Lasagna Time with Billy and Kyle

Pull up a bowl of noodles and join your hosts and guest Joe Brady for a discussion on one of cinema’s essential delights and love letters to food, Juzo Itami’s TAMPOPO! We talk about the beauty of populist art, food and cinema’s inextricable link as a form of nourishment, and the simple beauty of egoless effort into refining one’s craft.

Sausages are snipped, peaches are picked, and cake is catapulted! Film writer Marya E. Gates comes on the pod to evangelize Věra Chytilová's DAISIES, a gem of the Czech New Wave and an amazing (and highly underrated) food film. In DAISIES, meals are key to sugar babying, class deconstruction, and women's pursuit of pleasure. Come for the subversive feminist romp, stay for the astounding food fight.

Someone notorious for snatching the Best Picture trophy from the boxed gloves of RAGING BULL, ORDINARY PEOPLE is the rumbling domestic drama about an upper class family — starring Donald Sutherland, Timothy Hutton, and Mary Tyler Moore, and Judd Hirsch as the therapist Hutton begins to see — about the fall apart from the pain no one will acknowledge and the roles no one is good at playing. Its precisely selected food moments articulate a unit at the breaking point and a questioning, too, of the legacy of white suburban familial “happiness” in cinema. Writer and Oscar aficionado Mark Harris, the author of MIKE NICHOLS: A LIFE and PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION, joins us to discus how something as small as unwanted Fence toast can set off a chain reaction of events in a single family. We also play a game of Sounds Like a Suburban Snack to Me and discuss what’s giving us Lasagna Time feels this week.

On "Mare of Easttown," food is comfort, food is a weapon, and food is even in Fruit Ninja. (God bless Jean Smart.) On this episode, Easttownologist Lexi McMenamin (no relation to the show's fictional Erin, we think?) discusses how this hit HBO show reveals how food plays into the silence, violence, and coping that is emblematic of a kind of whiteness not often seen in media.

It took us 23 episodes, but we’re finally basking in the shimmering Italian summer heat of Call Me By Your Name. Vanity Fair’s incredibly charming and witty Richard Lawson joins Billy and Kyle talk about the class implications of the food and how it shapes Elio and Oliver’s perspectives about pleasure and work, the ecosystem of labor in the film, the soft boiled eggs, the fish, and, yes, we talk about the peach. And the hosts explore how the film, which Kyle famously dislikes, interrogates how food and the body is a central part of our conceptions of desire, while capping off this week’s episode with a game of Sounds Like a Gay Food to Me.

With an outstanding guest like The Washington Post’s Anying Guo, we certainly indulged in this episode — and fortunately were not turned into pigs. The same cannot be said for Chihiro’s parents in Miyazaki’s masterpiece SPIRITED AWAY. With Anying, hosts Billy and Kyle dive into food as temptation, love, and a remembrance of things past and then play some She Anim-ated What? in this week’s episode

Whether dining at Luke’s, ordering takeout, or getting gussied up for some debutante dinner, we’re always ready to eat up what GILMORE GIRLS has to offer. Guest Vox’s Constance Grady joins Lasagna Time to discuss the class implications of how the Gilmores eat, the frustrating fatphobia, and how the show weaves intimacy and complicated familial relationships in with its cooked goods.

This week, we have fun Binging with Babish! Comedian Jay Jurden joins the pod to dive into the detailed culinary world of Babish’s YouTube empire, where foods from beloved films and TV shows are recreated. Following a shared ode to Babish, Jay, Kyle, and Billy reflect on the improvisational elements of cooking and comedy before playing a meta game and sharing Lasagna Time Feels.

We board the USS Enterprise and explore a galaxy unfamiliar to the hosts with a special guest, mixologist and writer‬ John deBary, diving into the starry, complex universe of food on STAR TREK. From Klingon food to alliterative, color changing cocktails, we talk about memory, technique, and STAR TREK’s history of blending politics with carefully rendered in-universe details, and also give a shout out to a Top Chef queen.

The New Yorker's Rachel Syme joins "Lasagna Time" for the podcast's most food-forward episode yet: a savoring of Nora Ephron's JULIE & JULIA. Alongside hosts Kyle and Billy, Rachel dives into Julia Childs' mastering the art of French cooking, Julie Powell's era-defining blog, and the culinary bridges that unite and divide their stories.