In 2005, Matt sat across from Anthony Bourdain at a magazine photo shoot. His first TV show, No Reservations, was only a few months old, and they dug into the contents of his travel bags, which he had brought to the set from his apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Two hours turned into a highly personal conversation, recorded on a cassette that sat untouched for twenty years. This week, that tape gets its first public airing, and we discuss Tony’s preferred sucker-punch etiquette, his loyalty to cigarettes and the Chateau Marmont, ayahuasca in Peru, and the talk show he dreamed up with Christopher Walken in mind. The Bourdain biopic, Tony, is out on August 7. Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Renata Ameni is chef partner of Birdee, a bakery and all-day café on the Williamsburg waterfront. The Brazilian-born chef is a fine-dining veteran who worked at Eleven Madison Park and opened Crown Shy before hopping over to more casual territory. Today on the show, we talk about bridging the gap between different styles of restaurants, making singular pastries, and more. Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Noah Galuten—chef, James Beard Award–winning cookbook author, and YouTube food guy—joins the show to talk about his new book, Grill Time!. The conversation covers his unconventional path from UCLA theater student to LA pitmaster, the case for treating your gas grill as a weekday kitchen appliance, and a deep dive into his research trip to Hermosillo, Mexico, where he discovered that everything he thought he knew about carne asada was wrong. Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Omi Hopper is a Puerto Rican chef, social media influencer, and food entrepreneur. You might know her as a semifinalist on season two of Next Level Chef, or from her popular cooking videos across social media, where she shares her takes on Puerto Rican classics. Today on the show, we talk about making her debut cookbook, Cooking con Omi: A Love Letter to Puerto Rican Home Cooking. Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Claire Saffitz joins us for a summer-minded conversation about cooking outside the dessert lane. The best-selling author of Dessert Person and What’s for Dessert talks pizza-oven construction, YouTube behind-the-scenes, garden life in the Hudson Valley, and—for the first time—details about her upcoming third cookbook, which is a bit of a departure from her previous work. And it’s the return of Three Things, where Aliza and Matt discuss what’s interesting in the food world, including Matt’s visits to Lola’s, Bar Chimera, AOOA Farm, and Superiority Burger. Aliza checks out Dolores, Un Posto Italiano, and shares how she is having a real potato salad summer.  Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're thrilled to have chef Norman Van Aken on the show. Norman is the founding father of “new world cuisine” and the man who introduced the word “fusion” into the culinary lexicon—at a 1989 symposium in Santa Fe, decades before it became widely used and sometimes critiqued. A former carnival worker and tar roofer who never went to culinary school, Van Aken built his vision in Key West and Miami, gave Charlie Trotter his first kitchen job, and has spent 40-plus years arguing that Florida deserves a cuisine of its own. His restaurant Norman’s is now in its third Orlando incarnation. We get into all of it in this memorable episode. And check out Norman’s Substack too. It’s a great read. Also on the show we have a live recording from the recent The Great Nosh Jewish food festival. It’s an entertaining conversation featuring Niki Russ Federman of Russ & Daughters, Mike Solomonov of Kfar Brooklyn, and Itamar Srulovich of Honey & Co in London. Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caroline Chambers built the number-one food and drink newsletter on Substack, What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking, on one radical premise: most of us don’t want to cook, and that’s fine. Her debut cookbook became an instant New York Times bestseller. Her follow-up, Make It Fast, was written with the help of reader feedback and organized around a new concept: the “walk away” recipe. It’s like millennial “set it and forget it,” if you will. In this episode, Caroline talks about the community-sourced cookbook, Substack as a business, and how she writes about products she likes, not always the ones that pay her. It’s a refreshing conversation, and we love having Caro in the studio. Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lydia Pang is a creative director and the author of Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts, and Food. It’s a memoir that connects to the Chinese cultural concept of 吃苦 (chi ku), “eating bitterness” or being resilient, to her own life, with each chapter rooted in a recipe. Today on the show, we chat about how the book began as a zine in 2020, being inspired by her Hakka-Welsh heritage, and more. And it’s the return of Three Things, where Aliza and Matt discuss what’s interesting in the food world, including Matt’s trip to Chicago with visits to Maxwell Trading, Loaf Lounge, Best Intentions, and Colectivo. Aliza discusses her interaction with dirty soda in Utah, a recipe in the latest issue of Kismet Magazine, and a very good frozen drink at SAA in Brooklyn.  Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chloe Frechette spent nearly a decade as executive editor at Punch, the James Beard Award–winning drinks media brand, writing seriously about cocktails and the culture around them. Then she did what most drinks writers most certainly do not do: she opened a bar. Echo Lake and Undercurrent, her two-story rum destination in Williamsburg with partner Paul McGee, opened this spring—one a breezy daiquiri bar, the other an intimate den of rare and vintage spirits. In this episode, I speak with Chloe about making the jump from writing about bars to running one, the vintage rum collection that includes pre-embargo Cuban Bacardi, and so much more. Echo Lake is at 357 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bartender and author Toby Maloney has made somewhere north of half a million cocktails over thirty-plus years, from Milk & Honey and Pegu Club to the Violet Hour in Chicago and the Elbow Room in Vancouver, Washington. His new book with coauthor and drinks journalist Emma Janzen, The Classic Cocktail Sessions, is a deep-dive master class on 61 classic drinks: not their histories but their inner workings. In this episode, we talk about the daiquiri that changed Toby’s life and the difference between mastering a classic and making it yours. Also on the show Matt shares a few final thoughts on the Summer Fancy Food Show including a first look at rugelach from Manischewitz, how Jangin is a new Korean food brand that you should keep your eye on, and a look at Lapos NA aperitivo. Also: Juggad It from Spicewalla and cool things happening at Raazi Tea. Also see: This Is TASTE 801: We Went to the Summer Fancy Food Show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices