New Worlder

Carolina Colque and Sergio Armella are the owners of Ephedra Restaurant outside of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Let me be clear when I say that this is a very unlikely restaurant. Two young, local Atacameños with no cooking experience, have opened a tasting menu restaurant in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. It's not even in the main town, San Pedro de Atacama, but in an ayllu, a traditional community a dozen kilometers away. I urge you to just go to their Instagram page right now and look at the food they are making and the ingredients they are working with. It will blow your mind.The Atacama Desert, in the far north of Chile, is a special place. I have been there a few times over the years. The scenery is unreal, almost lunar at times, but it is the flavors there that have always excited me. In a place with little rain, most of the plants grow slowly, into large shrubs with brittle branches that develop one-of-a-kind flavors. There are also fruit trees, leguminous pods and fragrant flowers that only come out when there is a hint of moisture in the air. This is the kind of landscape Carolina and Sergio are working with.Before starting the restaurant, Sergio's cooking experience consisted of a Neapolitan pizza business they tried out during the pandemic, then he staged at Geranium, the 3 Michelin star restaurant in Copenhagen, which is extremely technical, for a few months. What makes Ephedra special is their will to create a distinct experience in the place they are from. These unique ecosystems, not to mention the cultures that support them, are what makes Latin American food special.Read More at New Worlder.

Bruna Fontevecchia and Max Wilson are the cofounders of the food magazine and platform Anchoa. The magazine, which began in Argentina, has tried to create a space for deeper stories about food in Latin America. There is little to no mention of fine dining chefs or restaurant rankings. The magazine covers anthropology and ecology with food, the things that we eat and drink and how they are made, as the connecting tissue that unites them all. Bruna is the editor and Max is the designer and as you will hear, the process in building each issue is very organic and flows with the rhythm of the region, which is in constant flux.While the magazine's coverage began in Argentina, where Bruna is from, it has gradually spread to rest of Latin America. Plus, the last two issues, #4 and the just released #5, are bilingual, in both English and Spanish. Part of that decision is to get more people to read it, though part of it is logistical, in just getting it on the shelves of bookstores and newsstands in different parts of the world. Anchoa is part of a new wave of gastronomic journalism in the region, where small print magazines are finding life as large print publications gravitate more towards digital publishing. There's also Chiú in Ecuador that started recently, as well as several other small publications.In the interview they describe the challenges in exposing people to these kinds of stories and are continually experimenting with new forms. They have a digital only part of the magazine and a podcast that releases sporadically. They also just released a 20-minute short film called El Sueño del Vino, about ancestral winemaking methods in northern Argentina, in Cafayate, and the battle to preserve them. Please check out what they are doing. Pick up issue #5, I even have a photo essay in it about fish in the Peruvian Amazon. Request your local bookstores with lively food sections to stock it. The more engaged the world can become with the depths of cuisine in the Americas, the better it will be for all of us.Read more at New Worlder

Sarah Thompson is the chef of Casa Playa in the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is a Culinary Institute of America graduate who spent many years working in New York City at restaurants like Marea and Alder, but when taking a job with Enrique Olvera and Daniela Soto-Innes at Cosme, she fell in love with Mexican cuisine. When that restaurant wanted a variation of it called Elio in Las Vegas she was tapped as the executive chef. They opened right at the same time the pandemic hit, so after months of openings and closings and instability on the Las Vegas strip it closed. However, she was able to convince the Wynn to let her take over the space and serve her form of Mexican cooking.Casa Playa serves coastal Mexican food, but it's not attached to any specific region. She has no sentimental background with a grandmother in Michoacán or anything like that, so she doesn't try to insinuate that she does and just lets the flavors work together as she sees fit. She even whips the masa for her tamales with coconut oil. It's a very particular environment, running a restaurant inside of a casino. The way people dine is different. They often come in large groups. She has a late-night taco menu for those that want to stop in for a quick bite before during or after going to a club or some kind of attraction. The lighting is beyond her control at times. These unique attributes also give her an opportunity to do things a little differently. It's a really fascinating world in Las Vegas. I know it seems like a place I wouldn't like, but I've never really gone there for all of the money and excess and nightlife that it has a reputation for. I've always appreciated just the weirdness of Las Vegas which is everywhere, though sometimes you have to peel back what's on the surface.Read more at New Worlder.

Based in Malmo, Sweden,Lotta & Per-Anders Jörgensen are the founders of the legendary food magazine Fool. Lotta is an art director and Per-Anders, or P.A. as I have come to call him, is a photographer. This is a magazine that launched in 2012 and has put out, thus far, 8 issues, very sporadically. It has been a few years since. The last issue, but as they reveal in the episode, there will be a #9.Aside of its unpredictable publishing schedule, Fool is a rare kind of magazine. In a world where everything moves so fast, where writing about food is mostly oriented towards minuscule bits of information on social media that keep coming at a rapid pace, one after the other, Fool is slow. It's thoughtful. It's reflective. It's stories are about interesting humans that work in food and their ideas, regardless of how well known they are. It's creative, with beautiful illustrations and photography, and stories that have always gone a little bit deeper than anywhere else. I had the pleasure of writing a few feature stories there and there was never any indication of what the word count should be. Just make it as long as you think it should be, they would say. That kind of collaboration is a dream for a writer or contributor of any sort. When you pick up an issue, you can read it like a book. A decade later, the stories remain relevant.Lotta and PA also create books, such as the Burnt Ends book, which we talked about with that restaurant's chef, Dave Pynt, in the previous episode. They've also worked with Andoni Luis Aduriz of Mugaritz, and quite a few other truly iconic chefs. There is also a documentary series they have created that they will launch soon, or at least soonish, or when it feels right. Anyway, their work has always been a big inspiration for me so it was a pleasure to have them on.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

Dave Pynt is the Perth, Australia born chef of the restaurant Burnt Ends in Singapore. Burnt Ends, open since 2013, which followed a pop-up in London the year before, is has been one of the restaurants driving the global conversation around modern barbecue, which, as Pynt explains, is barbecue where anything goes. It's not attached to tradition, to history or to borders. It simply means a focus on cooking over fire and the influences are many. It doesn't even necessarily mean cooking meat as you might assume as with the word barbecue as it is used in the United States.Pynt recently published a book about the restaurant, which is unlike almost any cookbook I've seen before. It's a straightforward life story with recipes. Much of the history is written and illustrated like a graphic novel. There are interviews and thoughts about technique surrounding cooking with fire. As we discuss in the interview, he didn't even want to include recipes, but he ultimately caved, but those recipes are written just as they are used in the restaurant, rather than trying to dumb them down for a home kitchen. He worked with mutual friends Pers-Anders and Lotta Jorgensen, who you might know from the Swedish food magazine Fool, in creating the book, which they self-published so they didn't have to make any compromises in the style.We discuss the path he took from working around the world, the time he spent traveling in South America, how Asador Etxebarri impacted his life and the change in set up from his previously small restaurant in Singapore's Chinatown to a much bigger spread with multiple concepts on Dempsey Hill.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

Meghan Flanigan & Mario Rosero are the owners of the restaurant Prudencia in Bogotá, Colombia. Prudencia is a timeless restaurant in La Candelaria, an old building reformatted by the architect Simón Veléz. It's only open for lunch and when you eat there it feels like you're hanging out at a friend's house. You are free to move around the place. To take a snack off their homemade grills in the back garden or to linger for far longer than you might anywhere else. There's no specific style of food you can point too, other than they mostly cook over wood and use Colombian ingredients. An idea for a plate might happen anywhere, sometimes a book, and not necessarily a cookbook.You'll hear in the interview how everything about their process seems counterintuitive about how restaurants are supposed to be run. For example, they pay their staff well above average to the point that they hardly ever leave, plus post-pandemic they raised wages and menu prices significantly while reducing the capacity. The menu is never the same, changing every single week. Prudencia is a restaurant that thinks a lot about balance. About human balance. Maintaining working relationships. The nutritional balance you feel when dining there and how your body feels afterward.Mario says, “I don't think we can go back to what did pre-pandemic. To sell the most affordable quality at the highest volume you can do.”They talk about their future plans, which includes closing the restaurant, very soon actually, and taking a long sabbatical, taking a step back and reevaluating everything, before completely reinventing themselves. Whatever it is I'm excited for it.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER

Olivier Bur is the chef and owner of the restaurant Casarré in the city of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Casarré is unlike any other restaurant I've heard of in the Caribbean. It's a fine dining restaurant, at least in the sense that it serves 7 to 10 courses and a pairing, even though it does it in a casual way. There are of course many other fine dining restaurants in the Caribbean too, but unlike everywhere, Casarré is defined by its limitations as much as it is abundance. They don't use flour, milk or eggs and instead find alternatives within the natural environment. They don't serve wine in the pairing, as it isn't produced on the island, and instead make different distillations like Mamajuana and source Clairin, an unaged sugarcane rum from Haiti, which needs to be bottled in Europe for it to be legally sold in the DR. They cook on a rustic wood fire, as it is done in the countryside, shunning most modern cooking equipment. It's a fascinating approach in a region that needs some disruption.Olivier was born and raised in Switzerland with his Swiss mother making typical Dominican foods for him every day. He still felt disconnected from Dominican food and life there, but as he became a professional cook, working in kitchens around Europe and Latin America, including Pujol and Noma Mexico, he gradually gravitated more and more to the island. After a few pop ups and research trips (which he continues to write about), he moved to Santo Domingo and began creating a network of collaborators. Not just suppliers and culinary friends, but artisan craftsmen of every sort. Casarré is a restaurant that tells the story of and immerses you in Dominican culture in a really profound way. And as you will hear in this interview, he has the right temperate and patience for it to work.Read more at New Worlder.

Bryan Ford is the author of the new book Pan Y Dulce: The Latin American Baking Book. Bryan is a baker and a very good one, and I think he's looking at Latin American breads unlike anyone else. His first book, New World Sourdough, released right in the middle of the pandemic was a giant hit and it's one of my most used baking books. It's good practical advice at making better sourdough and as I mention in the conversation, his persona makes it less intimidating. At least for me. I find bread intimidating sometimes because it takes a while to make and I found it easy to mess up, especially when I first started making it. The new book, Pan Y Dulce, goes deep into the traditional breads of Latin America and I'm excited to use it. There are recipes for things like Peruvian pan chuta, pizza like fugazettas from Argentina, cassava breads, and other types of baked goods that don't get much attention stateside. For a lot of these traditional breads that are rarely made with wild yeasts these days, he includes sourdough options. I'm especially excited to test this out as so many of these breads have so much potential made in this way.Ford was born in the Bronx to Honduran immigrants and raised in New Orleans. He was an accountant that liked baking and started to make a wholesale business out of it on the side. When he made a Honduran pan de coco, at his mother's request, his blog Artisan Bryan suddenly exploded. He is the the host of Magnolia Network's Baked in Tradition and The Artisan's Kitchen, and you've probably seen him on some other shows on Netflix and elsewhere. Aside of the new book Pan Y Dulce, he also launched a Substack newsletter last year, also under the name Artisan Bryan. Despite his growing popularity, he's not afraid to talk about things like slavery and colonialism, which I find refreshing. It seems like you are supposed to ignore history if you gain some mainstream traction. These things have had an obvious impact on breadmaking in Latin America, so of course he, as an Afro-Honduran acknowledges them, right in the first pages of the new book. He does it in a way that still celebrates the recipes, though some editors might be scared away by it. I personally appreciate the way he does it. It would be stranger to me if he didn't mention these things. So, show your support and buy the book.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

Food in the year 2125 with Giuliana Furci, Nephi Craig & Andrea Petrini.This is a very special 100th episode of this podcast. That's not something I ever expected to say. I really had no understanding of what it takes to launch a podcast when I started. I just recorded conversations with friends and colleagues and posted them online. That's still basically what it is, but I think I've become a bit better about how I go about it. I have Juli of course as a co-host to ask intelligent questions and grasp big concepts that I miss. I'm a little more comfortable interviewing people now, and I have a better understanding of who makes a good guest. Some thoughts about food, cooking and life are very different than they were four years ago, while others are the same.Even though it was just a few years ago, the world seems like a very different kind of place than it was in April of 2019. We were still in the midst of the pandemic and everyone was trying to think of what direction the world. What was going to happen to restaurants. To hunger. To food systems. To ecosystems. Everyone had taken a step back and was starting to have a new perspective on things. Very quickly, we all became caught up in the same problems. I think we are still sorting ourselves out from the pandemic, especially as it relates to food. We're still trying to envision what the future looks like. It it's really fucking messy right now.For this episode I wanted to try and think well into the future. Not just the next five, ten or twenty years, which I think are going to be rough, but 100 years away. Can we imagine what that is going to look like? What are we going to be eating? How are we going to be producing this food? How are we going to feed the extra 2 billion people on the planet when the earth's population peaks in 60 years?I asked three people I have known for a very long time to appear on this episode. All three have been past guests. They are extremely different people from different backgrounds and I have deep respect for all of them and the work that they do. I would never have imagined I could get them in a room together. There's Giuliana Furci from Chile, who founded the Fungi Foundation and literally has and is changing the legal framework around fungi in the world. There's Nephi Craig, the chef of Café Gozhóó in Whiteriver, Arizona, whose vision for ancestral food systems extends far beyond kitchen skills. And lastly, Andrea Petrini, the Italian writer and founder of Gelinaz!, who is continually questioning the idea of art as it relates to cooking. Of course there was also with Juliana Duque, my co-host, who brings her own anthropological background to the conversation. They are all some of my favorite people. They are people that continually fight for what they believe in, but they always do it with love. It's something to aspire to and it was an honor to converse with them here.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

Alejandro Osses is a food photographer from Bogotá, Colombia who recently moved to Madrid, Spain. He recently published a book of his work documenting food in Colombia over the past decade, called De Cero a Cuatromil Ochocientos, with Colombian publisher Hammbre de Cultura. He's a great photographer, that focuses on the human element behind the food as much as he does about the art of cooking, and the book takes you all over Colombia, from the high altitude wetlands and urban areas to Afro-Caribbean communities on the Pacific coast to indigenous outposts in the Amazon.Osses is also involved in a lot of other projects, alongside his wife, a great food writer named Carmen Posada. Together they have helped create Futuro Coca, a conference about coca leaves; Mucho Colombia, a distribution model for heritage Colombian ingredients from rural and indigenous producers; and Migrant Food Systems, which he is developing in Spain.Read more at New Worlder.

Shane Mitchell is the author of the book The Crop Cycle: Stories with Deep Roots, which is a history of food in the American South, often reflecting on her family's three centuries of history on Edisto Island, South Carolina connects with it. While told through stories that center around 11 different crops, the book isn't directly about food, but how we center it as a way to understand cycles of life. All of the stories in the book, except for one, were originally published in The Bitter Southerner, a brilliant magazine and website about the South. It has some of the most beautiful writing anywhere in it and despite having little to do with the south I read it regularly.Shane lives in upstate New York and is the Editor at Large for Saveur, which is now back in print and absolutely deserves your support. She also writes for The New York Times and is the author Far Afield: Rare Food Encounters from Around the World, a book about her travels around the world while profiling the stewards of the world's traditional foodways and it also features beautiful photos and recipes. She is a many times James Beard award winner and one of my favorite writers anywhere, so I was really excited to have this extended conversation with her.Read more at New Worlder.

Rather than a straight forward interview, this episode is a report from on the ground in Barranquilla, Colombia during the city's annual gastronomy festival, Sabor Barranquilla. The 17th edition of the festival occurred at the end of August and we were there to capture the sounds of the city and speak with local cooks, event organizers and people in the street, while exploring the region's diverse cuisine, from Lebanese restaurants to fried street snacks and corozó wine.Read more at New Worlder.

Gilberto Briceño is the owner of RLT Cuisine, or Road Less Traveled Cuisine, in Playa Potrero, a small beach town in Guancaste, Costa Rica. RLT Cuisine is not a restaurant, but it's also not not a restaurant. There is a restaurant element to it. Inside his food lab in a commercial building, nowhere near the beach, he has 4 seats inside of the main kitchen. Whenever someone wants to come in, he creates a 9-course meal out of local ingredients for them. But that is just a small fraction of what RLT Cuisine is. It's outdoor pop-up dinners in wild settings, a private chef service, product development, cooking classes and storytelling.Gilberto spent years staging at some of the best restaurants in the world, learning both the wrong way and the right ways to run a kitchen. He saw the toll that high level kitchens could take on a cook, but that it didn't have to be that way. Not only is his concept for RLT Cuisine adaptable, going with the flow and making whatever idea work within its boundaries and the limits of the business, but it is kind. There are staff meals provided by a local cook and the idea that everyone working there has equal value.Social media is also an important part of what Gilberto does. His Tiktok videos are great and should be a reference for any small culinary business. They are less of an advertisement about the business and more of just a way for people to stumble onto the way he thinks, which in turn helps his business. It's also a way to deepen knowledge of cuisine in the area. This is a part of Costa Rica that's near a Blue Zone, one of just a handful of places on earth where people live the longest because of the local diet, but the widespread development along the coast over the last 10 years is wiping it away even as they market the very concept of blue zones. I have been spending a lot of time in Costa Rica over the past decade and it's a really special place with a complicated history that I can't really equate to anywhere else. It has the greatest network of accessible small farms in the region, while also having industrial farms that have some of the world's highest rates of pesticide use. There are incredible local restaurants called sodas, while there are also more terrible, overpriced, ill-conceived tourist restaurants that don't use local ingredients than anywhere I can think of. Anyway, Gilberto and his pura vida vibes is someone that can help shift the momentum.Read more at New Worlder.

María Álvarez is the co-founder, along with Isaac Martínez, of the publisher Novo, the very first publishing house dedicated to gastronomy in Mexico. Maria and Isaac started Novo in 2023 because they saw a lack in the types of books being published about Mexican cuisine, both in Mexico and abroad. The wanted to be a publisher that is more collaborative with other disciplines, more like a milpa. Rather than just a monoculture of corn, they wanted a multicropped garden of designers, photographers and other professionals to help support the vision of the author. In this interview she explains how she moved from the world of art publishing into culinary publishing and is helping shape a community around these niche books about food in Mexico, as well as through their podcast series, Radio Milpa.Novo now has published two books. The first is Cocina de Oaxaca, by Alejandro Ruiz, published last year. Ruiz is the chef of Casa Oaxaca, who is one of the godfathers of modern Oaxacan cooking and has helped teach in a generation of cooks at his restaurant Casa Oaxaca. They also just released Estado de Hongos, a book about mushrooms in central Mexico by the Mexican Japanese forager by Nanae Watabe. She supplies mushrooms to lots of the best restaurants in the DF and is at the intersection of all things mushrooms in Mexico and the book reflects that. This October, they will be publishing La República Democrática del Cerdo, by Pedro Reyes, who you might know from the Taco Chronicles on Netflix. You can order them online or find them in bookstores in Mexico, as well as buy some of the books on Amazon in the U.S. or at incredible culinary bookstores like Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York and Now Serving in Los Angeles.This world of publishing culinary books in Latin America is really beginning to open up and I couldn't be happier. I think a healthy publishing environment is one where a lot of different voices and aesthetics are being developed and not just that of a few large international publishers. In the interview we discuss how important the very language being used in a culinary book can be. Read more at New Worlder.

A lot of chefs say they want to preserve landscapes, but Rodrigo Pacheco of Bocavaldivia in Puerto Cayo on the coast of Ecuador at is actually doing it. He is literally acquiring land and re-wilding it, in the hopes of turning it into the world's largest biodiverse edible forest.I first met the guy about 10 years ago at a conference in Quito. At the time, all the contemporary Ecuadorian chefs were trying to get international attention and get on lists and get famous. Then there was Rodrigo, who could care less about those things. It was still early on this project on a remote beach, but he was already talking about connecting with nature and utilizing biodiversity. He seemed totally out of place. It was still early in the life of Bocavaldivia. The 100 hectares of land he bought, a former pepper farm, was heavily degraded. Much of the surrounding tropical dry forest was cut down. There was little wildlife there. But in a decade, he has turned it into a thriving landscape, which, through the accrual of new land, now reaches up to the cloud forest. I was there earlier in the year and I saw it with my own eyes. He now uses more than 150 different edible plants from this landscape throughout the year on his menu.While the heart of Bocavaldivia is a restaurant, where he and his team cook from a rustic wood fired kitchen adapted from native ones, and serve tasting menus alongside nice wines, to call it just a restaurant would be lacking. The experience there involves a journey. Many hours before eating you start to experience the landscape. You traverse them by fishing in the sea and tasting termites off a stick and hiking through the trees. You connect with it before you sit down and eat. And when you do sit down, there isn't some long, drawn out explanation of what you are eating, because you've lived it.Lots of other projects that spin out from Bocavaldivia. He has a restaurant in Quito called Foresta. He was on the Netflix cooking show The Final Table. He has created a mini-documentary series with indigenous leaders. He is a Goodwill Ambassador in Ecuador at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He started a foundation. He says because he lives in the middle of nowhere that he has a lot of extra time on his hands that most other chefs don't. It's funny how the less busy you are sometimes the more you can get done. I'm still trying to figure out how that works.

Lisa Abend is a Copenhagen, Denmark based writer that covers food, travel and all sorts of other topics for publications like Time Magazine, The New York Times and Fool, among others. She is the head of communications for the Copenhagen based non-profit Mad and the author of the 2011 book The Sorcerer's Apprentices: A Season in the Kitchen at Ferran Adrià's elBulli, where she spent a season at the restaurant documenting its team of stagieres and what else goes on behind the kitchen walls. She is one of the most respected voices in the world of gastronomy and it was a real pleasure to be able to speak with her.   Recently, Lisa launched the Substack newsletter The Unplugged Traveler where she posts about going to destinations in Europe that she has never been before and, totally without any research prior to the trip, experiences them completely offline. That means no looking at her phone or the internet for recommendations or planning. For the most recent post her brother said she should go to Zadar, so she booked a flight there and went without even knowing what country it was in. It's unlike any travel writing being done anywhere else and there isn't a better moment for it. Travel, has lost much of its meaning since the advent of the smart phone. Everything is booked in advance. We seem to know everything about a destination before we get there and go armed with lists of recommendations on where to eat and drink and what to do and see. There is no room for surprise or discomfort of any sort. The same stories are being written repeatedly, which is leading to overwhelming swells of tourists in certain cities. We are seeing a backlash to that. Aside of limiting tourists from a destination, what can you do? One thing is to get back to the essence of travel and go to places where you can experience something new, some place where you can have your own experience. I didn't ask her this but I hope she turns this project into a book one day.Lisa lived in Spain when El Bulli was still around, then moved to Copenhagen and got to see Noma's rise. For a little while, she had another newsletter with some other Copenhagen based writers called Bord, which told in depth stories about the restaurant industry in that city, such as kitchen abuses and stagiares. Anyway, she has watched as those two restaurants, one right after the other, propelled by the oversized influence of The World's 50 Best Restaurants list, have changed the conversation around fine dining and cuisine as a whole. We discuss if that will happen again. What will the next big thing be? Maybe it isn't a fine dining restaurant. Maybe it's not even a restaurant.Read more and find a transcript at New Worlder.

Gabriela Perdomo is the owner of the tortillería and restaurant El Comalote in Antigua, Guatemala. More than just a place to buy tortillas and eat delicious things with corn masa, the almost entirely female run El Comalote is a project that is helping resurrect the links between criollo corn and consumers in urban parts of Guatemala. Like in Mexico, as well as other neighboring countries, the majority of tortillas consumed are from industrial corn. Gaby explains how the technique of making tortillas by hand remains dominant in the country, the choice of corn has changed drastically. There has been a shift away from the more difficult to grow native varieties towards the varieties that all look the same, grow extremely fast and produce massive quantities. However, these are less nutritious and often need pesticides and other chemicals to survive.Since El Comalote opened in 2021, they have helped open the eyes of urban consumers and chefs in the country to the flavor of heirloom corn. I've been there a couple of times now and tasting these thick, brightly colored tortillas – red, green, orange, blue, black – shows how perfect of a food a great tortilla can be. You really don't need much else. They also make other masa derived foods like tamales, cambrayes, chicha, chuchitos. and more. What's important from this interview is to understand how Gaby has been able to do this. More than just getting the very best corn and paying them the highest price, she has listened to the indigenous farmers and their communities that she works with to try to understand their needs and concerns.Read more at New Worlder.

Richard McColl is a British Canadian journalist, podcaster and hotel owner based in Bogotá and Mompós, Colombia. I've known Richard for at least a decade. I first knew of him from his work as a fellow foreign correspondent covering subjects all around Latin America, writing for international publications. In 2013, we met in person when I was writing for a story about Mompós for The New York Times. It's one of my favorite stories I ever written for The Times because Mompós is such a special place. It's this stunning 500-year-old colonial city on an island in the Magdalena River that was once a major port but was then mostly forgotten as that part of the river stilted up and war cut it off from society. It's a strange, kind of mystical place with so much history and so many stories and quirky characters. It's a place that was a big inspiration for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize winning author and you can feel the imagery from his books everywhere there. Richard's wife has family there and he was enchanted by it and ended up buying two of these colonial houses, which he turned into small hotels, La Casa Amarilla and San Rafael. We talk a lot about Mompós and its ghosts and how it's much easier to reach than when I went there and had to take a 10-hour ride in a truck from Cartagena.While I was in Mompós he asked me if I wanted to be on a podcast he just launched, called Colombia Calling, where he interviews all kinds of subjects about Colombia, in English. This was in 2013, and it was probably one of the original podcasts anywhere in Latin America, and honestly, I hadn't even listened to a podcast at that time. It's still going and has now recorded more than 500 episodes. Juli was on a recent episode and they talk a lot about Colombian food and it's a great listen.Richard also runs the Latin News Podcast and he recently started a small publishing company. They are books in English, about Colombia, and includes titles such as Better than Cocaine: Learning to grow coffee, and live, in Colombia, by the writer Barry Max Wills, and Richard has two books forthcoming, a general guide to politics, history and culture called Colombia at a Crossroads, and The Mompós Project, about his life in that incredible place and the stories he has gathered and witnessed. Anyway, it was great to catch up with Richard after all these years.

Pablo Díaz is the chef and owner of the restaurants Mercado 24 and Dora La Tostadora in Guatemala City, Guatemala. His restaurants have never been about tasting menus or getting rankings but serving good food using the best ingredients at fairly reasonable prices. He has been one of the driving forces in Guatemala's modern culinary movement, helping small farmers and artisan fishermen connect with restaurants in the city in a fair way, while also changing the perception of diners of the quality of local ingredients.I first met Pablo in 2018 in Guate. It was my first time back in the country in years and it was just a quick stopover for a few days and it opened my eyes to how much was going on there at every level, from street food and markets to fine dining restaurants. I went with Diego Telles of the wonderful fine dining restaurant Flor de Lis on an intense whirlwind tour around the city and there was one very unlikely restaurant that stood out called Dora La Tostadora. It was a tostada shop, set in an old shoe store. I ended up writing about it for The New York Times and it was maybe one of my favorite restaurant stories I ever wrote there.There were just a couple of sidewalk seats and a sort of thrown together interior. “Inside the former shoe store are just a few wooden tables and a two-stool counter that's lined with a dozen or so bottles of different hot sauces,” I wrote. “The décor has a haphazard, thrown-together feel: Christmas lights, a poster of the ruins of Tikal on the wall, a cartoon cutout of Dora the Explorer, the tiny restaurant's namesake.”The restaurant began as a pop-up months before while his market driven restaurant Mercado 24 was in the process of moving locations and his staff still needed a job. I absolutely love tostadas, maybe even more than tacos, and these were some of the best I ever had. They had the absolutely right combination and proportions of proteins like fish and beef tongue with different herbs, oils and spices on a crispy tortilla. They moved to a larger location, and more recently into an even larger location, but it began with such a simple idea that makes so much sense, as does Mercado 24. Pablo's restaurants are creative and cool, but they aren't flashy. There are no tasting menus and he's not doing what he does for international appeal. He has been doing it for his community and after 10 years you can see the impact it has had.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

Matthias Ingelmann is the bar manager of Kol Mezcaleria and Kol Restaurant in London England. Matthias is German born and has worked in a lot of great bars around Europe, but once he started drinking mezcal he went down the rabbit hole with agave spirits, as many of us do. He has now built one of the UK's largest mezcal collections at Kol Mezcaleria and is continually expanding that collection as Kol expands. They just announced another restaurant with a cocktail heavy menu, called Fonda, which will open later in the year.Like at Kol the restaurant, there is a strict policy of only importing a few basic ingredients like corn, chocolate and dried chiles. So there are no limes to use in cocktails. No grapefruit juice for palomas. He talks about how he started importing verjus, unfermented grape juice, as one of the ingredients to provide the acidity in some drinks. And how he uses seasonal herbs like pineapple weed to bring tropical flavors into the bar. We also talk about Kol's partnership with the Sin Gusano project in Mexico, which is allowing them to work directly with several small producers for their own line of 6 different agave spirits from different parts of Mexico, to be used in the bar and sold at the bar nut not commercially.There is a lot going on with mezcal as it becomes more mainstream that you, the consumer, should be aware about. Commercial brands are coming in and locking small distillers into contracts, they are monocropping espadin all over Oaxaca and they are putting pressure to try to produce more and more mezcal in unsustainable ways. It's not at tequila levels yet. There are no Kardashians selling mezcal. At the rate mezcal is increasing in popularity we are not that far off. That's why it's extremely important if you are a bartender to buy mezcal from sources that champion small producers and educate your clientele.Read more at New Worlder.

Nando Chang was born in Chiclayo, Peru and is the chef of Itamae AO, a Nikkei restaurant in Miami, Florida. It is the reincarnation of Itamae, the beloved Nikkei restaurant that began as a family food hall stall and later restaurant in Miami's Design District. Nando's sister, Valerie Chang, who I interviewed on this podcast more than a year ago, opened Maty's, a Peruvian restaurant in Midtown Miami in 2023, and it has gone on to be nominated for pretty much every major media award for U.S. restaurants since then. The plan from the beginning, however, was to install a more intimate version of Itamae in an adjacent space.The new Itamae, Itamae AO, is tasting menu only. Nando talks about why he won't call it an omakase, his thoughts about fish butchery, and how he got into fish aging, but also how he understands its limitations. We also discuss Nando's rap career, which included an album called Ceviche, with a track titled Sushi Chef, and how it's still very much a part of his life. He talks about how he was influenced by other chefs cooking Nikkei food, such as Llama Inn and Llama San's Erik Ramirez in New York, and getting to know Maido's Mitsuharu Tsumura in Lima and how it helped him confirm many of his views about Nikkei food and where it is going.I have probably said this before but there's often this idea of Nikkei food when it gets exported abroad that it is just ceviche and sushi on a menu together. That's a very limited view of this style of cooking, which, to me, is much more about freedom than limitations. The Chang family, who are Chinese-Peruvian by the way, have understood this very well since they started opening restaurants in Miami. Nando talks a lot about not just doing what everyone else is doing, but doing things that make sense to him. I think it's a good example to follow for other Peruvian chefs, or any chef trying to find their voice in the kitchen.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

Today we are speaking with Mariana Poo, the commercial director of Traspatio Maya and its counterpart Taller Maya, and Luciely Cahum Mejía, a beekeeper, vegetable producer and promoter from the Mayan community of Granada, Maxcanú, who also works with Traspatio Maya.Traspatio Maya, which is part of the larger Haciendas del Mundo Maya Foundation, is an organization based in Mexico's Yucatán that works with 32 rural indigenous communities and is dedicated to supporting the production of sustainable culinary products harvested in artisanal ways under fair conditions while rescuing ancestral Mayan techniques and improving global production practices. It's an incredible group that has really changed the gastronomic conversation in the Yucatán and you can see how these women are now driving the conversation around food in the region.I first heard of Traspatio Maya while I was in Merida last year. There was a panel that Mariana was a part of during the regional food festival Sabores de Yucatan, which was partnering with the Best Chef Awards. Everyone else on the panel was a chef, fairly famous ones, that were talking about their stories of working with rural and indigenous producers. At one point, Ferran Adrià, the famous chef of El Bulli and one of the most influential culinary figures in the world without question, who happened to be in the audience, asked to speak and was given the microphone. For the next 20 minutes he rambled on about technology and the future of the global food supply, mostly dismissing the work everyone on the stage was doing. The chefs on the stage just nodded, not wanting to debate this iconic figure, but Mariana pushed back. I was moved by it. In my mind it was like the statue of the Fearless Girl standing in front of the statue of the Charging Bull on Wall Street (note: I'm just referring to this instance. I've met Ferran Adrià prior to this and he seems like a decent guy). She stood up for herself and the women she works with, and she did it with love and respect. It was such a perfect example how to move a conversation forward. It's something I need to remind myself sometimes. You'll hear Mariana's response to what she was thinking during this, and also why what she was saying was important.Mariana also tells us about how important working with the restaurant community has been. She explains how Noma Mexico, Noma's 2017 pop-up in Tulum, allowed them to broaden their focus and how sending surplus produce to restaurants has been an important source of revenue.This is the first bilingual podcast we have had. Traspatio Maya always tries to include the women they work with in everything they do. I saw Luciely on stage with Jordi Roca at the Best Chef Awards, which you will hear about. In the interview you will hear some Spanish, though it is followed by an English translation so please be patient.Read more at New Worlder.

Juan Luis Martínez is the chef of the restaurant Mérito in Lima, Peru. Juan Luis was born in Venezuela but has been living abroad and working in restaurants in Spain and Peru for many years. He opened Mérito in 2018 after working at Central for several years. It's this narrow, two-level space in the Barranco neighborhood, with lots of minimalist wood and adobe walls. You see the kitchen right upon entering and there are a few seats there, plus more upstairs. The food is colorful, creative and really, really delicious. Is it Venezuelan? Is it Peruvian? It's kind of both but also neither at the same time. It's a restaurant cannot easily be boxed in, and I think that's the beauty of it. More recently he opened DeMo, a café and bakery, which recently moved into a larger location a few blocks from Mérito, which has an attached pizzeria called Indio. And late last year he opened another restaurant, called Clon, which is an even more relaxed version of Mérito.  I was recently a voter in Food & Wine's Global Tastemakers awards and when the results were in I was a bit surprised that of all of the restaurants in the world, Mérito in Lima was the one more of these voters ate better at in the last year than any other. For these awards, Mérito was named the best restaurant in the world. I was surprised, to be honest. Not because they didn't deserve it, but because the restaurant is so unpretentious. I think some people had the impression I had something to do with Mérito getting that ranking because I wrote an accompanying story about it for Food & Wine, but other than being a voter I really didn't. I don't have that kind of pull. Thanks for thinking I do though. Juan Luis, and his wife Michelle, who is a designer and whose work has left its own stamp on the restaurants as well, have managed to get a lot of attention, both locally and internationally, for these restaurants. 50 Best. Best Chef Awards. Whatever it is they are probably on it. Yet, they have done it by almost doing the total opposite of what most other restaurants that have received similar amounts of attention have done. They aren't loud or flashy. The investments in the restaurants have never been lavish or in high profile locations. They aren't on social media non-stop or flying around to conferences every week. They have just focused on creating good, creative food, in comfortable spaces at reasonable prices with great service. And everyone loves them. I send people there all the time and I cannot say I've ever heard someone disliking their experience at Mérito. They just happened to have created a really great restaurant. It's really that straightforward.  So, what is Mérito? Is it a prototype of Venezuelan food fusing with Peruvian food? There are a lot of overlap of ingredients in the two countries, at least overlap in kinds of ingredients if not the exact ingredients, especially in the Amazon and parts of the Andes. Plus, Lima has a history of absorbing whatever culture comes into town. There are more than a million Venezuelans that have moved to the city over the past decade, a phenomenon that's happening throughout the region because of the instability in Venezuela. There's no doubt that Venezuelan diaspora is having a major impact on food in the region, and that's a story I have been watching closely for years. I'm not entirely sure where Mérito fits into all of that. I think it's just one kitchen's evolving understanding of flavor, memory, place and art. It's not forced or trying to define itself. It just is. And it's wonderful.Find out more at New Worlder.

Pietra Possamai is the winemaker at Bodega Murga in the Pisco Valley of Peru. Born in Brazil, she has led the winemaking operations at Bodega Murga, which also distills pisco, since the beginning, in 2019. Her 32 different labels of natural wines using only six of the eight grapes that are used in pisco production. These criolla varieties are mostly unexplored in winemaking, so the possible combinations of what they can be coerced from them is full of potential. Pietra experiments with skin contact, early harvests, co-fermentations, and aging in amphora. She makes Pét-nat, blends and single varietal wines using these grapes. The results have been pretty incredible. She is making wines that could only be made in Peru. They are appearing at all of the best restaurants in Lima and a few of her wines, like the orange Sophia L'Orange, are appearing on some wine lists in the U.S., Europe and Dubai. She is helping change the wine culture in Lima, which had been quite stale in my opinion.I wrote a story a year ago about Peru's wine awakening. It's quite exciting for me to watch. Even though Peru has the deepest history of viticulture in the Americas, the wine has only become something to write about in the last five years or so. Pepe Moquillaza kind of kicked off the movement, making natural wines from Quebranta and Albilla grapes, and now all sorts of wines are coming out of the woodwork, and most are utilizing criolla grapes. I went to visit Murga's vineyards last year and they are quite special. In the interview we talk a little about the Joyas de Murga vineyard, it's short trek from the bodega, but it's completely encircled by towering sand dunes. It got its nickname from the hoyas of the Canary Islands, vines circled by stone walls. If you have a chance, check Pietra's wines from Bodega Murga, and just Peruvian wine in general. It's entered into a new era and it can finally co-exist alongside Peruvian food, which, let's face it, is a high bar.Read more at New Worlder.

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 began to think about how he could be a part of it in a way that made sense to him, he started to think about Nordic techniques. The older ones. He started to research 18th century cookbooks to understand the way Swedes used to eat. It was closer to the way he grew up in the northern part of Sweden, where foraging was a way of life and his parents would buy meat from Sami herders. I was at Ekstedt more than a decade ago and what I assumed would be something of a gimmick – a modern restaurant with just a wood stove, fire pit and wood fired oven that was without gas or electricity in the kitchen – was anything but. The food was smart and honest, the pure expression of the ingredients. It was one of the highlights of a trip that included meals at Relae and Fäviken.Ekstedt has been open for 13 years now, so any novelty of this restaurant has worn off. Many others have followed in its path. Niklas has even opened another version of the restaurant in London too.I think there is something important in thinking about the way we used to eat, wherever we are in the world. The last couple of centuries have truly disconnected us from where our food comes from and how we eat it, and we are paying the price. Our food is less nutritious, it often lacks flavor and its pumped full of all kinds of chemicals that are tearing our bodies and environments apart. We all need to peel back those layers and see what was going on a couple of centuries ago. I don't mean to limit that to restaurant settings, but in our homes as well.  We also talk a bit about how the restaurant industry is changing. Pre-pandemic, chefs used to take themselves very seriously. Kitchens were more like war zones than places of work. Not to say all is fine, but I think there is a sense that things are moving in a more positive direction.Read more at New Worlder.

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 internship at the restaurant. When her internship was up and she was about to return to Cochabamba, she was offered a job at the restaurant and she has been there ever since.In our discussion, we talk a lot about wine. Bolivia has a burgeoning wine scene. You may have heard our interview with Jardin Oculto's Nayan Gowda, but Bolivia has some incredible wines, especially the ones coming from old vines and criolla varieties. The sommeliers of Gustu have been one of my primary means of being introduced to new Bolivian wines since the restaurant opened. First it was Jonas Andersen, who now actually runs a wine shop called Folkways beside the train station in Croton Falls north of New York City and its wonderful. I went there the other day actually and it's by far my favorite area wine shop, plus they do nationwide deliveries if you need a a good natural wine purveyor. Then there was Bertil Tøttenborg, who now lives in Brazil. And now Andrea is there and it's a really exciting moment, so there was lots to talk about her.We also talk about this pull this particular restaurant has on people. I've been going there since Gustu has opened and I have felt it every time I have been there. It has a way of taking someone in and bringing out the best in them. If you ask anyone that has ever worked there will probably tell you that. We spoke with chef Marsia Taha about it in an earlier interview. The restaurant has such a purity in what they are trying to do, in a way that is hopeful and real. And what they do is far more than just a restaurant, but have inspired culinary and human development in Bolivia in everything the long arms of gastronomy touches, and that's a lot of places.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

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 more coffee to be roasted and consumed inside the country. He has become leading coffee educator in Colombia and Catación Pública offers a wide variety of workshops and certifications that are sought out by those in the coffee industry throughout the region.In the interview, we discuss how, even as the rest of the world had been exposed for half a century to the general quality and story of Colombian coffee through the emblematic and imaginary future of Juan Valdez, it has only been until recently that you have been able to actually drink good coffee in Colombia. When I first went to the country, in 2005, most of what you find was tinto, these little cups of coffee loaded with sugar to offset the low quality. All the good stuff was exported. Tinto is still around, but there has been a gradual transition towards a more dynamic coffee culture in the country. Today you see specialty coffeeshops like Catación Pública all over Colombia. There are world class baristas and roasters, and the growers can actually see how their coffee is being consumed, which gives them additional insight into how they should grow it. We also talk about why he thinks fermentation processes like carbonic maceration will remain niche, while cold brew still has enormous growth potential.Find out more at New Worlder.

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 millennials are putting it on fried chicken and tater tots. But if you asked me what distinguishes good caviar from great caviar, I couldn't tell you.The world of caviar has changed dramatically since 2008 when a global ban on caviar from wild sturgeon was enacted by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species after sturgeon were being severely overfished. Now, nearly all of the world's caviar comes from farmed sturgeon. There are 26 different types of sturgeon and each kind produces unique tasting roe, but the conditions in which each are being raised can vary drastically. The most coveted caviar comes from the Beluga, followed by the Ossetra, sturgeons, which are originally from the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Farmed caviar, however, is coming from anywhere now. There are hundreds of farms all over the world. There's lots of caviar being farm raised in the United States. It's being raised in Uruguay. A ton of it is being raised in China. Much of it is not Ossetra and Beluga, but from other species. There is also fish roe from other kinds of fish, such lumpfish, flying fish or even salmon, that are called caviar, though technically they do not fit the definition.I tried Cyrus' caviar in Italy and it is indeed the great stuff. That much I know. He explains why Caspian Monarque stands out, in his words. They are a sustainably minded sturgeon farm in the Caspian Sea, the origin of the finest grades of caviar. As they are being farmed within the Caspian Sea, the natural environment they are from, eating the same food they eat in the wild, they can get the highest quality caviar. However, I cannot even get his caviar, Iranian caviar, in the United States because of a ban on Iranian products in the U.S. He explains why that is and how Iranian caviar industry has a history of legal issues despite being historically sustainable and well managed. That's why he started the business. He was a lawyer and he liked the challenge.The caviar industry is one ripe with fraud. There are scandalous producers and misleading labels, though there are ways to know if you are getting caviar from a good source. On Caspian Monarque's website they actually have a way to check the origin of a tin of caviar by the CITES number on the label, and it's not just for their caviar, but any legally traded variety. For the most part, it's up to the consumer to know the difference and understand what they are buying. We talk about how blockchain might be used in the future to help make caviar even more transparent. Who knew there was so much to know about caviar?Read more at New Worlder on Substack.

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 potatoes. It was wild and debaucherous, to say the least. I wrote about the experience for the website Roads & Kingdoms, and the story quickly went viral. After that I had the opportunity on many occasions to get to know Andy. I was involved in various Gelinaz! performances during the Gelinaz! Shuffle, where I helped chefs like Ana Roš and Niko Romito behind the scenes when they had to cook meals at Boragó in Chile and Central in Peru, respectively. I was also a part of several other Gelinaz! events in New York and elsewhere in one form or another. I've had the opportunity to travel and dine with Andy on many occasions. A couple of years ago I was on a television show with the chef Victoria Blamey that Andy was hosting about Emilia Romagna for Discovery Plus in Italy, where I got to experience his driving skills and lived to tell about it.Andy is one of my all-time favorite people and I think he wildly misunderstood sometimes. What he stands for has always been, at least in my eyes, is pushing gastronomy to break free of its shackles. To take chefs out of their comfort zone and do something creative. To strive for art and love and soul. It doesn't always work out that way, as you will hear him explain, but I'm grateful there is someone out there like him that keeps pushing, because its needed more now than ever. For the past year he has been working to help restaurants collaborate with different musicians, to rethink the relationship between food and music. Different events will be occurring throughout the year, so follow Gelinaz! on Instagram to find out more.Read more at New Worlder.

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 Horse Desert: Norteño Cuisine of South Texas and also wrote a series about her life on the border for New Worlder in 2017. Today she has a blog called Kitchen Wrangler where she writes recipes inspired by her surrounding landscape, as well as a YouTube channel.Melissa's family has been living in the region since the 1700s, long before Texas was a part of the United States. She sees the food of Texas and the U.S,. rather than divided by a political border, but united by ancient trade routes and modern culture. During the interview we talk about the influence of mesquite in the region's food, how watering holes were the foundation for human habitation there, what real Tex-Mex cooking is and the migrant crisis and how the people in the borderlands view it, rather than through vapid political gestures by politicians.Read more at New Worlder.

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 development projects that relate to Colombian and Latin American gastronomy.Juliana is someone that understands the magnitude and vastness of cuisine in Latin America, but also that gastronomy in the region is still very much developing. When I say developing I don't mean commercially or that there are more fine dining restaurants yet to come, I mean the infrastructure to connect rural producers with consumers, to maintain foodways, preserve agricultural and cultural diversity and give people access to nutritious food that doesn't destroy landscapes and give them terrible diseases.When I started this podcast a couple of years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing. I still don't to some extent. It was still the middle of the pandemic and I just started to have conversations with people and record them. I have learned a lot from the people I have had on. A lot of interesting things have been said that I think you won't hear anywhere else. Maybe you are thinking this podcast is already perfect. That I'm perfect. That's obviously not true and I'm actually quite bad in general at conversation, as you may have noticed. I think I'm a very good listener and creating an atmosphere that lets the guest's guard down and allows them to open up, however, I often struggle with asking the right questions. Juli and I have very different backgrounds. Her work is generally more analytical, while mine is more about storytelling, so for this podcast I think we complement each other well. It's a new year, so this is as good a time as any to take this show in a new direction. I hope you enjoy what is yet to come.Read more at New Worlder.

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 New Worlder's Best New Restaurants when it opened. When he told me he was moving to Columbus I was completely surprised, but I immediately thought that it was one of the smartest decisions any chef I've ever met has made. I can tell just from my interactions with him over the past year that he is happier. He went to cook in a city that appreciates what he can do and not to win awards and recognition, though he is getting it anyway. It was a decision to move his family there so they could live a happier life. So many young chefs tell me they want to open in New York or somewhere because it is their dream. Really, that's your dream as a cook? Shouldn't it be to make good food that people enjoy and provides you a comfortable life? That can be New York or San Francisco or London or Tokyo, but it doesn't have to be. You can cook from anywhere. There are cities like Columbus everywhere. Why not open in Trujillo, Peru instead of Lima? Or Manaus instead of Sao Paulo? Every cook I know that's moved outside the centralized media market, outside of the industry bubble and found their place has been a thousand times happier and they are cooking better food for it. Fyr, Sebastian's restaurant, has been getting great reviews in local media and he has been bringing a lot of prominent Latin American chefs to Ohio to cook at the restaurant, such as Costa Rica's Pablo Bonilla and Panama's Mario Castrellón. It's kind of weird. These are guys I know from Latin America an have written about a lot that are suddenly in Columbus. It's kind of two worlds colliding for me.I grew up here and went to college here. It's basically all I knew until I was in my 20s. I've talked a lot on this podcast about growing up completely disconnected from where the food I ate was coming from. On the episode with Farmer Lee Jones, who runs Chef's Garden in northern Ohio, I talk about how there weren't any farms around. There were just corn and soy fields you drove past on the highway. And all of the restaurants were chains and concepts. I started writing about food in Ohio when I was 19, I think, and it wasn't really until then that I started questioning things. A culinary movement was just beginning there then, with Jeni's, now a well-known ice cream purveyor, opening in the North Market. There were a handful of fine dining restaurants that were being vocal about supporting local farms, and after I left it just kept kind of evolving. There are really great restaurants there now, both at the high and low end. My old neighborhood is full of Nepalese, Mexican and Salvadoran restaurants, and there has been a lot influence from North Africa and Southeast Asia elsewhere in the city. There are still too many concept restaurants for my taste, but there are more restaurants that are created organically and have creative food with good ingredients and nice drinks to balance it out. It's a very different place from where I grew up and it's because of people like Sebastian moving there and bringing new ideas.Read more at New Worlder.

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 Culinary Center. The film is about three students that trained at Fundación Pachacútec, a culinary school in the desert hills of Ventanilla outside of Lima, Peru and where their lives have led since enrolling. The school was built with the help of chef Gastón Acurio and is said to get 350 applications every six months, though can only admit 25 people per semester. Over the last 20 years it has had more than 400 graduates and many of those graduates have gone on to accomplish incredible things. It's a great culinary film that hopefully everyone will get to watch very soon. Find out more about Mariano's work at his website.Read more at New Worlder.

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 Icelandic cookbook on the table of a bakery in Milan. Think about that. Then, I was in Iceland this past July and I went to Slippurinn, the restaurant from the book, and Gio was there and I got to know him better. He has done a lot of work with food in the Nordic region, so it wasn't that odd that he was there, but, another strange coincidence. Anyway, Gio has worked with Slow Food within the Ark of Taste project for years. It's an online catalogue of endangered food around the world, and he was also co-coordinator of the Nordic Countries communities of Slow Food. He has come up with all sorts of creative ideas about safeguarding cuisines and disappearing ingredients and foods that are disappearing. Tone is an offshoot of that. He regularly uses endangered ingredients and inside the bakery he has this traditional Georgian bread oven, called Tone. We discuss everything he has going on at the bread lab, as well as everything else he has going on, like the Milano Food Project, Phantom Bread and Food Emotions.Read more at New Worlder.

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 making cocktails, so he already had my interest there. But applying that knowledge to where he lives in New Jersey with local flora is really something, I think, is quite revolutionary. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this is where the world of cocktails is heading. Some cocktail bars will be run more like restaurants rather than nightclubs and rather than just relying on branded spirits, the bartenders will make their own, not to mention all of the other pieces that go into making a cocktail, using the flavors they are growing all around wherever they are. It will lead to cocktail bars with a sense of place.Danny took over the drinks program at a tavern in the suburbs of New Jersey at The Farm and Fisherman Tavern in Cherry Hill, not far from Philadelphia, and did this very thing. His work there has received a lot of attention and that's why he wrote Slow Drinks, which is as much of a foundational book about building your bar as it is a collection of recipes. He's no longer with the restaurant and building a bigger concept around the idea of Slow Drinks, so I expect to see him giving lectures and leading workshops, among other things. Follow @SlowDrinks on Instagram to stay up to date with everything he is doing.When I say it's building a foundation for your bar, it's not just syrups. It's seasonal amaros. It's spruce beer. It's making amaretto from peach pits or root beer from sassafras. It's a transformational cocktail book and I hope a lot of people read it. Danny is by no means the only person doing these things, but creating this book is something that allows a lot of different people to do them. People like me, for instance. You don't have to live in the northeastern United States for the recipes to make sense either. They are flexible enough that you can swap in ingredients from wherever you are.

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 2019 on the island of Heimaey, the only inhabited island there, there while writing the book about the restaurant Slippurinn with the chef there, Gísli Matthías Auðunsson, aka Gísli Matt. I've a relationship with Iceland that extends far prior to this book, however, and I'll explain that a little more later on. It was quite fun to put this together so, I hope you enjoy it. I might do some more in the field recording in the future.

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 disconnected to the rest of the meal. You have all these savory courses and at the end this, rich sugary finish. And a lot of the time it is too much. It doesn't mean it isn't delicious, but it often leaves your body feeling awful. This isn't necessarily the fault of the pastry chef, it's just a lack of cohesiveness of the menu and trying to understand what a diner needs as opposed to what the restaurant wants to show them or what historically contemporary pastry is supposed to be. René uses the pastry kitchen to showcase natural flavors, not just techniques, and uses the best ingredients possible. So that means he cuts out all the industrial things that are normally found in pastry kitchens, such as refined sugars. Even though it is a dessert restaurant, so to speak, he has probably thought more about balance and what goes into every dish than 99.9 percent of the chefs in the world.New Worlder is a listener and reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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 are many. You see it in the mortadella sandwiches. You see it in the service of fine dining restaurants. Some of my best meals in the city have been Italian leaning, like Marco Renzetti's Pettirosso, which transformed into Fame Osteria, and Fasano, inside the hotel of the same name. Evvai's cuisine is called Oriundi, which refers to a migrant centered idea of Italian food. So, it's not trying to replicate Italian cuisine, but use it as inspiration. Luiz and I talk a lot about how he doesn't feel quite as boxed in with the concept as he once did, especially since the pandemic. Some dishes on the menu might look completely Brazilian and he's fine with that. If you like at Evvai's Instagram you'll see a lot of dishes that definitely do look lie traditional Italian food. There is some pasta, but lots of non-Italian restaurants have pasta. The line is very blurred between what is Italian and what isn't. There is freedom in that and I think his food, and I cannot say for sure as I haven't been there, is probably better for that.Read more and find a full transcript at New Worlder.

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 started visiting China and exploring its regional cuisines. Eventually, he re-imagined the restaurant around these cuisines. In our conversation, we discuss how this all came to be, and what his mindset was going into it. He continues researching regional Chinese recipes, texts and artwork through SOAS University, much of which he talks about alongside food anthropologist Dr Mukta Das on his podcastXO Soused. Read more and find a full transcript at New Worlder on Substack.

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 ingesting of alkaloids in coca chewing and on the northern Peruvian dish sudado de raya.His book, Eating Peru, provides a good understanding about the history of Peruvian food and how certain recipes have evolved over centuries. It's definitely not a restaurant cookbook, though there are some recipes in it. It goes into a lot of depth about coca, a lot about the food of the north coast, a lot about chicha and just the general study of Peruvian food. I don't agree with every point being made, but as far as academic books about Peruvian cuisine go, it's very fair and nuanced. We talk about this a little bit early in the interview and he writes about it in the book. In terms of academia, there seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to Peruvian food. One side is within Peru, where it is primarily driven by preserving culture and the books can be a touch nationalistic, which is expected. Then there is the side published by universities outside of Peru, where it is much more critical of the way Peruvian food has been developing and who benefits from it, especially in the last couple of decades. Both sides make some good points, but there lacks a middle ground sometimes. It feels like you're either with us or against us. It can be very polarizing.From my experience with Peruvian food, I think there is plenty to criticize, but there is far more to celebrate. The good far outweighs the bad, especially from within the culinary community. The future of Peruvian food, the future of any type of cuisine really, is going to be messy. We're trying to feed the planet in a healthy way without destroying it, amidst conditions that are rapidly changing. There are difficult decisions to make so we can all move forward. And for that to happen, we have to share our thoughts with love and kindness. And we have to listen to each other. We don't have to agree all the time, but we can try to understand where someone else is coming from and why they feel the way they do.Read more at www.newworlder.com.

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 than an acre with an aquaculture system that supplies all of his freshwater fish based off a YouTube class he took part in. He also harvests rainwater that he purifies and serves to guests as still or sparkling. He grows all of his garnishes, he houses honeybees and has planted all kinds of different trees. He has actually been able to improve the air quality of the restaurant and, importantly, he has been effective in lowering his overall costs in running the restaurant, which allows him to pay his employees better and make them happier.We discuss how he lived in his food truck prior to opening the restaurant and how he drove it all over southeast Asia, from beer garden to beer garden, as well as where his ideas come from and how he defines what Neo-Indian food is. We also talk about how limited the idea of Indian cuisine has been around the world and how people like himself and Unapologetic Foods in New York are changing that. There is so much going on we didn't even have time to talk about how he turned his restaurant into a soup kitchen during the pandemic, feeding more than a hundred thousand people. Subscribe to New Worlder on Substack and support this podcast here.

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 it made for a far more interesting experience. To me, at least.The restaurant is now in its fourth incarnation over a ten-year period and Juan has learned a lot about life and the restaurant business along the way. We have a very honest discussion about running restaurants, hospitality and sourcing, which has become one of the central components of how his menu is built and what he is trying to achieve in the long term. He's reached a place where he is a bit wiser and happier working in a restaurant and has really tried to understand the full breadth what that means.This is my first interview from Ecuador on this podcast. I'm not even sure how that happened. I used to go there all of the time and I know lots of people there. I love the country and vastness of its biodiversity within the smallness of its borders, but until this year it had been a while since I was there. The pandemic is mostly to blame. In terms of gastronomy, there is a lot happening there right now on a lot of different levels, so I'm eager to go back with a bit more time. See more at New Worlder.

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.

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 finally had his food after meeting him a couple of years before. It's a small, minimalist space in the Latin Quarter, a block from Pont de la Tournelle. It's one of those places I could go again and again. There's good music playing. The wines, always natural, are beautiful. The food is very ingredient driven, though there aren't long drawn out stories about anything. It's not French. It's not Japanese. It's not Nordic. It's not Latin American. It's just him and he's a lovely person. It's my favorite restaurant in Paris. Also, he breaks the news that he's probably going to open in New York in the not too distant future. It's something he has been wanting to do for years and it looks like it will finally happen.Disclaimer: We talk about cats a lot. We are both cat people. Check out the Instagram of his cats. I think the first 10 minutes of this episode is just two grown men talking about their cats. Don't judge.Find a transcript of the episode at New Worlder.

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 and fauna. Vaughan is a hunter and forager and uses a lot of wild foods, so we end up talking a lot about strange ingredients he encounters, like the Pūkeko, this wild pheasant with frightening claws and tahrs, a sort of wild goat from the Himalayas that has populated the area. The presentations of his dishes evoke the original animal, and he occasionally gets shit for allegedly glorifying hunting on social media. So, we talk about that and his idea of honoring the animal in this way rather than buying from factory farms. This is a guy that you are probably going to hear a lot about in the coming years. See a full transcript and subscribe to the newsletter at New Worlder.

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 on with all of her projects and I've had the chance to see many of them up close while traveling in Chile. We speak a lot about her restaurant and how she really is breaking with tradition in terms of sourcing and logistics, opting to work directly with fishermen in a way that is mutually beneficial. We also touch upon this idea of the restaurant as a hub of storytelling, something I think can be incredibly powerful. For a transcript and additional details, subscribe at New Worlder.

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 in food, completely ignore it in other aspects of our lives. I think I do that. Do you ever question where the materials you put on your body everyday come from? Honestly, before this interview I hadn't given it much thought. Why does that industry get a pass? Why do we give ourselves a pass for the clothes we wear? This is a conversation that we should have been having for a long time. Natalia isn't the only one thinking about clothing in this way, though she just so happens to have a food connection that make Terratela especially relevant for my listeners. See a tranwcript and subscribe to our Substack newsletter at Newworlder.com.

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 are really trying to use actual data and open lines of communication between different groups within the Netherlands. They are trying to lay the groundwork to create a more sustainable and healthier food system. See more at www.newworlder.com.

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 think lines up a lot with my own, which is why I'm really interested in where he goes with this photographic undertaking. I have followed Luis' work for many years, but I only met him in person a few weeks ago in New York. I was honored for him to take my portrait and we also hung out a bit. He grew up moving between South America, New York and Europe. He lived in Japan for a few years. He's traveled widely and exhibited his work all over the world. He's an interesting guy and I'm glad I was able to speak with him here. See more at www.newworlder.com.

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 restaurant called Bossa in London in May. How we never got to debate storytelling in food at an event in Slovenia that was canceled because of the pandemic. How he started cooking while living in London because a friend saw his leadership skills on a futbol field and offered him a job. And we talk about stagiers, what happened during the Olympics, the fundamentals of a French kitchen, and lots of things about Brazil. We talk for more than an hour, but I still feel like I barely scratched the surface with Alberto.

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, the restaurant he created with his childhood friend Iré Hassan-Odukale, is often misunderstood. While there are elements of Sub-Saharan Africa on his menu, he clarifies that the Ikoyi is not a Nigerian restaurant and was never supposed to be one, even though the media has built a narrative that it is one. He describes, while he is inspired by these flavors, namely the bold spices used there, and his partner is from Nigeria and the restaurant's name comes from a neighborhood in Lagos, he's never felt that culture was his story to tell. Rather, he uses spices – not just West African, but global spices – without their cultural context. He simply focuses on the flavors and how he personally relates to them and finds ways to express them. Even as everyone has continually tried to pigeonhole Ikoyi, he remains defiant. He's just cooking to the best of his ability in the way he thinks is best. Whether you agree with his approach or not, you have to respect how he is able to trust his own instincts and block out all the noise.See a full transcript at www.newworlder.com.