Enrique Lozano is a Chopped champion, James Beard nominee for Best Chef Texas, and executive chef at Aguazul in San Antonio, with roots at Benny Frank's in El Paso and Mija opening soon in San Elizario.

He'd been trying to get on Chopped for over a decade before the call finally came, right after his James Beard nomination. His strategy once he got there: cook exactly what he already knew, nothing more ambitious, nothing borrowed. It won him ten thousand dollars and, once the embargo lifted a year later, a wave of business he hadn't planned for.

• Why he thinks contestants lose on cooking competition shows by trying dishes they've never made before, instead of doing what they already do well
• What actually separates Beat Bobby Flay from Chopped once the cameras are off, and why one felt like being treated like a rock star
• Why he doesn't strain his ramen tonkotsu broth anymore, and the tare trick a friend talked him into trying

André Natera and Enrique Lozano cover what it actually takes to build a 100% sustainable restaurant from the ground up at Mija, why a 200-item menu at Aguazul isn't chaos but cross-utilization, San Antonio's quiet run of Michelin recognition, the deep well of chef talent coming out of El Paso, two restaurant closures and the identical tax mistake behind both of them, who actually showed up when things fell apart and who didn't, and whether music belongs in a kitchen at all.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore, and the one addition to his tonkotsu broth that isn't a spice.

Guest

Instagram: Chef Enrique Lozano

Links

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Matthew Cutolo is a third-generation chef at Gargiulo's, the Coney Island restaurant his family has run since 1965 and that has fed Brooklyn since 1907. In 1977, The New York Times gave it three stars, unheard of at the time for a restaurant outside Manhattan.

He learned to bake from Mike the Bake, the restaurant's pastry chef of over forty years, who refused to write down a single recipe, including for family. Matthew asked to learn anyway. Mike's answer was, "If you want to learn, you have to watch." For the first two months, Matthew stood at the mixing bowl and watched Mike add ingredients with no measurements at all, a scoop of this, a lap around the kitchen, a conversation with someone else, back to the bowl. Only after two months did Mike start telling him what was actually going in.

• Why the same holiday recipe came out different every year, because it was never really written down, it was feel
• Why Matthew never uses a thermometer frying cannoli, and the one thing his uncle said that changed his mind about tradition versus evolution
• How a summer internship on The Chew turned into a decision to go all in on content, and why cooking videos never worked for him but talking to the camera did

André Natera and Matthew Cutolo cover the difference between Italian food and Italian American food and why that argument goes back to Ellis Island, the family's daily 2:30 lunch that nobody is allowed to skip, guys' night and the right way to make a negroni, the meatball debate settled once and for all, sauce versus gravy, dried pasta versus fresh, Parmigiano versus Pecorino, what actually makes a video do well on YouTube versus Instagram, and why toxic kitchens exist in family restaurants too.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore, and the correct cannoli filling.

Guest

@matthewcutolo
https://www.matthewcutolo.com/Gargiulo's on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/gargiulosrestaurant/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/booksShop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Bobby Hicks read roughly 800 mid-century cookbooks to write one, and what he found was not a list of bad recipes. It was the exact point where American home cooking lost its thread.

The Great Depression ran into World War II with almost no recovery in between. Two generations of mothers cooked without butter, without sugar, without the ingredients their own mothers' recipes assumed. What did not get cooked did not get taught. By the time the post-war boom arrived with canned soup and boxed everything, and women moved from house labor into factories and still had to put dinner on the table, the chain was already broken. The dishes we laugh at now were what filled the gap.

• Why a pineapple was a status symbol, and why people rented them by the party
• Why aspic was proof you owned a refrigerator, not something anyone wanted to eat
• What actually broke the transmission of technique, and who put it back

Bobby Hicks is a food historian, a Next Level Chef season four alum, and the author of Retro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist from Countryman Press. He shows up with a vintage basting spoon from an estate sale and opens with the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him in a kitchen. He was telling an extern that onion skin works as a bandage. Mid-sentence, he cut off the tip of his finger.

André Natera and Bobby Hicks cover the three books he studied before going on television, why sleep and food were what actually wrecked him on set, the market exercise he still gives private chefs, why he believes you can teach technique but not adaptability, what happens once a publisher wants 100 recipes in six months, twelve years of content advice from before it was a career, and how to order a drink without embarrassing yourself.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

Retro Recipes Kitchen on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/retrorecipeskitchen/
This Fellow on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/thisfellow/
retrorecipeskitchen.comRetro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist → https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324117257

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/booksShop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Chef Toby Archibald is the New Zealand-born chef and owner of Quarter Acre, a Michelin Guide restaurant on Lower Greenville in Dallas. Texas Monthly named it one of the Best New Restaurants in 2023. D Magazine ranked it a Top 5 restaurant. He spent twenty years working through Michelin-starred kitchens in London, Canada, New York, and Australia before opening Quarter Acre in December 2022. His career includes sous chef at The Greenhouse in London, sous chef at Café Boulud Toronto and New York under Gavin Kaysen and Aaron Bludorn, and Executive Chef at Georgie by Curtis Stone.

This episode starts in 2006. Toby is 23, backpacking across America, staying in a hostel. He gets a reservation at Restaurant Daniel. Shows up 20 minutes early, gets fitted with a dinner jacket from a room full of them, sits in the middle of the dining room as a solo diner, and has a meal he cannot describe but has never forgotten. That one dinner changed the entire direction of his career, his life, and who he is as a chef.

• Why you cannot learn to really cook from YouTube because you cannot taste or smell what is happening in the pan, and the critical learning lives entirely in that gap
• The difference between French charcuterie and Italian salumi and why calling a plate of Italian cold cuts a charcuterie board is almost always the wrong name
• What one extraordinary hospitality experience at age 23 can do to a twenty-year career and why Daniel Boulud built his entire reputation on making every single person feel exactly the way Toby felt that night

André and Toby cover the Bocuse d'Or dinner at Kent Rathbun's house where this friendship started, the language barrier at The Greenhouse that forced real learning, the seventh generation charcutier at Café Boulud Toronto who could debone a pig with a spoon, Gavin Kaysen leaving New York a week after Toby arrived, Daniel Boulud pulling out his phone at Toby's farewell dinner to look up Sydney hotels, and what Quarter Acre is and why it is impossible to put in a box.

Guest

• Toby Archibald on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/tobyarchibald/
• Quarter Acre on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/quarteracredallas/
• Quarter Acre Website → https://www.quarteracrerestaurant.com/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Geno McWilliams is the self-taught chef and owner of Lucia's Italian Kitchen in Effingham, Illinois, a 39-seat open kitchen Italian restaurant three hours south of Chicago that has become a destination in rural America. He spent decades as a construction contractor while teaching himself to cook, traveled with more cooking equipment than construction tools, fired pizzas in hotel rooms with an Ooni Koda, and opened Lucia's in November 2020. He is a member of the US Pizza Team and Women in Pizza certified.

He attended the Rewiring Hospitality conference in Irvine, California the week before this recording. His biggest takeaway became the central argument of this entire episode: after years of obsessing over the food, the food is not the point. The food is the bonus. Hospitality is what brings guests back.

• Why Lucia's pre-shift meetings never discuss 86 items, cover counts, or operational details and spend every minute on one question: how are we going to make the guest experience better tonight
• The difference between Italian and Italian American cuisine and why Geno built his menu around traditional Italian dishes in a town that walked in expecting fettuccine Alfredo and chicken Parm
• The pasta economics that every small Italian restaurant needs to understand: 90 percent extruded, 10 percent stuffed, and why pushing that ratio in the wrong direction will destroy your labor and your consistency

André Natera and Geno McWilliams cover the wedding dance moment that went viral on social media, reading guests through body language and NLP, the Roman tonda meets New York style pizza hybrid that defines Lucia's pizza, the discovery that French toast originated in fourth century Rome, and the construction contractor financial discipline that gave Geno a foundation most self-taught chefs never develop. The episode closes with his Mount Rushmore of chefs by category, his yellow tape kitchen in honor of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and his tagline: cheaper than a ticket to Italy.

Guest

• Geno McWilliams on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefginomc/
• Lucia's Italian Kitchen on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/luciaseffingham/
• Lucia's Italian Kitchen Website → https://luciasik.com/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Chef Matt McCallister is the Food and Wine Best New Chef 2014, three-time James Beard Award finalist, and one of a handful of chefs to ever receive a five-star review from the Dallas Morning News. He opened FT33 in Dallas in 2012, followed it with Homewood, and is now opening River Sing, a 24-seat tasting menu restaurant in Fair Park, Dallas, in fall 2026. He has been sober since 2016.

This episode is the less glamorous side of the chef world that people do not talk about.

• How the success of FT33 accelerated access to every vice that was already available, and what that looked like by 2016
• The morning he called his business partner's wife two days before Valentine's Day, ready to say something stern, and she answered and said Michael's dead
• What imposter syndrome actually feels like when you move from being one of the best fine dining chefs in Texas to being a food and beverage director at a casual dining group

André Natera and Matt McCallister trace the full arc from FT33's peak to Homewood's collapse to getting sober to disappearing from public view to building River Sing. The conversation covers the intervention, the shame of public failure, what forgiveness actually costs over time, and why he is doing it again. River Sing is named after a line in a Grateful Dead song and his lifelong love of fly fishing in the Arizona mountains. It enters through a courtyard garden. It opens this fall. It is 24 seats.

Guest

• Matt McCallister on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/matthewt.mcallister/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
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Hanalei Souza is the sous chef, author, and content creator behind @ladylinecook, one of the most recognized culinary humor and leadership voices on Instagram with 88,000 followers. She has been in the industry since 2018, has worked at the same restaurant for seven years in a mountain town, and is the self-published author of the kitchen memoir "Nice Work, Boys!" She started making cooking videos on YouTube at age 14, posted with no audience for 11 years, and went viral on Instagram in 2022. She was flown to Texas by commercial kitchen equipment brand Cuchimix, which is how she ended up at Just Push Record Studios in Austin for this episode. The episode was also recorded twice because André forgot to press record the first time.

This episode opens with the night a man was literally on fire outside her restaurant. Hanalei grabbed a kitchen fire extinguisher, pulled the pin, chased him down the street, helped save his life, and then went back inside to finish the last three hours of service. That is the opening story. It gets better from there.

• Why a title earns zero automatic respect in a kitchen and how the only path to genuine authority is being the person who can actually do every job in the building
• What the night she burned $300 in New York strips as a new sous chef taught her about leadership, integrity, and why a good chef does not fire you for one mistake
• Why creators who build their platform by complaining about the industry are doing more damage than the toxic kitchens they claim to expose

André Natera and Hanalei Souza cover the clipboard fear she had as a line cook and why she now runs four of them, why 80 percent of her job as sous chef is still hands on the food, the transition from being everyone's friend on the line to being the person responsible for their stations, and the social media conversation that the culinary world needs to have about what viral actually means and who it serves. The episode closes with her Mount Rushmore of chefs, her Mount Rushmore of culinary content creators, and a shoutout to Cuchimix and the women's chef coat she co-created with Funky Chef.

Guest

• Hanalei Souza on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/ladylinecook/
• Lady Line Cook Website → https://www.ladylinecook.com/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Chef RJ Yoakum is the chef de cuisine at Michelin-recommended Sushi Kozy in Dallas, a kaiseki-inspired omakase restaurant from chef-owner Paul Ko. A 2025 James Beard Award finalist for Emerging Chef, he previously led the kitchen at Georgie in Dallas to its first Michelin recommendation and trained at The French Laundry, Angler, and The Clove Club in London.

He is 32 years old. He has trained in some of the most demanding kitchens in the world. And in this episode, he says that the more successful he became in Dallas, internally he was broken.

• Why four excellent elements on a plate always beat seven mediocre ones, and how learning to edit is what separates mature cooking from the need to prove yourself
• How cooking meat and fish whole on the bone and portioning after service protects yield, improves consistency, and teaches teams to develop real judgment instead of following a timer
• What nobody tells you when you leave a three-star kitchen to lead your own, why the resume gets you in but culture has to be built from zero, and why the army disappears the moment you need it most

André Natera and RJ Yoakum cover the TFL classics that shaped his approach, the asparagus question of when technique serves the ingredient versus when it gets in the way, the mentorship of David Breeden and Thomas Keller and what it actually transferred, the imposter syndrome that followed his success in Dallas, and the leadership lessons that only made sense once he was on the other side of them. The episode closes with his Mount Rushmore, rapid fire questions, and what he is building at Sushi Kozy.

This episode is sponsored by Rational USA. Learn more at https://rationalusa.com

Todd Duplechan and Jessica Maher are the husband-and-wife chef-owners of Lenoir, a MICHELIN Guide restaurant in Austin's Bouldin Creek neighborhood open since 2012. They also formerly owned Métier Cook's Supply next door and opened Boni's Bar, a Spanish drinks and bites concept, in Spring 2026. Todd is a native Texan who trained at The Danube under David Bouley and served as chef de cuisine at the Four Seasons Austin before opening Lenoir. Jessica cooked through the Bouley restaurant family and at Tabla with Floyd Cardoz and Gray Kunz before moving to Austin. They met through the Bouley restaurants and have built Lenoir together for 14 years.

This episode is about the gap between technically skilled and genuinely great, and what it actually takes to close it.

• Why great cooking is built through process, patience, and accumulated experience, and why social media trends actively work against that development
• The foundational cookbook list every serious cook should own, from Ducasse's Grand Livre de Cuisine to Jacques Pépin's La Technique to Paul Bertolli's Cooking by Hand
• How mentorship through observation, athletic team dynamics, and genuine hospitality have kept Lenoir evolving for 14 years without losing what makes it worth returning to

André Natera, Todd Duplechan, and Jessica Maher cover Todd's stage at The Danube, being hired, and the 12-course meal at the pass that changed how he understood professional cooking, how they met through the Bouley restaurant family, what separates cooks who develop into great chefs from those who plateau, and the teamwork and hospitality philosophy that has driven Lenoir's 14-year evolution. The episode closes with rapid fire kitchen gear, the chef Mount Rushmore, and the story behind Métier and Boni's Bar.

Guest

• Todd Duplechan on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/duplechananigans/
• Lenoir on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/lenoiratx/
• Boni's Bar on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/bonisbaratx/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Chef Brian Lewis is the founder and CEO of Full House Hospitality Group and a three-time James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef Northeast, with nominations in 2018, 2022, and 2025. A Culinary Institute of America and Johnson and Wales University graduate, he apprenticed under Jean Louis Palladin, Marco Pierre White, and Eric Ripert before becoming the founding executive chef of Richard Gere's The Bedford Post Inn, which earned Esquire's Best New Restaurant in 2009 and an Excellent review from The New York Times. In 2015 he founded Full House Hospitality Group, which now operates The Cottage in Westport and Greenwich, Connecticut, and OKO in Westport and Rye, New York, with 125 employees across four locations.

This episode opens with a story about a job interview that most chefs would have walked away from. Lewis did not walk away. He secretly prepared an eight-course meal before anyone asked, controlled the entire tasting, and landed the role that gave him what he calls a PhD in opening and operating a restaurant from the ground up.

How he built Full House Hospitality Group around a single principle: only expand when operations can thrive without you in the room

Why empowering teams with genuine autonomy inside defined guardrails is the only leadership model that scales across four restaurants and 125 people

How strategy and psychology replaced technique as his primary tools when he made the shift from chef to CEO

André Natera and Brian Lewis cover the identity shift required when a chef stops being the creative voice in the kitchen and starts leading other chefs to express theirs, the role of kindness as a non-negotiable management standard, navigating reviews and social media pressure across multiple concepts, and the research trip to Japan that preceded the launch of OKO. The episode closes with rapid fire kitchen gear, stocks and dashi minimalism, and the chef Mount Rushmore.

Guest

• Brian Lewis on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/brianlewischef/
• Full House Hospitality on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/fullhousehg/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef