock on the Distinction Between Happiness and Success [2/2]
January 16, 2020 21:30 - 40 minutes - 27.6 MBOn this week's far-ranging Special Sauce we cover a lot of territory- and I mean a lot- of territory. We've got Sean Brock on the highs and lows of an extended stay in rehab, and the joys of parenthood; Kenji on being a Juicy Lucy skeptic; and Stella on making an olive cake so delicious and so easy it can be in your mouth in less time than it takes to watch an episode of Billions. Before we get to Sean Brock's ongoing battle with recovery, Serious Eater Mike Suade wants to know if ...
Special Sauce: Chef Sean Brock on the Perils of Working Too Hard [1/2]
January 09, 2020 20:38 - 38 minutes - 43.7 MBOn the first new Special Sauce episode of 2020, we go deep and wide on a whole range of topics. First the insanely talented chef Sean Brock, whose new book, South: Essential Recipes and New Explorations, has just been published, takes us on part of his extraordinary journey as a chef. Brock talks about picking vegetables in his grandmother's kitchen and getting his first job in a restaurant kitchen as a teenager, which he describes as feeling like walking on to a pirate ship. He th...
Ask Special Sauce: Kenji and Stella Answer Your Holiday Questions
December 19, 2019 19:19 - 36 minutes - 42.2 MBThis year, my wife and I managed to get through Thanksgiving without any major mishaps or blow-ups. That domestic and culinary tranquility was thanks (at least in part) to the answers Kenji and Stella gave on our special episode of “Ask Special Sauce.” This week, “Ask Special Sauce” returns with even more reassuring answers to an impressive array of holiday cooking questions posed by serious eaters all over the US and Canada. We got straightforward inquiries, like how to navigate ...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Eggs, Plus Wisdom From Two Master Bakers [2/2]
December 13, 2019 02:36 - 57 minutes - 65.4 MBIn part two of my conversation with the extraordinary bakers Amy Scherber of Amy's Bread and Melissa Weller of High Street on Hudson, we take a deep dive into what makes a proper (and I would say perfect) bagel, keeping wholesale bread fresh and high-quality, as well as the balancing act required to make entrepreneurship, marriage, and parenthood work. Both bakers have overcome extraordinary hurdles in the process of building their baking empires. Melissa recounts making bread in a...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Pizza Dough; Amy Scherber and Melissa Weller on the Business of Baking [1/2]
December 05, 2019 20:05 - 31 minutes - 36.1 MBThis week's Special Sauce episode unintentionally turned into a carb fest. Although I knew I was having on a couple of the finest bakers in the land- Amy Scherber, the founder of Amy's Bread, and Melissa Weller, a baker and partner at High Street on Hudson- I had not anticipated that the other segments of the show would have a similarly starchy focus. But let's start with the bread-bakers: Scherber founded Amy's Bread way back in 1992, and it was one of the first artisanal bread-ba...
Ask Special Sauce: Kenji and Stella Answer Your Thanksgiving FAQs
November 21, 2019 22:56 - 37 minutes - 43.1 MBI don't know about the rest of you Thanksgiving hosts out there, but my wife and I tend to become increasingly stressed as the holiday approaches each year. On more than one occasion, I've reached out to Kenji and Stella to help relieve my cooking-related anxiety. It was during one such conversation that I came up with the idea of having a call-in Thanksgiving episode of Special Sauce co-hosted by Stella and Kenji. We put out the call for your Thanksgiving-related cooking and baking...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Competitive Cooking; Ivan Orkin and Chris Ying on Being Gaijin [2/2]
November 14, 2019 21:48 - 46 minutes - 53 MBOn this week's Special Sauce, we take a deep dive into The Gaijin Cookbook: Japanese Recipes from a Chef, Father, Eater, and Lifelong Outsider, the new cookbook from Ivan Orkin and Chris Ying. We pick up where we left off in last week's conversation, and Chris and Ivan talk about how this new project came about. They said that while their previous collaboration, Ivan Ramen: Love, Obsession, and Recipes from Tokyo's Most Unlikely Noodle Joint was received well, they decided they'd l...
Special Sauce: Ivan Orkin and Chris Ying on The Gaijin Cookbook [1/2]
November 07, 2019 22:15 - 42 minutes - 48.5 MBSometimes, my Special Sauce interviews are the best way to catch up with old friends and colleagues. I was reminded of that when Chris Ying and Ivan Orkin, co-authors of The Gaijin Cookbook: Japanese Recipes from a Chef, Father, Eater, and Lifelong Outsider, walked into the studio. The first thing you have to know about Ivan and Chris is that they are great company. The second is that, since they've worked together for long enough that they've established an easy rapport, one that ...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Browning Meat, Adam Chandler on Colonel Sanders's Wild Side [2/2]
October 31, 2019 22:31 - 37 minutes - 25.8 MBOn Special Sauce this week, I had the pleasure of continuing my deep dive into the history of fast food with Adam Chandler, the author of Drive-Thru Dreams. But before I tell you more about that conversation, we kicked off this episode, as we always do, with another round of "Ask Kenji." Serious eater Nick Bastow asks Kenji why minced meat has to be cooked before it's added to a sauce, such as a Bolognese or chili. Kenji explains that it's not just about rendering excess fat but al...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Cooking With Fish Sauce and Adam Chandler on Fast Food [1/2]
October 24, 2019 21:44 - 33 minutes - 22.7 MBThis week's Special Sauce episode kicks off with Serious Eater Marc Lampert asking Kenji about the process of cooking with ingredients packed with umami. "Does umami cook out like an acid would?" Marc asked. Here's part of Kenji's response: "A general rule of thumb for cooking is if you can smell it that means that its concentration in the pot is going down...So if you are cooking a stew and it smells like there's this wonderful red wine aroma that means that the more you smell red ...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Freezing Chicken, Simone Tong on Making Mixian [2/2]
October 17, 2019 21:04 - 37 minutes - 42.5 MBThis week's episode of Special Sauce kicks off with our new culinary Q&A segment, "Ask Kenji." At the behest of listener Dave Shorr, Kenji lays down the law on the best way to freeze chicken. It’s a simple process that includes placing chicken pieces into a zipper-lock bag and pouring in a saltwater brine. Tune in to learn more about why- and be sure to read up on the benefits of freezing flat. Next, Little Tong Noodle Shop owner Simone Tong explains how she came to open a restaura...
Special Sauce: Kenji on Cooking With Starch, Simone Tong on the Ingredient She Hates [1/2]
October 10, 2019 19:42 - 34 minutes - 39.2 MBThis week's Special Sauce kicks off with our new culinary Q&A segment, "Ask Kenji." This time around, Kenji schools us and serious eater Paul Anderson on the differences between cornstarch and flour when used as thickeners. Among them: Unlike flour, "cornstarch tends to break down when you hold it hot," Kenji says. "So you've been to a Chinese buffet, and they have the pot of hot and sour soup that's been sitting there all day, that's usually thickened with cornstarch, and as it sit...
Special Sauce 2.0: Kenji on Grilling Naan and Nicholas Morgenstern on Sundaes [2/2]
October 03, 2019 21:42 - 44 minutes - 50.9 MBFor the first segment of this episode of Special Sauce 2.0, Kenji takes a question from serious eater Phil on how to make naan in a Big Green Egg. It starts with our grilled naan recipe and ends with a 60- to 90-second bake on a pizza stone. Next, ice cream Jedi Master Nicholas Morgenstern, of Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream, talks about how he comes up with his notoriously inventive flavors, like Burnt Sage, Black Pepper Molasses, or the Banana Kalamansi ice cream he had me taste o...
Special Sauce: Introducing Special Sauce 2.0, with guest Nick Morgenstern [1/2]
September 20, 2019 15:36 - 33 minutes - 38.3 MBThis week Serious Eaters get to see the all-new Special Sauce format we've cooked up for the new season. Every episode of Special Sauce 2.0 will start off with "Ask Kenji," a brief section in which J. Kenji Lopez-Alt will answer a pressing question one of our readers has sent in. We're going to do one of these every week, so keep those questions coming. This week the question comes from Tucker Colvin, who asks Kenji which outdoor pizza oven Kenji recommends. After "Ask Kenji," each...
Special Sauce: Author Tom Roston on Post-9/11 New York as Victim and Survivor [2/2]
September 20, 2019 01:27 - 24 minutes - 27.5 MBPart two of my at times emotionally overwhelming interview with Tom Roston, author of The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World: The Twin Towers, Windows on the World, and the Rebirth of New York, focused on the employees of Windows on the World who were in the North Tower's iconic restaurant on September 11, 2001, all of whom tragically died that day. According to Roston, "there were immigrants from, I think it was over 25 nations.... People from Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Ecu...
Special Sauce: Tom Roston on the Untold Stories of Windows on the World [1/2]
September 13, 2019 00:35 - 26 minutes - 30.7 MBNo matter where you were when the two planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, you were profoundly affected by the events of that day. And if you, like me, were at all involved in the food culture at that moment, your thoughts quickly turned to Windows on the World, the glitzy restaurant on the 107th floor of the North Tower, where visitors could enjoy unparalleled views while sipping $5 drinks (at the adjoining Greatest Bar on Earth) or dropping serious coin for a celebrat...
Special Sauce: Soleil Ho on Representation in Food Media [2/2]
August 29, 2019 21:01 - 37 minutes - 43.2 MBIn part two of my thought-provoking interview with San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho, we dove right into how she thinks about restaurant criticism. Soleil explained, "I like to think of restaurants as texts in the same way that you read a book and then you extrapolate upon who wrote the book, when did they write it, why did they write it, what did the audience think at the time? What does it say about society at the time? What kind of snapshot is it? You're really...
Special Sauce: Soleil Ho on Her Journey From Quantum Physics to Racist Sandwich [1/2]
August 22, 2019 21:34 - 25 minutes - 17.3 MBLike a great deal of food media in America, the world of restaurant criticism has a long history of hiring white writers and closing its doors to people of color. So it was exciting to see the San Francisco Chronicle break the mold last year when it hired Vietnamese-American food writer and co-host of The Racist Sandwich podcast, Soleil Ho, to be its lead restaurant critic. If that wasn't cool enough, Soleil also happens to be a fellow graduate of Grinnell College, the small progre...
Special Sauce: Matt Rodbard and Max Falkowitz on What's Next in Food Media [2/2]
August 15, 2019 21:28 - 36 minutes - 42.3 MBIn part two of Ed Levine's conversation with Max Falkowitz and Matt Rodbard, the three discuss how Falkowitz and Rodbard got started in food media and how their careers evolved. Falkowitz begins by underlining how intimidating it was when he first started working at Serious Eats. "I can't really describe the terror upon walking into the office," he says- though, he observes, that fear was tempered by the frenetic publication schedule, which was both liberating and educational. "It ...
Special Sauce: Matt Rodbard and Max Falkowitz on Becoming Food Writers [1/2]
August 08, 2019 20:30 - 30 minutes - 34.5 MBIn the next two episodes of Special Sauce, we take a deep dive into the challenges and triumphs of building a career in food media. I invited former Serious Eats editor/current contributor Max Falkowitz, and founding TASTE editor Matt Rodbard to share their perspectives. As two people who have co-written cookbooks with chefs, been on staff as editors and writers at food publications, and freelanced extensively, I thought they’d offer unique insights into what it takes to become food...
Special Sauce: Lazarus Lynch on Writing Son of a Southern Chef [2/2]
August 01, 2019 20:44 - 29 minutes - 33.7 MBIn part two of Ed Levine's conversation with Lazarus Lynch, who goes by more titles than any 25-year-old has any reasonable expectation to have (cookbook author, performer, singer...the list is incredible!), they delve into how Lynch decided he wanted to write his book, Son of a Southern Chef: Cook with Soul. Lynch tells Ed that he came up with the title in his junior year in college, long before he even thought about what the book would contain, during a meeting in which a campus ...
Special Sauce: Lazarus Lynch on Cooking on Camera and Being Okay With Who You Are [1/2]
July 26, 2019 02:07 - 27 minutes - 31.6 MBSinger, author (Son of a Southern Chef), and food personality Lazarus Lynch is not your typical cookbook writer or social media star. As an openly gay young Black man, Lynch is blazing his own trail in the food and media worlds, so I couldn't pass up the chance to talk to him for Special Sauce. Lynch started his food TV career in college, where he enlisted friends to hold cameras and other equipment for his cooking show in exchange for free food. "We put it on YouTube. I didn't thi...
Special Sauce: Alvin Cailan on What “American Food” Means in 2019 [2/2]
July 18, 2019 23:58 - 29 minutes - 33.6 MBIn part 2 of my extraordinary chat with chef-restaurateur-activist Alvin Cailan, we delved deeply into his socio-political motivations, but we still managed to fit in some laughs. Cailan says he's always been motivated to confound the pessimism he frequently encountered growing up, akin to what former President George W. Bush described as "the soft bigotry of low expectations." "I grew up in the early 1990s in the rebellious era of gangster rap and...the rise of the immigrant voic...
Special Sauce: Eggslut’s Alvin Cailan on Ruckus-Causing as a Career Path [1/2]
July 11, 2019 18:22 - 29 minutes - 33.8 MBEvery 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 religious mother thought it would keep her wayward son out of trouble, and it worked- sor...
Special Sauce Live, Ed Levine Edition: Serious Eats Lives! [2/2]
July 03, 2019 20:10 - 28 minutes - 32.7 MBWelcome 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 named
Special Sauce Live, Ed Levine Edition: A Serious Eater Is Born! [1/2]
June 27, 2019 20:01 - 27 minutes - 31.7 MBAt 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 turned the tables on Ed and had Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group and Ed's ...
Special Sauce: Nik Sharma on the Kitchen as Laboratory [2/2]
June 20, 2019 21:06 - 31 minutes - 35.9 MBThis 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 kitchen, even if we’re just tweaking a family recipe. In his case, though, Nik explains that...
Special Sauce: Nik Sharma on the Stories Told by Seasoning [1/2]
June 14, 2019 01:35 - 32 minutes - 37.4 MBCookbook 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, it wasn't talked about. I'm talking about in the late '80s, early '90s, when I kind of realiz...
Special Sauce: Priya Krishna on Cooking and Being "Indian-ish" [2/2]
June 06, 2019 19:00 - 30 minutes - 21 MBIn part two of my delightful conversation with Priya Krishna, she delves into her book Indian-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 says. "It was like I was too American to be Indian and too Indian to be American. But I thin...
Priya Krishna on Special Sauce: How Indian-ish Came to Be [1/2]
May 30, 2019 21:09 - 31 minutes - 21.6 MBI 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-ish" means. Krishna explains that the concept was inspired by her mother and the book's...
Special Sauce: Joe Yonan on Charting Your Own Path [2/2]
May 24, 2019 01:01 - 35 minutes - 40.1 MBIn 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. How did he manage to acquire one of the few coveted roles as staff food writer? He told h...
Special Sauce: Food Editor Joe Yonan on Finding the Color of His Parachute [1/2]
May 16, 2019 21:48 - 35 minutes - 40.8 MBIt'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 learned a lot of valuable lessons about telling stories. "You know one of the things t...
Special Sauce: Jason Wang on Building a Xi'an Famous Foods Empire [2/2]
May 09, 2019 21:11 - 33 minutes - 23 MBIn 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 days, I'll be honest with you, we didn't give out napkins. We didn't have a napkin di...
Special Sauce: Jason Wang on the Origins of Xi’an Famous Foods [1/2]
May 02, 2019 21:41 - 33 minutes - 23.2 MBOne 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 legendary lamb face salad that's unfortunately no longer on the menu. Wang emigrated with h...
Special Sauce: Kwame Onwuachi's Journey From Setbacks to Success Story [2/2]
April 25, 2019 22:17 - 27 minutes - 31 MBWhen we last 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, when I reduced it down, it was a little bitter. It was like these little things I didn't kno...
Kwame Onwuachi on Special Sauce: Notes From a Young Black Chef [1/2]
April 19, 2019 02:14 - 20 minutes - 23.7 MBThis 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 included membership in a gang and selling "nutcrackers," or homemade alcoholic punch, on ...
Special Sauce: Allison and Matt Robicelli on Moving to Baltimore [2/2]
April 11, 2019 19:56 - 36 minutes - 25.3 MBWhen 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 that. Because everything is a possibility. Everything about your life has stakes. Everyt...
Special Sauce: Matt and Allison Robicelli on Cupcakes and the Bonds of Suffering [1/2]
April 04, 2019 18:58 - 36 minutes - 41.8 MBSometimes 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 cooked at City Bakery and Lutèce. Together, they opened the acclaimed bakery Robicelli...
Special Sauce: Tommy Tomlinson on Asking for Help When You Need It [2/2]
March 28, 2019 20:15 - 45 minutes - 52.1 MBIn 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 habits. "I learned a lot from them about how they would watch what I was eating. And th...