Tinfoil Swans

Tinfoil Swans

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting conversations with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made them who they are today. Each week, you'll hear from icons and innovators like Daniel Boulud, Guy Fieri, Mashama Bailey, and Maneet Chauhan, going deep on their formative experiences, the dishes and meals that made them, their joys, doubts and dreams, and what's still on the menu for them. Tune in for a feast that'll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor later. New episodes every Tuesday.

Episodes

Run the Jewels and the Tuna Salad Battle

July 15, 2025 • 52 mins
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Wylie Dufresne and the Platonic Pizza Ideal

July 8, 2025 • 47 mins
2001 Food & Wine Best New Chef and Stretch Pizza impresario Wylie Dufresne joins Tinfoil Swans to talk about his job lording over the ice truck at the New York Renaissance Festival, how team sports inform his work ethic, what the heck molecular gastronomy actually is, and why the pursuit of the perfect pizza dough has him so fired up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Ana and Lydia Castro and the Tortilla Full of Beauty

July 1, 2025 • 59 mins
2022 Food & Wine Best New Chef Ana Castro and her sister and business partner Lydia Castro are powerhouse duo behind New Orleans' beloved Acamaya. They're not just redefining contemporary Mexican cuisine — they’re reshaping what it means to lead with vulnerability, resilience, and fierce sibling love. In this conversation they dive deep into their shared childhood in Mexico City, parallel journeys through grief and healing, and the...
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Encore: Guy Fieri and the Flying Mustard Jar

June 24, 2025 • 44 mins
In our debut episode, Food & Wine's executive features editor Kat Kinsman spoke with the one and only chef Guy Fieri. He's become a household name as a restaurateur, cookbook author, host of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, Guy's Grocery Games, Tournament of Champions and more smash-hit shows — and in recent years, as a mega-philanthropist who has raised millions for first responders and hospitality workers. But before all that, Guy w...
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Karen Akunowicz and the Compliment That Changed Her Life

June 17, 2025 • 52 mins
25 years ago, James Beard Award-winning chef and Top Chef alum Karen Akunowicz received a compliment from a Food & Wine Best New Chef that changed her entire career path. On this episode, she opened up about her journey from musical theater kid and hardworking diner waitress to acclaimed restaurateur, the power of embracing her queer identity, the heartbreak of a dropped dessert, her enduring love of Houston's, and the importance o...
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Dr. Jessica B. Harris and the Hardcore Virginia Ham

June 10, 2025 • 51 mins
Dr. Jessica B. Harris is a scholar of the African food diaspora, an award-winning and prolific writer, a gifted storyteller and speaker, a teacher, and an icon to many. But what gets lost sometimes is that she's a person, first and foremost — one whose bookishness as a kid made it hard for her to connect with other kids. One raised by two artists whose dreams had to be deferred to make a living in New York but who supported their d...
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Matthew Lillard and the Glorious Dorito Salad

June 3, 2025 • 43 mins
You have a favorite Matthew Lillard film or TV performance. It might be SLC Punk, the Scream franchise, Scooby Doo, Hackers, She's All That, Twin Peaks: The Return, or the new Stephen King and Mike Flanagan movie The Life of Chuck. He's been working in Hollywood for over 30 years, and has a reputation for being kind to fans. But connecting with people is exactly why he got into acting as a kid — the community that comes from puttin...
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Encore: Will Poulter, Dave Beran, and The Bear

May 27, 2025 • 52 mins
Season 3 of the smash hit FX/Hulu show “The Bear” roared to life just days ago, but Will Poulter (the actor who plays fan-favorite Luca) and 2014 F&W Best New Chef Dave Beran had been prepping for weeks. Poulter — like his co-star Jeremy Allen White — staged with Beran at his Santa Monica restaurant Pasjoli to learn how to accurately portray a professional chef onscreen. The lessons went so well, Beran says he’d hire Poulter as a c...
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Curtis Stone and the Clandestine Charcuterie Closet

May 20, 2025 • 49 mins
The first food memory Curtis Stone has is getting in trouble for eating too much butter. Then again, the Australian chef and TV host has never been one for restraint. Once he realized he wasn't going to be a professional athlete, he went to work for Marco Pierre White — notoriously one of the most hard-driving chefs of all time, then hosted 140 episodes of Take Home Chef, and then back into the fray, opening restaurants on his own ...
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Hawa Hassan and the Hot Dog Habit

May 13, 2025 • 48 mins
When Hawa Hassan was five years old, she was living in a refugee camp in Kenya. By seven, she was resettled in Seattle with a few other refugees from Somalia, and waiting for her family to join her. Then the political climate changed, and she came to realize that they were never coming; she was on her own. The thing to know about Hawa Hassan is that she will always find the light in any situation, and use it to guide the way forwar...
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Romy Gill and the Slow Burn Book

May 6, 2025 • 46 mins
Romy Gill puts in the work — always. Growing up in India, the chef, TV host, and author dreamed of being a cricket player and directed all her effort into that — and into lightly fibbing her way into her neighbors' homes to try different dishes than the ones she ate in her Punjabi household. It's this hunger and curiosity about other people and their foodways that has made her such a beloved presence on the BBC and ITV, as well as ...
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Vikas Khanna and the Beautiful Lie That Saved His Childhood

April 29, 2025 • 49 mins
When Vikas Khanna was growing up in a small town in India, the world was stacked against him. He was bullied by other children for wearing braces on his legs and not being able to play like them. But his grandmother and sister saw him for who he truly was: a lion. They brought him into the kitchen, and he roared to life. An extraordinary life at that, where he makes movies, writes books, feeds millions of hungry people, and runs Bu...
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Laurie Woolever and the Cone of Silence

April 22, 2025 • 57 mins
Laurie Woolever has worked for chefs you've definitely heard of, most notably Anthony Bourdain and Mario Batali. Those two men are notorious for their outsized appetites, but in her new memoir, "Care and Feeding," Woolever gets raw and real about her own insatiable need for drugs, alcohol, and extramarital affairs while navigating the grossness and glamour of the food world in their orbits. She joined the Tinfoil Swans podcast to t...
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Roy Choi and the Out-of-Body Emeril Experience

April 15, 2025 • 63 mins
Growing up as an immigrant latchkey kid, Roy Choi spent a lot of time wandering the streets of Los Angeles alone, thinking he'd never fit in anywhere. He had a scar on his face from cleft palate surgery, and he thought of himself as an alley cat, slipping through the world unnoticed and he took in every detail of the way people interacted, especially at restaurants. It's this nuanced and empathetic view of humanity that's made the ...
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Byron Gomez and the American Dream

April 8, 2025 • 61 mins
Byron Gomez and his family arrived in the United States from Costa Rica when he was eight years old, and he was in for the shock of his young life. He spoke Spanish at home, he'd never seen snow or even a winter coat, and he had to find his place in a world that didn't always want him there. But at age 15, he found restaurants. He put in the very hard work, let himself dream, and the success followed. The Top Chef contestant spoke ...
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Tinfoil Swans Is Serving Up Season 3: April 8, 2025

April 1, 2025 • 2 mins
The award-winning Tinfoil Swans podcast from Food & Wine is back on April 8. We're bringing you even more intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry and beyond, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made them who they are today. In Season 3, you'll hear from icons and innovators like Byron Gomez, Roy Choi,...
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Encore: Kevin Gillespie and the Restaurant of a Lifetime

March 25, 2025 • 54 mins
There's a good chance you know chef and author Kevin Gillespie from his fan-favorite stint on Season 6 of Top Chef or his return on the All Stars Season 20, but the Georgia native's talent can't be reduced to the small screen. His new Atlanta restaurant, Nàdair, is a full-throated love letter to his Scottish heritage — something Gillespie's family had always been made to feel ashamed of. But in the aftermath of renal cancer, doctor...
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Encore: Kylie Kwong and the Five Glass Ghosts

March 18, 2025 • 56 mins
When chef Kylie Kwong announced that she was going to be shuttering her destination dining spot Lucky Kwong to take on a new role at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, working at the intersection of food, community, and education to honor the people and foods that have made Australian cuisine so distinctive and precious — it made sense. Kwong has always centered humanity in everything she does, including this raw and astonishing conv...
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Pati Jinich and the Bedtime Cookbooks

November 19, 2024 • 59 mins
With her shows Pati's Mexican Table and La Frontera and cookbooks Treasures of the Mexican Table and Mexican Today, Pati Jinich uses her exceptional empathy, political science background, and fearless curiosity to share the stories of the people living, creating, and cooking all around Mexico, and celebrate our shared humanity. For the Season 2 finale, Jinich joined Tinfoil Swans to talk about learning English by watching Sesame St...
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Joel McHale and the Spiced Steak Fantasy

November 12, 2024 • 36 mins
You may know Joel McHale from his star turns on beloved shows like Community, The Soup, or Animal Control, his standup special Live From Pyongyang, or as host of House of Villains and Crime Scene Kitchen. Chefs know him from their nightmares — or rather as the menacing chef David Fields on The Bear. He's also a very talented cook, especially in the realm of meat. McHale joined Tinfoil Swans to talk about working at a coffee stand i...
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