I got dressed up to talk to Mariana Velásquez for this interview. From experiencing the elegance of her cookbook, Colombiana: A Rediscovery of Recipes and Rituals from the Soul of Colombia alone, I knew I had to wear a nice dress. Then I browsed her apron collection, Limonarium , and saw ever more style expressed. But there’s also substance, in the exploration of the regional foods of her native Colombia, the recipes for foods she grew up with and adapted to her life in New York City, and the st...
Jul 16, 2021•17 min
Amber Mayfield really knows how to work: She has started her own event hosting company, called To-Be-Hosted, as well as an annual magazine about Black food and drink called While Entertaining. The self-published magazine is printed on thick, beautiful paper and packed with essays, recipes, playlists, and ideas for hosting that come from some of the coolest folks working in food and drink right now—some that are huge, and others that Mayfield wants to see get more attention. Because I love indepe...
Jul 02, 2021•25 min
I’ve been following the chef and writer Taffy Elrod on Twitter for years, and right now she’s having a moment. From teaching virtual classes while the restaurant she owns in the Hudson Valley with her husband has been closed to working with Rancho Gordo on a bean recipe booklet, she’s been making the most of a weird moment for a chef accustomed to working with the public. We discussed her mostly vegetarian upbringing, studying at the Natural Gourmet Institute, and the thin line between hospitali...
Jun 25, 2021•30 min
I knew I wanted to talk to writer Hannah Selinger when she was openly angry that her Eater essay “ Life Was Not a Peach ,” about her experience working for David Chang, wasn’t included in Best American Food Writing 2021. The rule is that we writers aren’t supposed to comment on whether we’ve been snubbed for an anthology or an award, even when it’s a clearly egregious way to keep a highly critical essay out of the canon, in an anthology edited by a fellow chef. So we talked, not just about the a...
Jun 18, 2021•29 min
Listen now | Talking with the interdisciplinary artist and 'Palate Palette' editor about hyper-specificity and locality in her work on Black foodways in Baltimore. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliciakennedy.substack.com...
Jun 11, 2021•42 min
Dianne Jacob has been writing since the 1970s, and she brings the perspective of someone well-versed in the industry to her book Will Write for Food , the fourth edition of which just came out this week. In the text and her online writing, she demystifies what is often thought of as the romantic world of food writing for anyone who might want to break into it. That’s required paying attention to how the industry has evolved in the last twenty years, especially, as people have moved away from res...
May 28, 2021•30 min
Karla Vasquez is a writer and keeper of culture documenting the women who are keeping Salvadoran food tradition alive in the United States. Her project SalviSoul is putting oral tradition down on paper so that it can’t be lost, and it also points to the significance of specificity when discussing Latin American traditions: The U.S. considers the Latinx community a monolith, when it is actually wildly diverse. I wanted to discuss with her the inspiration behind this, her experience so far working...
May 21, 2021•45 min
Do I need to introduce Julia Turshen to a food crowd? Her cookbooks are best sellers and she’s written for everyone. Before I made my foray into food writing, I envied her quite a bit for seemingly having achieved all my dreams far before I was ready or able to do so, despite the fact that we’re the same age. In this conversation, I wanted to understand her approach to creating “healthy” recipes and what inspired the one vegan chapter in her new book, Simply Julia , but I also wanted to discuss ...
May 14, 2021•59 min
Aja Barber and I have been following each other online for years, while we were both working various jobs and trying to get anyone to pay attention to our work. Contrary to how most people are taught these things work, we only got anyone to pay attention when we started our own independent ventures: for me, this newsletter; for Aja, her incredible Patreon . She also has a book coming out, called Consumed: On Colonialism, Climate Change, Consumerism & the Need for Collective Change . Her work...
May 07, 2021•41 min
Irene Li is a hilarious writer on serious issues, which I discovered when she sent me her piece, “ 8 Totally Achievable Ways to Show Up for Racial Justice… When You’re White and Own an Asian Restaurant! ” She’s also the chef of the former restaurant Mei Mei in Boston, which has become a packaged dumpling company, as well as a project manager at Commonwealth Kitchen, where she’s helping Black and Latinx restaurant owners make their businesses work better for them. We discussed how her social just...
Apr 30, 2021•31 min
Ronna Welsh, owner of Purple Kale Kitchenworks in Brooklyn and author of The Nimble Cook , is an expert at using waste that others wouldn’t think twice about throwing in the garbage. I wrote about her cookbook when it came out in 2019 for Edible Brooklyn , and I was most taken with the recipe for garlic skin vinegar. This was a book in the vein of Abra Berens ’s Ruffage and Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat that took an old-school approach to recipes: Here, you’re taught how to cook, how to u...
Apr 23, 2021•21 min
My fiancé is making me a martini as I put together this interview with Jackie Summers , and I think he’d appreciate that. What we have in common is that we are writers and boozehounds. But Jackie is much more than that: He was the first Black distiller to be licensed in the United States since Prohibition, to make his delicious Sorel liqueur , and is a fabulous public speaker on matters of equity in hospitality. I first came across him when I was assigned to write about Sorel, and I’m thrilled t...
Apr 16, 2021•40 min
When the opportunity to interview Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy upon the release of her book Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture (next Tuesday) landed in my inbox, I couldn’t say no. To discuss food with a literary scholar? Of course . There is an entire chapter on food in the book, relating current expressions of Black identity in cookbooks and restaurants to past Black power movements. It is illuminating, especially in its discussion of Bryant Terry’s Afro-Vegan , for making co...
Apr 09, 2021•30 min
I met Emily Stephenson one day years ago at a café right by our then-apartments in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She had emailed me because I was an editor at Edible Brooklyn at the time and wanted to discuss my work. I was jealous of her work, though, because she developed recipes for cookbooks. Eventually, we collaborated on the Food Writers’ Workshop , along with Layla Schlack, attempting to demystify food media for a bigger group of writers through a ticket price of $13.50. Emily has since writte...
Apr 02, 2021•34 min
When I talked to Mark Byrne for my piece “ On Booze ,” I was so excited by the free-flowing conversation that I knew I had to do a proper interview. He’s a journalist turned distiller who has co-founded Good Vodka , made from coffee waste. While it hasn’t turned me into a vodka martini person (nothing could rip me away from gin), it is a gorgeously vanilla vodka with a rich mouthfeel that has changed my mind about the spirit. Someone once told me vodka is simply a “feat of engineering.” Good Vod...
Mar 26, 2021•50 min
I met Jenn de la Vega at The Brooklyn Kitchen in 2017, when it was still in Williamsburg but wasn’t operating as its old self. She came on to do prep for a fundraiser there after Hurricane Maria, for a burgeoning nonprofit meant to keep the hospitality industry on the archipelago afloat. She was working, and still works, as an editor for the seminal food zine Put a Egg On It . Her attitude was so chill that she adapted easily to the work and the vibe—no questions asked, no ego fluffed. As I disc...
Mar 19, 2021•37 min
Listen now | The chef and community organizer talks occupation and moving to a worker-owned model. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliciakennedy.substack.com...
Mar 12, 2021•39 min
I’ve been following Emily Gould’s writing for so long that I can barely remember a pre- Emily Gould time in the internet discourse. She has been an influence and a role model, if I’m being honest, and her vulnerability, honesty, humor, and growth have been so wonderful to watch over the years. She’s done so much: personal blogging, Gawker blogging, a memoir ( And the Heart Says Whateve r ), her two novels ( Friendship , Perfect Tunes ), and her essays at The Cut and other outlets. She’s also bee...
Mar 05, 2021•47 min
When I heard about the informational website KnowYourAlcohol.com , which launched early this year, I wanted to hear from who’s behind it. As I wrote about in “ On Booze ,” I’m pretty fascinated by how spirits are made and the culture around them. The very fashionably designed site provides really simple explanations for how the spirits industry works, and who is working against the conglomerate ownership, lack of transparency about ingredients and sourcing, and how bigger brands are now adopting...
Feb 26, 2021•21 min
Claire Lower , senior food editor at Lifehacker, and I had the idea to interview each other at roughly the same time. I did her “ How I Eat ” series, and now here she is in my conversation series. I’ve been very interested in her work for ages, despite our very different approaches to food and recipes. A Food Network show with us co-hosting would be a take on the Odd Couple trope—the omnivore and the mostly-vegan. (For some reason, this is the best way I can explain it.) Nonetheless, there is de...
Feb 19, 2021•27 min
I have been a big fan of Claire Sprouse ’s work since way before she opened Hunky Dory in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Through Tin Roof Drink Community , she’d been challenging the bar world to think sustainably and work differently. And by opening Hunky Dory—which used to be a place I went regularly after getting a manicure, to zone out at the bar and think—she has put the ideas into practice. We spoke late in 2020 about how she got into the hospitality industry, how the restaura...
Feb 12, 2021•32 min
Tamar Adler wasn’t in the best mood when we recorded this interview, and she apologized once we stopped recording. I didn’t think there was anything to be sorry for, but I appreciated learning that it was due to trying to get her town, Hudson, New York, to make their vaccine information available in languages other than English so that they would be accessible to people who needed it. I think it helps to know that’s what was on her mind while listening or reading to this conversation about how i...
Feb 05, 2021•48 min
Bettina Makalintal has, in a relatively short span of time, become a mononym in food media. People know who the Vice culture writer is, what her voice is, which subjects she covers, and the compelling angles she takes on them. From Bettina’s writing on cake or font trends to thoughtful longform pieces, she is an indispensable voice. We discussed how she got into cake, how she balances short- and long-form writing, and what she’s most looking forward to when we’re all vaccinated. Listen above, or...
Jan 29, 2021•21 min
Jing Gao is now food-world-famous for her eponymous line of strikingly labeled Sichuan ingredients, Fly by Jing (the stuff is good ). But before she launched what has become a super-successful purveyor of Sichuan chili sauce, mala spice mix, Zhong sauce, doubanjiang, preserved black beans, and more, she ran a fast-casual restaurant in Shanghai called Baoism. This switch was brought upon by her love for ingredients—for sourcing them well, for putting them together well—and regional Chinese cuisin...
Jan 22, 2021•35 min
Nicola Harvey is a journalist and farmer based in New Zealand. We connected about the podcast she produced for Audible, “ A Carnivore’s Crisis ,” because we share concerns about the tech-meat burgers by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat that are being hailed as a climate-change savior while still encouraging monocropping in farming, processed foods with dubious health effects, and other food-system ailments. I wanted to get her on to chat about that, as well as her forthcoming book on “food citiz...
Jan 15, 2021•40 min
It’s hard for me to properly state what I perceive to be the significance of Amanda Cohen. For more than ten years now, she’s been the chef-owner of Dirt Candy in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The restaurant was once very small (it was once, indeed, in the space that now houses Superiority Burger), then she moved it to a larger space. Now, it’s rather small again, operating only on the patio with a lot of heat lamps, and she long ago adopted a no-tipping policy in order to pay staf...
Jan 08, 2021•35 min
The first time I interviewed Eric , I knew he was different from other chefs. He really says whatever is on his mind, which comes from deep experience: Rivera used to work in the insurance business, then the recession hit and he turned his interest in food into something bigger. He went to culinary school. He spent three years as the director of culinary research operations at the Alinea Group in Chicago. But when it comes to his Seattle restaurant, Addo—which started in his apartment—he doesn’t...
Dec 04, 2020•33 min
Kevin Vaughn started his bilingual weekly newsletter and monthly zine Matambre early on in the onslaught of the pandemic. For me, it has become indispensable reading on the ways in which various small restaurants in Buenos Aires and food workers in the country are coping with crisis, as well as reimagining the future. While I’ve only been to Buenos Aires once and quite briefly, I loved the city on the surface but felt that I wasn’t able to quite dig in—Vaughn’s writing proves that feeling was co...
Nov 27, 2020•46 min
Listen now | He's the Raaka Chocolate brand manager and a nature photographer. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aliciakennedy.substack.com...
Nov 20, 2020•48 min
When it comes to wine, I admittedly try to keep myself a little bit ignorant. This is because I love wine so much: I don’t want to over-intellectualize it; I want to keep it special. One of the magazines that feels organic (no pun intended) in its approach to writing about the subject is The Wine Zine , published independently by writer Katherine Clary , whose book, Wine, Unfiltered , is similarly approachable in its voice. Both come from a perspective where enjoyment is centered, and it’s under...
Nov 13, 2020•22 min
