🎙️ EP161 - Chefs live and die by the prep list. This episode is kitchen discipline: owning your section, juggling a thousand timers, costing without bullshit, and letting go of those ego dishes nobody orders.

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

📋 Night Prep Lists – Building a bulletproof station

🐂 Grab the Bull by the Horns – Taking real control of your section (and surviving clopening)

🗣️ Commies, Demi, CDP – Communication and chain of command that actually works

⏱️ Chefs as Project Managers – Living inside a storm of timers

💻 Apps & Excel – Why most kitchen software still sucks

📊 Costing 101 – Steak, fries, rosemary salt & the hidden percentages

💸 Margin of Error – Airport pricing and not lying to yourself

📈 Dynamic Pricing – When burgers behave like plane tickets

🤝 Front of House Magic – The golden goose and the perfect check

⭐ Dogs, Plow Horses & Stars – Menu engineering for real kitchens

🥔 Buying Better Product – Quality vs. racing to the bottom

🧠 Ego Dishes – Specials, sweetbreads & gently educating guests

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🎙️ E160 – We got told we “know nothing about hospitality.” So we cracked open the word, the history, the ego, the danger, and the beauty of inviting someone in.

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

🤬 Instagram Says We “Know Nothing” About Hospitality

📖 Hostis: Guest, Enemy, Stranger

🤝 Host vs Guest — Power, Grace, Boundaries

🎁 The Art of Giving

⭐ Arzak's Bad Reviews -Trip Advisor Rage

🍬 Avant-Garde Gone Too Far

🔥 Elkano × Josh Niland: Two Fish Wizards

🐟 Fish Eyes, Bone “Mero” & Dirty Hands

🍨 Fish Collagen Ice Cream

🪄 Collaboration as Hospitality

🧷 Vulnerability, Limits & Saying “No”

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🎙️ EP159 - We pray to the tire god—patron saint of burnout and greenwashing. The cult of squared perfection, fake sustainability, and the insanity of chasing stars. This one’s for every cook who’s ever asked—what are we really cooking for?

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

🌿 Michelin’s Vanishing Clover – Green Star sudden disappearance

🛞 Love–Hate with the Tire God – Worship, whips, and whiplash stars

🌟 What Michelin Was (Maybe) – The old religion of “excellence”

✝️ Brand as Church – Crosses, Bibendum, and belief engineering

🎥 Puglisi’s Rant – Square fish, round lies, and waste (the video)

📖 Storytelling vs. Truth – Farm porn, misty fields, and menu fiction

🦋 Noma, Mugaritz & Myth – When narrative flavors the dish

⏰ Human Cost – Overworked brigades, perfect squares, and burnout

🃏 Fooling the Inspectors – Staged rooms, borrowed petit fours, instant stars

🍲 Cook for Stars or Self? – Freedom vs. validation addiction

⏳ Michelin is Obsolete – What if tomorrow all stars disappeared ?

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🎙️ EP158 - There’s a difference between a place that looks cool and a place that feels right. One has soul, the other comes with a mood board and hashtags. The ones we love need no gimmicks, just good taste, hot planchas, cold anchovies, and the kind of energy that makes you think, “Damn… I wish I’d open this.”

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

🌿 Cafe Botanic – Dirty chai, quiet gardens, plant-based cheese that fooled us

🍴 La Brillantina – Latin American fusion done right

🥪 Ultramarinos & Ultra Paninos – Plancha, garum splash, house bread & charcuterie

🐟 Rooftop Smokehouse – Smoked-butter anchovies worth the pilgrimage

🍞 Origo & Lot (Barcelona) – Pastry labs, cocoa drinks, Mobb Deep on the speakers

🥯 Lille Bakery (Copenhagen) – Rustic bread, pink-sugar donuts, community tables

🪄 The Vibe – Authenticity > aesthetics; rooms built by people who care

🔥 Saison (SF) – Wood embers, primal precision, ingredients doing the talking

🌶️ Nikkei Tricks – Ceviche mayo on fried chicken, binchotan oil, bright tiraditos

🍳 Brunch Done Right – Turkish eggs, pastrami melts, and why hipster brunch slaps

🥗 Annelies Kohlrabi Salad – Mustard, hazelnut, Thai basil, perfect simplicity

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🎙️ EP157 - Foie gras with white chocolate. Anchovies in a cake. Jamón fat in flan. Sounds wrong—until it’s not. This episode is about breaking the rules and laughing at anyone who says, “that’s not how it’s done.”

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

🍰 Savory Desserts – Blue cheese cheesecake, anchovy tart & foie gras ideas

🦆 Foie Gras Ganache – White chocolate, corn nuts & San Sebastián flashbacks

🍣 Sweet Sushi – Truffle, yuzu, and why dessert can be purely savory too

🥖 Bread Course – When carbs take center stage

🧈 Butter vs Olive Oil – The eternal kitchen divide

🇪🇸 Iberico Ham – Spain’s magic animal and Anthony Bourdain memories

🔥 Jamón Cheesecake & Ham Fat Flan – When pork sneaks into pastry

🤬 Culinary Orthodoxy – It's okay to do things differently!

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🎙️ EP156 – 700 covers. Tickets spilling to the floor. Grill in freefall. This episode is about the nights everything falls apart, and why that’s where real cooks are made.

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

🔥 Friday-Night Meltdown — When the pass loses the plot and how to reset

🧾 Ticket Tsunami — Reading, batching, and staying ahead of the board

🥩 Grill Triage — “Fire everything” vs. perfect sear and rest

🧠 Prioritize & Execute — Jocko’s playbook for the line

🧘 Detach to Survive — Mind control under pressure

🧮 Mental Mapping — Keeping six tables in your head without dying

📣 Expo Done Right — FOH-led pass calls and flow

🐻 The Bear IRL — What the show nails

🍜 Din Tai Fung — Systems, speed, and consistency at scale

🔥 Wok Logic — A la minute skill from Chinese & Japanese kitchens

🇵🇪 Chifa Legends — Javier Wong, ceviche + wok, and doing two things perfectly

📋 Small Menus, Big Impact — Why fewer dishes hit harder

🏗️ Kitchen as System — Leadership, stress management, and getting your grip back

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🎙️ EP155 – Phil & Eric are back on The Line: the guests who test your patience, the ones who treat the menu like a suggestion, and the quiet power of saying NO when everyone expects you to bend.

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

👨‍🍳 Back belly, underbelly, and serving up “The Line Pt. 9”

👀 Open Kitchen Reality – Early signs of trouble before the first ticket drops

🔄 Annoying Guests – The one that rearranged the whole dining room

🧾 Off-Menu Madness – When “Can I have this without that?” breaks the system

💸 Partial Refunds, Full Integrity – When keeping your rep means eating the cost

💬 Review Warfare – Turning a 4★ into a 5★ without selling your soul

🧘 Boundaries as Brand – “No soup for you” and other small victories

🥣 The Soup Suitcase – VIPs and their crazy requests 19:16

🧪 Dietary Minefields – Gluten-free, vegan, and the high price of “special”

🚫 Entitlement Kills Experience – How one guest can ruin service for twenty

🗾 Japan’s No-Sub Culture – Why respect tastes better than entitlement

👨‍🍳 When We Do Bend – Freestyling dishes vs tanking quality

📋 Menu on the Fly – The Dos Palillos discipline of rewriting in real time

🗣️ Hospitality Backbone – Saying NO clearly, kindly, and once

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🎙️ EP154 — Basque fire, Bangkok chaos: From Mugaritz to Noma and now the streets of Thailand, Chef Iñaki Bolumburu turns a 35-seat speakeasy into a traveling txoko where the market writes the menu, charcoal does the talking, and “waste” gets a second life.

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

🏡 Basque Roots – Farmhouse life, family kitchens, and early sparks

🎓 Bilbao School Days – Bad student, good instincts

🔥 Mugaritz Breakthrough – “Everything is possible”

🌍 Learning English in the Kitchen – Cooking abroad without words

👨‍🍳 Noma & Azurmendi – Creativity and foraging on another level

🏛️ Nerua Lessons – Mentorship, travel, and purpose

✈️ First Pop-Up – Grief turned into motion

❄️ Force Creativity – From waste to byproduct to dish

🌪️ Pop-Up Snowball – 40 countries, countless ideas

🇵🇹 Portugal Collab – Cooking with Vasco Coelho Santos

🇹🇭 Bangkok Chaos – The accidental Amalur

🔥 Fire Language – 80% of the menu on charcoal

💡 Txoko Philosophy – Basque hospitality abroad

🥩 Product Over Prestige – Local fish, honest salt

🥢 Basque vs Thai – Minimal meets maximal

🧪 Locavore Lessons – Sustainability done right

🎒 Nomad Tour – Europe, foraging, and family

🏠 Inside Amalur – 35 seats, one chef, full heart

🍷 Natural Wine & Firewater – No frills, just flavor

🧁 Simple Desserts – Olive oil cakes and pickled fruit

🧘‍♂️ Health Reset – Quitting tobacco, finding balance

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🎙️ EP153 – More audience questions. More proof that breaking rules and ignoring common sense sometimes makes food more delicious. From soggy chicken skin to overcooked pasta, sometimes wrong tastes right.

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode

🍗 Soggy Chicken Skin — Hainanese chicken, hot-water trick, poached bounce

🌿 Ugly Greens — Army-green spinach

🥧 Recipes That Shouldn’t Work — Boiled-butter citrus curd, silky and perfect

🍝 Overcooked Pasta? — 25-minute spaghetti, risotto-style al dente

🥬 Wok-Fried Salad — Tossing mixed greens hot and fast

🎭 Trends We’d Kill (and Keep) — Gimmicks out, bistro classics forever

😭 When Food Hits Emotion — Gratitude bites in Japan, a son’s first omelet

🧪 Cooking Myths Torched — Searing “locks juices,” & more

🤖 AI Recipes — They're mostly robot hallucinations.

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🎙️ EP152 – From Wall Street to Berlin Burger Joint: Sachin Obaid eats more fine dining than anyone we know. But his true masterpiece? A burger that tells his life story.

🎧 Topics Covered in This Episode:

📈 From Finance to Fryers – line-level pressure on Wall Street and on the pass

🥒 Gilda Memories – a dirty martini that tasted like San Sebastián

🌍 Third-Culture Cooking – India meets the U.S. inside a bun

🧪 Pandemic Pop-Up Playbook – Shopify menus, zero-waste pantries, perfect sell-outs

🧂 Real Spices, Real Problems – potency, ports, and why your cardamom is dead'

🔥 Kerala Fried Chicken – Southern technique, South Indian soul

🍔 Gully Burger – masala patties, chutneys, and a sesame-seed grin

⭐ Hype vs Taste – why star systems don’t guarantee goosebumps

🥩 Etxebarri Truth – the steak that resets your compass

🍷 Hidden Spain – off-map temples (hello, Galicia)

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