This Is TASTE

This Is TASTE

If you're a fan of smart and lively conversations about food, home cooking, and culture, this is the place. We interview the most interesting characters in the world of food, media, and cookbooks and release episodes several times a month. The program is hosted by TASTE editors Aliza Abarbanel and Matt Rodbard, and is sometimes recorded live at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City. Visit TASTE online: tastecooking.com

Episodes

January 26, 2026 79 mins
Luca Servodio is a guy who knows his way around Los Angeles restaurants. In 2021, he reviewed 100 Los Angeles pizzas in 365 days through his LA Countdown Instagram account, and he followed up by taking on 100 taquerias in 2022, 100 epic LA sandwiches in 2023, 100 iconic LA noodle dishes in 2024, and 100 burgers in 2025. Today the LA Countdown is a community that is home to The LA Food Podcast and other projects. In this episode, we...
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Jerrelle Guy is an award-winning author and celebrated food photographer. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, she received her master’s in gastronomy from Boston University and was nominated for a James Beard Award for her debut cookbook, Black Girl Baking. She is back with a terrific new book, We Fancy, and we hear about her interpretation of fancy, as well as how she thinks about developing recipes for all styles of ...
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Scott Conant is a James Beard Award–winning chef, TV personality, and pasta sauce savant. Matt still dreams about the Scarpetta spaghetti. It was a lot of fun having Scott in the studio to talk about his time coming up in New York City restaurants and why he decided to launch a food company, Martone Street, and compete for attention on the highly competitive tomato sauce shelf.  Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠S...
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Brooks Reitz writes the wonderful newsletter A Small & Simple Thing, which has become one of our favorite reads. He also runs restaurants in Charleston and New Orleans, including Leon’s Oyster Shop, Little Jack’s Tavern, Melfi’s, and the Bell. In this conversation we talk about Brook’s unique worldview, built around restaurant hospitality, tastemaking (the not annoying kind), and design. We talk about the recent British Invasion fo...
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Ella Quittner is a journalist, screenwriter, and humorist who writes about obsession, culture, and food. She’s the author of a terrific new cookbook, Obsessed with the Best: 100+ Methodically Perfected Recipes Based on 20+ Head-to-Head Tests. On this very fun episode we talk about those tests, and finding the absolute best recipes for biscuits, pancakes, cookies, yellow cake, roasted chicken, and so much more. We also talk about he...
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Preston Clark is the executive chef at Lure Fishbar and Bar Mercer in New York City, and he joins us in the studio to talk about his unique career. Clark’s father, Patrick Clark, was the original chef at the Odeon and the first Black chef to win a James Beard Award. Tragically, Patrick passed away in 1998 at the age of 42. Preston has picked up the Clark legacy while writing his own chapters, and we talk about his early chef life w...
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January 14, 2026 39 mins
Rick Bayless joins us in the studio for a truly memorable conversation. Rick is a chef, TV personality, cookbook author, and great advocate for Mexican cooking and culture. He joins us in the studio for a candid talk about his deeply personal history with Mexican cuisine, including the opening of his pioneering restaurant Frontera Grill in Chicago and his life in and out of the kitchen.  Subscribe to This Is TASTE: ⁠⁠Apple Podcas...
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Natasha Pickowicz is a New York City–based chef and the author of More Than Cake, which was named a New York Times Best Cookbook of 2023 as well as a James Beard Award finalist. She’s also a hot pot obsessive who regularly hosts pop-ups of the communal East Asian dining experience in NYC. Now she’s sharing all her family hot pot wisdom and the techniques she’s adapted as a chef in a new book: Everyone Hot Pot. It’s so fun to have N...
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What a fun time having Nathan Thornburgh in the studio. Nathan is a former Time magazine foreign correspondent editor and is the CEO of Roads & Kingdoms, which he cofounded with writer Matt Goulding and at which Anthony Bourdain was a partner. We’ve long admired Nathan’s journalistic muscle and great feel for a story. We talk about the founding of Roads & Kingdoms and how the company’s pivot to organized travel has been a really gr...
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January 7, 2026 69 mins
Sam Lawrence is the chef-owner of Bridges, an ambitious and stylish restaurant on the edge of Manhattan’s Chinatown. Formerly the culinary director of Ignacio Mattos’s restaurant group, he opened Bridges in 2025. It won a Michelin star in its first year. Today on the show, Sam shares about bringing Bridges to life, Michelin recognition, and his plans for year two of the restaurant.  Before that, Matt has a great conversation with ...
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Chef and restaurateur Marc Vetri is behind the legendary Vetri Cucina in Philadelphia, among many other restaurants. He’s also the author of several cookbooks, including the terrific The Pasta Book: Recipes, Techniques, Inspiration. I really enjoyed having Marc in the studio to talk about his deep love for both pasta and pasta cookbooks. We discuss the early days of Vetri Cucina as well as how a family recipe was passed down for on...
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Nikko Cagalanan is the chef-owner of Kultura in Charleston, South Carolina. Born and raised in the Philippines, Nikko began cooking in 2017 while still working as a nurse, discovering that the kitchen offered the same sense of purpose—to nurture, care for, and bring comfort to others. In 2019, he moved to Charleston to fully pursue his passion for cooking and launched Kultura to great acclaim, including a James Beard Award nominati...
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Tamar Adler is the James Beard and IACP Award–winning author of An Everlasting Meal; Something Old, Something New; and the best-selling Everlasting Meal Cookbook. Currently living in Madrid, she stopped by the TASTE studio to talk about writing her new book Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day. It’s a thoughtful collection of dispatches from a daily life anchored by food, and today on the show, we go deep on Tamar’...
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Snaxshot, the curatorial and slightly mercurial grocery newsletter and community, has grown into an industry force, read by consumer packaged goods executives and members of the food media on a near-religious level. (We are among these readers.) Andrea Hernández returns to the show to go over the big headlines from the year at the grocery store and in the CPG trenches. We talk about shorting protein, Stiller’s Soda, and Starbucks’s...
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It was a blast having Dan Souza in the studio. Dan is the chief content officer of America’s Test Kitchen and the former editor in chief of Cooks Illustrated. Dan has such a great style in the way he talks about home cooking, and we discuss his time working in food media before digging into a very cool and ambitious new drinks book: Cocktails Illustrated: 400+ Recipes for the Home Bartender, from Spirit Forward to Zero Proof.  And...
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Laurel Kratochvila is an American-born writer and baker based in Berlin and trained in France. She runs the iconic Fine Bagels bakery, and her first book, New European Baking, was a finalist for a James Beard Award in 2023. Laurel joins us in the studio to talk about her incredible new book, Dobre Dobre, which focuses on both the modern and traditional baking of Poland, a country with deep culinary roots. We talk about Jewish bakin...
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We wanted to close the year by talking about the year in dining in Los Angeles, a city that always inspires with new openings and truly singular legendary spots. We are joined by Jenn Harris, a columnist and critic for the Food section of the Los Angeles Times. The paper just released its annual 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles list, and we talk about many of the selections. Also on the show, we speak with Jordan Okun and Max S...
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We wanted to close the year by talking about the year in dining in our hometown of New York City. Matt has a great chat with New York magazine food editor Alan Sytsma. We talk about the magazine’s best new restaurants list as well as some long-standing favorites. Next up, Aliza has a wonderful conversation with Mahira Rivers, who covers the city through her Substack, Sweet City, and by reviewing restaurants in the pages of the New ...
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Yara Herrera is the chef-partner at Hellbender, a Mexican-American restaurant in Ridgewood, Queens. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she honed her skills in the city’s fine dining restaurants like Wolfgang Puck’s Spago and Providence before moving to New York in 2018 to work at Momofuku Ko, Xilonen, and Sobre Masa. Today on the show, we talk about Yara’s culinary journey, running Hellbender, and creating her distinctive approach to ...
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For over two decades, Andrew Zimmern has starred in some of the most thoughtful and compelling food television being made for TV and online. He’s the longtime host of Bizarre Foods and a number of other food travel shows that defined a generation of programming. He’s also a longtime friend of mine, and it’s crazy that this was his first time appearing on the show. We go in so many great directions with this conversation, including ...
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