Podcast: Season 2

How Roy Choi Plans to Change the World

On this week’s Special Sauce, Roy Choi told me that his new California-based fast food concept, LocoL, is merely trying to change the world, one mostly-meat burger at a time. 

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Ed and Kenji Take Your Calls (Part 2)

This week’s especial Special Sauce episode (I know that’s redundant, but it rolls off the tongue) again features my runnin’ and eatin’ partner, Kenji López-Alt, Serious Eats’ managing culinary director and the author of the New York Times best seller…

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Extra-Special Sauce: Ed and Kenji Take Your Calls.

This week’s episode of Special Sauce is, well, special. Inspired by Car Talk, one of our all-time favorite radio shows, we did a call-in session featuring Kenji López-Alt, Serious Eats’ managing culinary director and the…

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Eric Ripert on the Making of His Memoir and What Inspires Him

I used to think of Le Bernardin chef-restaurateur Eric Ripert as a smart, impossibly charming and handsome chef’s chef. But between interviewing him for Special Sauce and reading his moving and evocative memoir 32 Yolks, I’ve since realized that…

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Tom Douglas on the Moral Imperative of Livable Restaurant Wages.

The multiple-Beard-Award-winner and proprietor of 19 Seattle restaurants is whip-smart, even though his mother has never forgiven him for being the only one of her eight children not to go to college. Tom’s also funny, opinionated, and generously…

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Russ & Daughters on How to Keep a 100-Year-Old Family Food Business Fresh

Family businesses are hard. Family food businesses that have lasted four generations, like the New York appetizing emporium Russ & Daughters, are practically unicorns. So, when I had a chance to have Niki Russ Federman and Joshua Russ Tupper on…

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Jessamyn Rodriguez on Hot Bread Kitchen, NY’s Bakery Incubator

Ed Levine first met Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez eight years ago, when he happened upon her and her mother selling handmade tortillas at a tiny farmers market in West Harlem. Even back then, he could tell that Jessamyn was a force to be…

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Jim Lahey on the Accident of No-Knead Bread

This week’s Special Sauce guest, bread baker extraordinaire Jim Lahey, is a man of strong opinions, provocative ideas, and many talents. He’s not on the fence about anything. So I figured that if we just gave Jim a mike and let him rip, serious eaters…

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Roy Blount Jr. on Saving Room for Pie

Roy Blount Jr. is one of the funniest writers on the planet. And he loves to eat, and talk about what he’s eaten, so he’s a made-to-order guest on Special Sauce. On this week’s episode, you’ll hear Roy wax poetic about the dangers of eating foam (he’s…

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Special Sauce: Chris Ying on the Best and Wurst of Lucky Peach Life

Who knew, in an age of huge magazine companies being sold off like rusty used cars, that you could create a quarterly, delightfully idiosyncratic food magazine and get more than a hundred thousand people to pony up $28 a year to subscribe? On this…

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