One of my all-time favorite food writers is Amanda Hesser, the co-founder of Food52 and author of The New York Times Cookbook, and it's a huge thrill to have her on Lunch Therapy this week. In today's session, I ask her all about Cooking for Mr. Latte (one of my all-time favorite food books), how she went from being a writer to starting a business, being super detail oriented, portraying herself as unlikable in her book, and the food writers that she read at the start of her career. We also learn about how she doesn't like lunch, the new Food52 offices, her lunch with Julia Child, and most fascinating of all: the CBS Mr. Latte sitcom that never was!

The James Beard award-winning biographer of James Beard, John Birdsall, swings by the office today for a lunch therapy session. We talk all about who'd be the best actor to play James Beard, how the pandemic interrupted his book tour plans, raw onions, working at Deborah Madison's Greens in a Zen Center in SF, and how his gentle temperament worked in a restaurant kitchen. We also cover being out as a chef in SF in the 90s, how the AIDS crisis played out in restaurants, Jeremiah Tower's lawsuit, and much more.

Dwight Garner is one of the most feared and yet funny voices in the pages of The New York Times Book Review, where he's one of their most beloved critics, as well as the former editor. He's now the author of a brand new book called The Upstairs Delicatessen and in today's session we talk all about being a book critic with a book, facing the authors whose books he pans, reading his wife's work, how he stays focused (and gets through three hundred pages in a day), and how he knows so many literary quotes. We also cover his membership in The Organ Meat Society, the three martini lunch, how he makes his martinis, celebrity cookbooks, our dogs, and much much more.

Welcome back to Lunch Therapy! Today's patient, Abi Balingit, is the creator of the blog ⁠The Dusky Kitchen⁠ and the author of the brand new, Filipino-American dessert cookbook, ⁠Mayumu⁠. In today's session, we talk all about growing up in California, her parents' Filipino background, the food that they cooked and how she took a lot of it for granted. We also cover banana ketchup, Capri Sun, making food for charity, working a non-food job, cooking with her boyfriend, and America's rising interest in Filipino cuisine.