New Worlder

Today’s episode is an introduction to Juliana Duque as the New Worlder podcast’s new co-host. Juliana, or Juli as I tend to call her, was born in Colombia and now lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of the book Sabor de Casa and is a writer, editor, consultant, producer and many other things. She has a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Cornell University and for many years has been very involved in various development projects that relate to Colombian and Latin American gastronomy.

Juliana is someone that understands the magnitude and vastness of cuisine in Latin America, but also that gastronomy in the region is still very much developing. When I say developing I don’t mean commercially or that there are more fine dining restaurants yet to come, I mean the infrastructure to connect rural producers with consumers, to maintain foodways, preserve agricultural and cultural diversity and give people access to nutritious food that doesn’t destroy landscapes and give them terrible diseases.

When I started this podcast a couple of years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t to some extent. It was still the middle of the pandemic and I just started to have conversations with people and record them. I have learned a lot from the people I have had on. A lot of interesting things have been said that I think you won’t hear anywhere else. Maybe you are thinking this podcast is already perfect. That I’m perfect. That’s obviously not true and I’m actually quite bad in general at conversation, as you may have noticed. I think I’m a very good listener and creating an atmosphere that lets the guest’s guard down and allows them to open up, however, I often struggle with asking the right questions. Juli and I have very different backgrounds. Her work is generally more analytical, while mine is more about storytelling, so for this podcast I think we complement each other well. It's a new year, so this is as good a time as any to take this show in a new direction. I hope you enjoy what is yet to come.

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Sebastian La Rocca, who is the Argentina-born chef at the restaurant FYR in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. It’s a Latin American live fire restaurant that opened inside of a new Hilton Columbus Downtown Hotel right on High Street in the middle of the city in late 2022. I have known Sebastian for years from his work in Costa Rica, where he ran the restaurant at the El Mangroove Hotel in Guanacaste, and then opened up an open fire restaurant called Botanika outside of San José, which was one of New Worlder’s Best New Restaurants when it opened. When he told me he was moving to Columbus I was completely surprised, but I immediately thought that it was one of the smartest decisions any chef I’ve ever met has made. I can tell just from my interactions with him over the past year that he is happier. He went to cook in a city that appreciates what he can do and not to win awards and recognition, though he is getting it anyway. It was a decision to move his family there so they could live a happier life. So many young chefs tell me they want to open in New York or somewhere because it is their dream. Really, that’s your dream as a cook? Shouldn’t it be to make good food that people enjoy and provides you a comfortable life? That can be New York or San Francisco or London or Tokyo, but it doesn’t have to be. You can cook from anywhere. There are cities like Columbus everywhere. Why not open in Trujillo, Peru instead of Lima? Or Manaus instead of Sao Paulo? Every cook I know that’s moved outside the centralized media market, outside of the industry bubble and found their place has been a thousand times happier and they are cooking better food for it.  

Fyr, Sebastian’s restaurant, has been getting great reviews in local media and he has been bringing a lot of prominent Latin American chefs to Ohio to cook at the restaurant, such as Costa Rica’s Pablo Bonilla and Panama’s Mario Castrellón. It’s kind of weird. These are guys I know from Latin America an have written about a lot that are suddenly in Columbus. It’s kind of two worlds colliding for me.

I grew up here and went to college here. It’s basically all I knew until I was in my 20s. I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about growing up completely disconnected from where the food I ate was coming from. On the episode with Farmer Lee Jones, who runs Chef’s Garden in northern Ohio, I talk about how there weren’t any farms around. There were just corn and soy fields you drove past on the highway. And all of the restaurants were chains and concepts. I started writing about food in Ohio when I was 19, I think, and it wasn’t really until then that I started questioning things. A culinary movement was just beginning there then, with Jeni’s, now a well-known ice cream purveyor, opening in the North Market. There were a handful of fine dining restaurants that were being vocal about supporting local farms, and after I left it just kept kind of evolving. There are really great restaurants there now, both at the high and low end. My old neighborhood is full of Nepalese, Mexican and Salvadoran restaurants, and there has been a lot influence from North Africa and Southeast Asia elsewhere in the city. There are still too many concept restaurants for my taste, but there are more restaurants that are created organically and have creative food with good ingredients and nice drinks to balance it out. It’s a very different place from where I grew up and it’s because of people like Sebastian moving there and bringing new ideas.

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Mariano Carranza is a Lima, Peru born Emmy award nominated documentary filmmaker that lives in Brooklyn, New York. You may have seen some of his work, such as the Miami episode of the Netflix series Street Food, which he directed, or some of the mini-docs he made for Vice and CNN’s Great Big Story. His latest film is called Pachacútec, The Improbable School, which recently had its premier at the San Sebastián International Film Festival’s Culinary Zinema section, organized with the Basque Culinary Center. The film is about three students that trained at Fundación Pachacútec, a culinary school in the desert hills of Ventanilla outside of Lima, Peru and where their lives have led since enrolling. The school was built with the help of chef Gastón Acurio and is said to get 350 applications every six months, though can only admit 25 people per semester. Over the last 20 years it has had more than 400 graduates and many of those graduates have gone on to accomplish incredible things. It’s a great culinary film that hopefully everyone will get to watch very soon. Find out more about Mariano’s work at his website.

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Giovanni Marbese, or Gio, as I know him, is an Italian food anthropologist and owns Tone Bread Lab, an experimental bakery in Milan. It’s a funny story how I know this guy. I was staying in Milan, close to the bakery, a year ago and a friend recommended I go there for breakfast. I went in and ordered a coffee and a pastry and there was one table open to sit and I sat down and the Slippurinn book I co-authored just happened to be sitting there. Aside of it being me that sat there, this is an Icelandic cookbook on the table of a bakery in Milan. Think about that. Then, I was in Iceland this past July and I went to Slippurinn, the restaurant from the book, and Gio was there and I got to know him better. He has done a lot of work with food in the Nordic region, so it wasn’t that odd that he was there, but, another strange coincidence. Anyway, Gio has worked with Slow Food within the Ark of Taste project for years. It’s an online catalogue of endangered food around the world, and he was also co-coordinator of the Nordic Countries communities of Slow Food. He has come up with all sorts of creative ideas about safeguarding cuisines and disappearing ingredients and foods that are disappearing. Tone is an offshoot of that. He regularly uses endangered ingredients and inside the bakery he has this traditional Georgian bread oven, called Tone. We discuss everything he has going on at the bread lab, as well as everything else he has going on, like the Milano Food Project, Phantom Bread and Food Emotions.

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Danny Childs is the author of the phenomenal new cocktail book Slow Drinks. It’s a book about incorporating the ingredients that are growing around you into the bar. I was sent an advanced copy of the book in the Spring and it has been one of my most used recipe books. Maybe ever. First of all, Danny, prior to becoming a bartender, has done a lot of ethnobotanical work with indigenous communities such as the Shipibo and Mapuche in South America, and that has influenced how he thinks about making cocktails, so he already had my interest there. But applying that knowledge to where he lives in New Jersey with local flora is really something, I think, is quite revolutionary. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think this is where the world of cocktails is heading. Some cocktail bars will be run more like restaurants rather than nightclubs and rather than just relying on branded spirits, the bartenders will make their own, not to mention all of the other pieces that go into making a cocktail, using the flavors they are growing all around wherever they are. It will lead to cocktail bars with a sense of place.

Danny took over the drinks program at a tavern in the suburbs of New Jersey at The Farm and Fisherman Tavern in Cherry Hill, not far from Philadelphia, and did this very thing. His work there has received a lot of attention and that’s why he wrote Slow Drinks, which is as much of a foundational book about building your bar as it is a collection of recipes. He’s no longer with the restaurant and building a bigger concept around the idea of Slow Drinks, so I expect to see him giving lectures and leading workshops, among other things. Follow @SlowDrinks on Instagram to stay up to date with everything he is doing.

When I say it’s building a foundation for your bar, it’s not just syrups. It’s seasonal amaros. It’s spruce beer. It’s making amaretto from peach pits or root beer from sassafras. It’s a transformational cocktail book and I hope a lot of people read it. Danny is by no means the only person doing these things, but creating this book is something that allows a lot of different people to do them. People like me, for instance. You don’t have to live in the northeastern United States for the recipes to make sense either. They are flexible enough that you can swap in ingredients from wherever you are.

Order Slow Drinks here.

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This episode is something I haven’t done before. It’s a special episode recorded during the Matey Seafood Festival on Iceland’s Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, also called the Westman Islands. There are a number of interviews and soundbites from people that live there, as well as Shruthi Basappa, a food writer from the Reykjavík Grapevine, and some of the visiting chefs that came for the festival, Cúán Greene of Ómós in Ireland and Adam Qureshi from Kol in London. I spent much of the summer of 2019 on the island of Heimaey, the only inhabited island there, there while writing the book about the restaurant Slippurinn with the chef there, Gísli Matthías Auðunsson, aka Gísli Matt. I’ve a relationship with Iceland that extends far prior to this book, however, and I’ll explain that a little more later on. It was quite fun to put this together so, I hope you enjoy it. I might do some more in the field recording in the future.

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Host: Nicholas Gill
Co-host: Juliana Duque
Produced by Nicholas Gill & Juliana Duque
Recording & Editing by New Worlder 
Email: [email protected]
Read more at New Worlder: https://www.newworlder.com

This episode is something I haven’t done before. It’s a special episode recorded during the Matey Seafood Festival on Iceland’s Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, also called the Westman Islands. There are a number of interviews and soundbites from people that live there, as well as Shruthi Basappa, a food writer from the Reykjavík Grapevine, and some of the visiting chefs that came for the festival, Cúán Greene of Ómós in Ireland and Adam Qureshi from Kol in London. I spent much of the summer of 2019 on the island of Heimaey, the only inhabited island there, there while writing the book about the restaurant Slippurinn with the chef there, Gísli Matthías Auðunsson, aka Gísli Matt. I’ve a relationship with Iceland that extends far prior to this book, however, and I’ll explain that a little more later on. It was quite fun to put this together so, I hope you enjoy it. I might do some more in the field recording in the future.

New Worlder is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

EXTRA: Select dishes from Matey’s guest chefs using local seafood

Pollock steamed in sugarkelp, kelp butter, saltbaked new potatoes & saffron from Cúán Greene of Ómós at Slippurinn.

Cod carnitas with buckwheat tortillas, cod pil pil, smaelki potatoes, cod cheeks, sea urchin and habanero salsa from Adam Qureshi of Kol at Gott.

Slow cooked cod in brown butter, orange glaze & celeriac cake from Adrien Bouquet at Næs.

Tuscany Panzanella: shrimp, capelin roe, lardo di Colonnata and burrata from Francesco Triscornia at Einsi Kaldi.

Pastel de elote: sweetcorn cake with “súrmjólk,” berries, chamomile and dulse macha from Adam Qureshi of Kol at Gott.

Scallop & “slátur” dumplings, cabbage, lamb broth, & sea truffles from Cúán Greene of Ómós at Slippurinn.

For more information:- The Matey Seafood festival- Iceland’s Vestmannaeyjar archipelago

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René Frank is the chef and owner of the two Michelin star restaurant Coda in Berlin, Germany. Coda is a dessert restaurant, but what that means is probably not what you expect it to mean. It doesn’t mean that everything on the menu is sweet. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t savory courses. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t umami elements in the dishes. What René is doing is re-imagining dessert and fine dining.

I love sweet things, but in terms of fine dining, I always feel they are so disconnected to the rest of the meal. You have all these savory courses and at the end this, rich sugary finish. And a lot of the time it is too much. It doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious, but it often leaves your body feeling awful. This isn’t necessarily the fault of the pastry chef, it’s just a lack of cohesiveness of the menu and trying to understand what a diner needs as opposed to what the restaurant wants to show them or what historically contemporary pastry is supposed to be. René uses the pastry kitchen to showcase natural flavors, not just techniques, and uses the best ingredients possible. So that means he cuts out all the industrial things that are normally found in pastry kitchens, such as refined sugars. Even though it is a dessert restaurant, so to speak, he has probably thought more about balance and what goes into every dish than 99.9 percent of the chefs in the world.

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Luiz Filipe Souza, the chef restaurant Evvai, in São Paulo, Brazil. Evvai, is a Brazilian restaurant with Italian influences, though sometimes that gets lost in translation and it’s just called an Italian restaurant. Brazil, and São Paulo in particular, has a massive Italian heritage. I don’t think a lot of people really understand how extensive it is. There was as much Italian migration there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as there was in Buenos Aires or New York. The influences are many. You see it in the mortadella sandwiches. You see it in the service of fine dining restaurants. Some of my best meals in the city have been Italian leaning, like Marco Renzetti’s Pettirosso, which transformed into Fame Osteria, and Fasano, inside the hotel of the same name. Evvai’s cuisine is called Oriundi, which refers to a migrant centered idea of Italian food. So, it’s not trying to replicate Italian cuisine, but use it as inspiration. Luiz and I talk a lot about how he doesn’t feel quite as boxed in with the concept as he once did, especially since the pandemic. Some dishes on the menu might look completely Brazilian and he’s fine with that. If you like at Evvai’s Instagram you’ll see a lot of dishes that definitely do look lie traditional Italian food. There is some pasta, but lots of non-Italian restaurants have pasta. The line is very blurred between what is Italian and what isn’t. There is freedom in that and I think his food, and I cannot say for sure as I haven’t been there, is probably better for that.

-Nicholas Gill

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Andrew Wong is the chef of the two Michelin star restaurant A.Wong in London, England. Andrew grew up working in his parents’ restaurant, a straightforward Cantonese restaurant called Kym’s, and had no desire to go into the restaurant business.  He went to Oxford to study chemistry, then switched to social anthropology, and then his father passed, so he jumped back into to the restaurant business to help his mother. He started to think about the relationship between food and culture and started visiting China and exploring its regional cuisines. Eventually, he re-imagined the restaurant around these cuisines. In our conversation, we discuss how this all came to be, and what his mindset was going into it. He continues researching regional Chinese recipes, texts and artwork through SOAS University, much of which he talks about alongside food anthropologist Dr Mukta Das on his podcast XO Soused, which is also here on Substack.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newworlder.substack.com/subscribe