The Sporkful

By day, Scott Wiener leads pizza tours around New York City. By night, he shares his Brooklyn apartment with his world record-holding pizza box collection. Since going all in on pizza, he’s visited tomato farms in California and buffalo farms in Italy, and even planned entire vacations around visits to pizza box factories.

In France, you either leave your desk during lunch, or you’re breaking the law. Which makes Kaitlin Plachy, an American expat in Strasbourg who secretly eats at her desk most days, an outlaw. So why do the French have this law?

Chefs and YouTube stars Sohla and Ham El-Waylly first met in culinary school, where they geeked out over hydrocolloids and molecular gastronomy. Since then they’ve gotten married, opened (and closed) a restaurant together, and spent countless hours collaborating in the kitchen, on screen and off.

After 15 years as an opera singer and winning a Grammy and a Tony, Alexander Smalls got turned down for a lead role at the Metropolitan Opera. He’d hit the same glass ceiling that held back many Black opera singers before him. He went home, drank a bottle of wine, and came to a realization.

What has to happen for Vietnamese lemongrass barbecue sauce to take up as much space as Texas barbecue sauce on an American grocery store shelf? There’s a whole generation of young entrepreneurs — many of them women of color — making packaged foods that are expanding the palate of American shoppers. This week, live on stage in Brooklyn, Dan is talking with two of these businesspeople: Chitra Agrawal, founder of Brooklyn Delhi, and Vanessa Pham, the CEO of Omsom.

Dan goes on an adventure around Los Angeles, starting at the airport. Where is he going? He doesn't know.

Wherever Phil Rosenthal goes, he wants to eat — which explains the name of his Netflix show, Somebody Feed Phil. He travels the world with wide eyes, an empty stomach, and a bottomless supply of delight at the people and food he encounters. And before Somebody Feed Phil and his new podcast Naked Lunch, Phil created the hit sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, which used food as a key source of tension between the characters.

Dan gives up the hosting chair and becomes a contestant in our most popular (and only) Sporkful game show, 2 Chefs And A Lie! The game is simple. Dan talks with three “chefs.”

Barbecue is America’s culinary national pastime. Dozens of  books have been written about it, food writers criss-cross the country looking for the best places, and people wait hours to eat at the most famous spots. In his book The Cooking Gene, culinary historian Michael Twitty traces the path that barbecue traveled from West Africa to the American South — and how enslaved cooks in plantation kitchens created Southern cuisine.

Fernando Frías was a successful cafe and restaurant owner in Havana, but when Fidel Castro came to power, the government nationalized Fernando’s businesses and imprisoned him when he tried to leave the country. Eventually he got out, settling near Miami like so many other Cuban expats. Even though Fernando never went back to Cuba, he was always searching for pieces of his homeland in the Cuban-American community in Miami.