Welcome back to The Go-To Food Podcast, where we're joined by Alison Roman — chef, writer, and creator of some of the most talked-about recipes of the last decade. Alison takes us back to her first kitchen job at Sona in Los Angeles, working under David Myers for $7.25 an hour, crying daily but learning fast. It was a tiny, nine-person kitchen that ran like The Bear, long before The Bear existed. From there she went to Milk Bar in New York, then the Bon Appétit test kitchen — reverse-engineering photo-shoot dishes into recipes home cooks could actually make. The early days were brutal, pre-Instagram, and anonymous. No bylines, no fame, just biscuits, burnouts, and a deep sense that if you showed up more than anyone else, something would happen.
In London, Alison’s been eating with purpose — Café Deco’s anchovy-studded little gem, a quiche that insists it’s a frittata, and a beef stew she calls one of the best she’s ever had. She weighs The Devonshire against The Pelican and The Hart. There’s a fascination with pub culture, a debate over sharpened pencils at hotel reception, and a reminder that the best meals aren’t always on “the list.” We get her take on TikTok chefs, the chaos of phones in kitchens, and an unnerving AI ad that generates recipe ideas without authors — proof, she says, that food without humanity just doesn’t taste the same.
We talk legacy too. From Dining In to Nothing Fancy to Sweet Enough, Alison’s cookbooks built a blueprint for the way people cook now — easy, intuitive, quietly confident. She admits the dessert book nearly broke her, but Something for Nothing came easily because it mirrors how she actually cooks. There’s a new tomato sauce line born from her husband’s refusal to cook, a love letter to anchovies, and an argument for doing one thing well instead of a thousand badly. We end with her perfect menu: shrimp cocktail, Caesar salad, ribeye in brown butter and lemon, and a slice of key lime pie — the ultimate Alison Roman meal, simple, specific, and unapologetically human.
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