The Sporkful

Fifty years after the panic about "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" began, we explore how faulty science and perceptions of race and class contributed to the making of a food myth that persists today. And we tell you how to make the best Bloody Mary ever.

This episode originally aired on January 6, 2018, and was produced by Dan Pashman and Anne Saini, and edited by Margaret Kelly. The Sporkful team now includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgens...

Today, we have an update on one of our most popular Sporkful episodes ever, about a beloved sandwich shop in Aleppo, Syria, and an exiled aid worker named Shadi Martini. When the brutal regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad fell last December, we got back in touch with Shadi. Earlier this year, after 12 years in exile, he returned to Aleppo, and visited his favorite sandwich shop. He tells us about the whole experience in this ...

When we left off, Shadi Martini was getting increasingly worried that his efforts to help those targeted by the Syrian regime would be discovered. A doctor who was known to treat protestors had been arrested and tortured. Shadi took it as a message – someone was telling him to stop. But he didn’t stop. Instead, he started doing a lot more.

This is part two in our series. If you didn’t listen to Part 1, please go back and listen to t...

Back in 2017, we aired one of our most popular Sporkful episodes ever, about a beloved sandwich shop in Aleppo, Syria. At that time, Syria was reeling from years of civil war, and the country’s leader, Bashar Al-Assad, had been brutally targeting his own citizens. Aleppo was especially hard hit. We heard about that sandwich shop and set out to find out what made it special, and whether it was even still there. 

At the end of last ye...

The owner of Big Mike’s Soul Food in Myrtle Beach is also a city councilman, a church deacon, and a real estate agent -- so helping people is at the core of his work. The general manager at Croissants Bistro & Bakery went to coffee school and ice cream school. At Rivertown Bistro, chef Darren Smith’s lowcountry spring rolls are so popular, they paid for his daughter’s college tuition. As Dan found when he went there, Myrtle Beach i...

If you do the cooking, should your partner do the cleaning? Are savory oats underrated? Are broccoli stems better than the florets? This week we’re taking your calls, tackling your food disputes, and hopefully bringing some peace and resolution to your homes. Helping Dan mediate (and sharing some hot takes of their own) are Paola Velez, author of Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store, and James Par...

We take you to two iconic hot dog joints in Detroit and New Jersey to find out what makes them special. Plus Kenji Lopez-Alt schools us on the science of deep-fried hot dogs, and Dan's parents make a special cameo.

This episode originally aired on June 26, 2016, and was produced by Dan Pashman and Anne Saini, edited by Shoshana Gold, and mixed by Chase Culpon. The Sporkful team now includes Dan Pashman, Emma Morgenstern, Andres O'Ha...

Dan Rossi sells hot dogs in the most coveted spot for a street vendor in all of New York City – outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He’s been in this location for nearly twenty years, and he’s spent much of that time fighting politicians, public health officials, the NYPD, the Met, and other vendors to hold on to his precious location. In recent years he’s taken to sleeping in his van next to the spot, to be sure nobody takes i...

How the (part veggie) sausage gets made...Cara Nicoletti comes from a long line of butchers, but her grandfather didn’t want her to follow in his footsteps. It’s physical work, it requires long hours, the pay isn’t great, and the path is even tougher for women. Cara went against her grandfather’s wishes anyway and became a butcher — but she hasn’t followed a traditional path. She spent ten years developing a type of sausage that no...

Over more than fifty years and 16 books, Dr. Jessica B. Harris has uncovered the ways that West African food, and African American people, have fundamentally shaped American cuisine. Her seminal 2011 book, High on the Hog, brought the connection between African and American food into the culinary conversation, and led to the 2021 Netflix series of the same name. This week we talk with her about her own journey in making these conne...

Welcome to our summer cookout spectacular episode! We talk with renowned burger historian George Motz about the history of the hamburger, and about the wide range of regional burgers across the country, many of which are unknown outside their areas. Then we get an incredible burger recipe from Chef Jehangir Mehta, inspired by Indian street food, that’s made with 25% mushrooms. Finally, our old friend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt stops by for...

Chefs tend to have a love-hate relationship with restaurant critics, who have the power to make or break them. Critics try to enter restaurants undetected, while chefs try to spot them, then ensure a flawless experience and a good review. This week, we have a story about one critic’s very unusual encounter with a famous chef, and the bombshell article that followed. MacKenzie Chung Fegan was a relatively new critic at the San Franc...

As civil war erupted in Yemen, Mokhtar Alkhanshali found himself imprisoned, with $5,000 stuffed in his underwear and his coffee samples confiscated. To get those samples to the biggest specialty coffee expo in North America, he’d have to survive more than one near-death experience. Would his coffee be worth the risk?

This is the second half of our two-part episode about Mokhtar Alkhanshali. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 from la...

Thomas’ English Muffins are so famous for their nooks and crannies that the recipe that produces those iconic features is a closely guarded trade secret. Only a select group of people know it, and as you’ll hear in this week’s show, when one of those people took a job at a competitor, all hell broke loose. This story comes from our friends at Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent podcast about things overlooked and misu...

Mokhtar Alkhanshali was a doorman in San Francisco when he saw a statue that changed his life. The statue was of an Arab man holding a cup of coffee, and it led Mokhtar to learn about the origins of coffee, in Yemen, where his family is from. While coffee’s roots in Yemen run deep, Mokhtar learned that present-day Yemeni coffee was hard to source, and the quality was inconsistent. But when it was good, some experts said it was the ...

In parts of Texas, a kolache is about as common as a donut — but it’s relatively unknown outside the Lone Star State. The kolache is a traditional Czech pastry made with a sweetened, yeasty dough and filled with either fruit, cheese or sausage. It got a foothold in Texas after a wave of Czech immigrants came to the state more than a century ago. This week, Alexa Lim, a producer on The Atlas Obscura Podcast, explores the Kolache Tri...

This was supposed to be the Queens Night Market’s big summer... When the open-air market debuted in 2015, the crowds were massive. Founder John Wang selected food vendors who represented more than 90 countries. And he had one rule for them: no item could cost more than $5. That way the market would be accessible to nearly everyone, and big businesses would stay away. In 2019 the market set a new record for attendance, and finally s...

Sebastian Maniscalco is one of the top-grossing comedians in America, beloved for his stories about the food-obsessed family he grew up in, and his constant irritation at just about everyone around him. And in 2021, he parlayed his love of food into a new Food Network show, Well Done. Sebastian talks with Dan about what it’s like going from a working-class upbringing — during which he torched hams to earn a little extra cash — to s...

A 150-year-old blood feud over processed meat... When the New Jersey State Legislature tried to designate an Official State Sandwich, a fight broke out. Should it be pork roll, egg, and cheese — or Taylor ham, egg, and cheese? Thing is, pork roll and Taylor ham are the same food. New Jerseyans just can't agree on what to call it. And this debate has its roots in a 150-year-old blood feud. We talk with a bunch of locals, a pork roll...