One of my all-time favorite food writers is Amanda Hesser, the co-founder of Food52 and author of The New York Times Cookbook, and it's a huge thrill to have her on Lunch Therapy this week. In today's session, I ask her all about Cooking for Mr. Latte (one of my all-time favorite food books), how she went from being a writer to starting a business, being super detail oriented, portraying herself as unlikable in her book, and the food writers that she read at the start of her career. We also lear...
Nov 20, 2023•1 hr 6 min
The James Beard award-winning biographer of James Beard, John Birdsall, swings by the office today for a lunch therapy session. We talk all about who'd be the best actor to play James Beard, how the pandemic interrupted his book tour plans, raw onions, working at Deborah Madison's Greens in a Zen Center in SF, and how his gentle temperament worked in a restaurant kitchen. We also cover being out as a chef in SF in the 90s, how the AIDS crisis played out in restaurants, Jeremiah Tower's lawsuit, ...
Nov 06, 2023•57 min
Dwight Garner is one of the most feared and yet funny voices in the pages of The New York Times Book Review , where he's one of their most beloved critics, as well as the former editor. He's now the author of a brand new book called The Upstairs Delicatessen and in today's session we talk all about being a book critic with a book, facing the authors whose books he pans, reading his wife's work, how he stays focused (and gets through three hundred pages in a day), and how he knows so many literar...
Oct 30, 2023•55 min
Welcome back to Lunch Therapy! Today's patient, Abi Balingit, is the creator of the blog The Dusky Kitchen and the author of the brand new, Filipino-American dessert cookbook, Mayumu . In today's session, we talk all about growing up in California, her parents' Filipino background, the food that they cooked and how she took a lot of it for granted. We also cover banana ketchup, Capri Sun, making food for charity, working a non-food job, cooking with her boyfriend, and America's rising intere...
Oct 23, 2023•59 min
Today's Lunch Therapy patient, Leah Koenig, is the author of seven cookbooks, including The Jewish Cookbook and Modern Jewish Cooking. Her latest, Portico, is all about Roman Jewish cuisine and our conversation today covers everything Roman and Jewish, from frying artichokes to weighing fish. We also delve into Leah's relationship to food and cooking, her kosher husband, anti-semitism, dealing with picky eaters, recipe testing, and why it's totally fine to eat a tuna melt while keeping kosher. L...
Sep 05, 2023•56 min
This week's Lunch Therapy patient is Amy Thielen, the multitalented cookbook author and chef whose latest cookbook, Company, is hot off the presses and features 125 amazing new recipes. In today's session, we talk all about Amy's childhood in Park Rapids, Minnesota, her journey to New York's four-star restaurant kitchens, and her journey back to where she grew up with her sculptor husband to raise their son, Hank. We also cover her family's pork store, how she comes up with such original recipes...
Aug 07, 2023•1 hr
Today's patient, Alex Jung, is an accomplished journalist for New York Magazine and Vulture, who's profiled countless celebrities and been nominated for a National Magazine Award. He's currently got the best gig in the city, writing the column "The Year I Ate New York" for which he dines across all five boroughs, cataloguing his experiences every two weeks. In today's session, Alex talks all about growing up Korean in Florida, the pastrami sandwiches his mom would make him for lunch, the link be...
Jul 31, 2023•58 min
Raise your glass to this week's Lunch Therapy patient: Rosie Schaap, the author of two books (Drinking with Men, Becoming a Sommelier) and the former Drink columnist for The New York Times. In today's episode, we talk all about drinking, how to manage it, how to know when it's gone too far, and how everything changes as you get older. We also talk about her move to Northern Ireland, meeting her husband (and dog) there, being the only Jewish woman in her town, her famous sports writer father Dick...
Jul 24, 2023•1 hr 2 min
My patient today is the illustrious food stylist and recipe developer Susan Spungen, the author of the brand new book Veg Forward, and the founding editor at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. You very likely have seen her work food styling for such films as Julie & Julia, It's Complicated, and Eat, Pray, Love. In today's session, we talk all about the tricks of the trade, what props to use when taking food pictures, how she photographed her whole book using her iPhone, and why an overhead sho...
Jul 17, 2023•59 min
This week's Lunch Therapy patient, Anya von Bremzen, is the author of a brand new book, National Dish, that's been called "a fast-paced, entertaining travelogue" by The New York Times. In today's episode, we learn all about the ways Russia uses borsch for propaganda, the meat pie with ketchup she ate growing up (her family's version of "pizza"), living in Jackson Heights, and living part time in Istanbul. We also learn about the ways food and nationalism intersect, being a winner at the very fir...
Jul 11, 2023•56 min
Jeff Gordinier is one of the most prolific, influential food writers in the biz: not only does he work on Esquire's Best Restaurants list every year, he contributes regularly to The New York Times as both a food writer and a poetry critic (!) AND he's the author of the book Hungry, for which he traveled around the world with René Redzepi, frequently hailed as the world's best chef. In today's session, we learn all about Gordinier's new interest in eating healthy (and the toll the Best Restaurant...
Jul 03, 2023•1 hr 1 min
Welcome back to Lunch Therapy! We start this brand new season with Lee Sung Jin, the creator of Netflix's hit show BEEF. I worked with Lee several years ago on the ABC sitcom The Real O'Neals and since then he's gone on to write for Dave, Tuca and Bertie, and now his breakout, runaway hit starring Steve Yeun and Ali Wong. In today's session, we talk all about Lee's name change (when I knew him, he was Sonny Lee), the road rage incident (and bathroom incident) that inspired the show, and the terr...
Jun 26, 2023•1 hr 2 min
My guest today is the creator of one of my favorite podcasts of all time, The Mystery Show with Starlee Kine. If you haven't listened to that, turn this off and go do that first. It's amazing. I asked Starlee if she had a favorite recipe and she didn't. I asked her if she had a favorite thing to eat in L.A. and she sent me to Griffith Park to eat the California Veggie Sandwich at The Trails in Griffith Park. Unfortunately, it was pouring down rain and I had a cold, so I couldn't actually make it...
Mar 06, 2023•1 hr
Vegan chef Chris Tucker (@veganchefchristucker) is a private vegan chef -- he's making vegan desserts for Elton John's Oscar party in two weeks! -- who appeared on Season Four of The Great American Baking Show. In today's episode, Chris sends me Heidi Swanson's recipe for caramelized mushrooms with chilies and peanuts and lime and cilantro which I served up with ramen noodles. We talk all about how Chris got into veganism, his former career as a hair stylist, how he deals with difficult clients,...
Feb 27, 2023•56 min
Today's guest, Homa Dashtaki, is the co-founder (along with her father) of The White Mustache yogurt, some of the most celebrated yogurt in the country. She's also the author of a brand new cookbook called Yogurt & Whey (coming out March 5th) that gives away her signature yogurt recipe as well as all of the things you can make with the yogurt itself and the whey, including these out-of-this-world whey pancakes which are seriously the best pancakes I've ever eaten (go to amateurgourmet.com fo...
Feb 20, 2023•50 min
Our guest this week, Aaron Hutcherson, is a writer and recipe developer for The Washington Post's Voraciously and recently moved to Washington, D.C. for the gig. In today's episode, we learn all about Aaron's previous career as a wealth manager on Wall Street, how he grew up loving being in the kitchen with his mother, and how her unpretentious approach to food inspires the recipes he writes to this day -- including today's "you've got to taste this" dish of chicken thighs roasted with butter an...
Feb 13, 2023•1 hr
This week Karan Soni, who you may recognize from Deadpool or Miracle Workers, shares a recipe from the Dishoom cookbook for Keema Pao: a punchy combination of yogurt, ground lamb, and an herb paste made with mint and cilantro. Learn all about Karan's childhood in India, how his parents sent him to a boarding school to lose weight, how he learned to cook for himself when he arrived in America to go to USC, the difference between Northern Indian and Southern Indian cooking, and why his mom is the ...
Feb 06, 2023•1 hr
This week we're shaking things up, shifting from a "you've got to taste this" recipe to a "you've got to taste this" field trip! LA Times food writer and host of The Bucket List Jenn Harris knows more about L.A. food than most people twice her age; that's because she grew up here with a Jewish grandmother and Chinese grandmother who love to eat. Today she sends me to the San Gabriel Valley, specifically to the Kang Kang Food Court, for sheng jian bao: the dreamiest hybrid of a soup dumpling and ...
Jan 30, 2023•54 min
One of my favorite bakers (and favorite people) is Nicole Rucker, owner of Fat & Flour in the Grand Central Market here in L.A., and the very first guest on my very first podcast, Lunch Therapy. In today's episode of "You've Got to Taste This," Nicole sends me a recipe for Silesian Heaven crispy pierogis from "Pierogi" by Zuza Zak. These pierogis are stuffed with dried fruit and well-seasoned pork, boiled, and then fried in butter with sesame seeds. Spoiler alert: they were out of this world...
Jan 23, 2023•1 hr
This week's "You've Got to Taste This" recipe comes to us from Felicity Spector, a Harvard Fulbright scholar and London-based journalist, whose interest in Ukraine and Russia far precedes the current conflict there. That interest certainly informs her recipe choice: Makoviy Rulet, a braided babka-ish bread studded with apples and infused with a sweet, complex, frangipane-like poppyseed paste. It's a recipe by Felicity's friend and food-writing colleague Olia Hercules, who's been movingly writing...
Jan 16, 2023•1 hr
Welcome to "You've Got to Taste This," my brand new podcast centered around dishes that are so good, you've simply got to taste them. My first guest is Noah Galuten, author of the upcoming Don't Panic Pantry Cookbook, inspired by the YouTube show he does with his wife, comedian Iliza Shlesinger. For today's episode, Noah offers up his pasta with dried porcinis, fresh rosemary, and a zippy tomato sauce that's so good, it's already entered my normal pasta rotation. In addition to explaining the re...
Jan 09, 2023•54 min
Now I know most of you already have your Thanksgiving desserts planned out, but just in case you need a little inspiration, I invited Charlotte Druckman (Women on Food, Kitchen Remix) on the podcast to discuss all the pies she tasted recently for a New York Magazine article. We're talking Thanksgiving pies from New York's best bakeries with exciting innovations like gingersnap crusts, butterscotch pumpkin, and apple buttermilk. In addition, we talk pie making at home, what we'll be eating at our...
Nov 21, 2022•57 min
The author of the brand-new, hotly-anticipated Puerto Rican cookbook DIASPORICAN, Ilyanna Maisonet, swings by the podcast today to talk all about cooking Puerto Rican. We cover achiote oil, her mother's mushroom chicken, which ingredients are different in Puerto Rico vs. the U.S., persimmon cookies, and lots more. Plus: learn how Illyanna pivoted from culinary school to a food writing career, how the cookbook came about, the obstacles she faced, and how she landed on such a striking cover image....
Oct 24, 2022•54 min
Everyone's favorite cookbook author and NYT columnist, Melissa Clark, is back on the pod to talk all about that tricky old subject: weeknight dinners. With her brand new cookbook, Dinner in One, Melissa proves that it takes just a few flourishes to turn a humdrum meal into something special. Today we talk about Thanksgiving on a sheet pan (!), how to do the dishes, parenting a picky child, how her cookbooks sank to the bottom of the ocean, cleaning clams, washing lettuce, and how she'd tackle ro...
Oct 03, 2022•47 min
Jonathan Melendez is a chef, food photographer, and the creator of the blog The Candid Appetite. Recently he's started the biggest job of all: he and his partner Julian (I met them both last year at a Christmas party) are the proud parents of a newborn baby boy named Theodore. How has fatherhood changed his cooking habits? What kind of relationship does he want Theodore to have to food and cooking? What role does culture play into all of this? Join us for a hearty, heartfelt conversation about f...
Sep 26, 2022•54 min
I've been cooking along to show tunes since I first started cooking twenty years ago... so imagine how excited I am that the Broadway cookbook that I cowrote with Gideon Glick (star of Spring Awakening, Little Shop of Horrors, and a Tony nominee for To Kill a Mockingbird), Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway, is coming out this October 4th! Gideon actually received his copies in the mail a few days ago (mine are on their way) and so I had to invite him on the podcast to talk all about our cookbook,...
Aug 29, 2022•49 min
Andrea Nguyen ís the prolific author of eight cookbooks, including Vietnamese Food Any Day, The Pho Cookbook, Asian Tofu, and The Banh Mi Handbook. She's also the co-host of a brand new podcast called Everything Cookbooks where she, along with her co-hosts Molly Stevens, Kate Leahy, and Kristin Donnelly discuss the ins and outs of the cookbook publishing world. That's the very subject of today's talk -- the cookbook biz! -- and Andrea lays out how she got her start, how she keeps getting books p...
Aug 22, 2022•1 hr 5 min
When Chef Vishwesh Bhatt started serving his Indian-inflected Southern food at SnackBar in Oxford, Mississippi, the food world was so dazzled, the James Beard committee nominated him for Best Southern Chef five times before he finally won in 2019. His new book, I Am From Here, captures what makes his cooking so original and specific to him and his journey from Gujarat India to the American South. In today's conversation, we get at the heart of his idiosyncratic cuisine -- from cornbread infused ...
Aug 15, 2022•56 min
What's it like to be gay and to love food? Today's guest Dan Pelosi (aka: Grossy Pelosi) knows a little something about it. Having grown up 3/4ths Italian (the other 1/4 is Portuguese), Dan had food foisted on him at a young age. But how did he reconcile that with the body-obsessed gay-culture that he became a part of once he got older? It's a similar issue for me having grown up in a Jewish family where skipping a meal was more alarming than getting a fake ID (my mom actually made me get a fake...
Aug 08, 2022•52 min
What's it like to be famous on TikTok? Ask Chef Jon Kung who has 1.5 million followers on there and is frequently on lists of TikTok's best food accounts. Learn how he went from being a chef in Detroit to being a full-time TikToker, what his process is, whether he writes his narrations or improvises them, what kind of camera he uses, how he thinks about his sex appeal, and the impact he's had on his subscribers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your a...
Aug 01, 2022•56 min
