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Our colleague Sky Lebron introduces us to Steve Smith, a.k.a. the Hoodbachi God. Hear how Smith turns the trunk of his car into a hibachi dining experience.

 Thanks to our pals at The Bay Blend for sharing this conversation. 

Rate and review The Zest wherever you're listening to this episode!

Our colleague Gabriella Paul catches up with environmental activist and friend of the pod Robin Greenfield. Find out why he's once again sworn off grocery stores and what he's eating instead. Thanks to our pals at The Bay Blend for sharing this conversation. The feature is introduced by Susan Giles Wantuck.

This summer, we're checking in with some past Zest guests. 

René Valenzuela is the founder and former owner of the popular local chain Taco Bus. He owned several restaurants in his native Monterrey, Mexico, before moving to the United States in 1995. In 2018, Chef René was badly burned and nearly died after a gas explosion in his food truck. 

Chef René chatted with The Zest’s original host, Robin Sussingham, in 2020. And in June 2026, host Dalia caught up with him at a picnic table at his René's Mexican Kitchen food trailer on Tampa’s bustling Nebraska Avenue, adjacent to Southern Brewing & Winery.

Thanks to our friends at Florida Matters Live & Local for sharing this conversation.

“Retro food” can mean different things to different people. For today’s kids, it’s the Jell-O Pudding Pops and vintage Pizza Huts of their parents’ childhood. For Bobby Hicks, retro means tuna noodle casserole, chicken Kiev and gelatin rainbow cake—the food of his parents’ and grandparents’ heyday.

But retro recipes are more than a list of ingredients. They’re a feeling. During the pandemic, Hicks shared this nostalgia with a growing number of social media followers who watched him make these sentimental dishes, providing a much-needed sense of comfort.

And now he’s captured that feeling in a new cookbook. It’s called Retro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist. 

We caught up with Hicks, who grew up on a farm in Central Florida and now lives in South Florida. In this conversation, the content creator and self-taught private chef discusses how to modernize retro meals for the 21st century, staples of a vintage kitchen and which recipes should stay in the past.

Want to hear more from Bobby? Catch him in conversation with Dalia at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg on June 30. Get event details here.

When our elders pass away, too often their recipes die with them. 

In recent years, this reality really began sinking in for actor and restaurateur Billy Dec. So Dec, the son of a white father and Filipina mother, decided to travel to the Philippines to find his last living maternal elders and learn his ancestral recipes. He brought along a film crew, and the result is the new PBS documentary Food Roots.

We met up with Dec at Sunda Tampa, the Southeast Asian restaurant he owns in Tampa’s Midtown district. In this conversation, he discusses what his journey taught him about himself, his struggle to fit in as a “Waisian” kid growing up in Chicago and the rising popularity of Filipino cuisine.

A hotel bar is much more than a place to grab a drink while you’re on vacation or traveling for work. It’s about connection, relaxation and rituals as old as mankind. A really good hotel bar will even attract the locals. 

That’s the case at The Tampa Edition, a five-star hotel located on downtown’s bustling Channelside Drive. Throughout the hotel’s bars and restaurants, service is as important as what’s in the glass. Ensuring that hospitality is the Tampa Edition’s director of bars, Nihat Çam.

We sat down with Çam at the hotel’s Punch Room speakeasy. Over virgin hibiscus cocktails, he shares how his Turkish upbringing and global travels led him to this role. Çam also shares the latest trends in alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks and discusses the larger role that hotels play in society, as detailed in his book. It's called Bar Culture: Hospitality, Hotel Bars and Spirits.

It’s not about the coffee. Owning a coffee shop is about connecting with people. So says Roberto Torres, president of Blind Tiger Coffee Roasters. What started as a local coffee concept has grown into a company with eight locations across Tampa, including a presence in Tampa International Airport.

We met up with Torres at Blind Tiger’s Ybor City location. In this conversation, Torres shares his journey from being an accountant in his native Panama to owning one of Tampa Bay’s most revered local brands with his business partner, Luis Montanez. He also pushes back on the romanticized idea of owning a coffee shop and explains how entrepreneurship is like a classic video game.

How do you eat healthy when it feels like the system is set up for you to fail? For indigenous Floridians, it’s become especially challenging to eat the foods that sustained their ancestors for thousands of years.

Having been pushed off of their land, given ultraprocessed government foods and finding their surroundings polluted, many members of Florida’s Seminole Tribe wrestle with lifestyle-related health issues.

Karen Two Shoes knows this all too well. After being diagnosed with diabetes, she decided to make some changes. She lost 80 pounds and went back to school to become a registered dietitian. 

Today, Two Shoes works as nutrition coordinator for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, helping her fellow community members reclaim their health by incorporating traditional Seminole practices into the 21st century.

Two Shoes chatted with Dalia about her own health journey and how she’s inspiring others.

NOTE: Since the time of this recording, Community Harvest SRQ has merged with Sunshine Community Compost to form Sunshine Community Harvest.

Andrew Hudson is on a mission. An organic gardener and program director for the nonprofit organization Community Harvest SRQ, Andrew wants to connect the people of Sarasota with its local food.

Dalia met Andrew through a mutual friend, Chef Steve Phelps of Indigenous Restaurant. Steve describes Andrew as “rebooting the community food system in Sarasota.” 

So of course I wanted us all to meet him.

As Andrew explains in this conversation, he connects restaurants and neighbors to get surplus produce off the field and onto people’s plates. We also dig into Sarasota’s Eat Local Week, food sovereignty and what it means to give communities more control over what they eat. 

As I learned in this conversation, Andrew is also a Mennonite minister. So he brings a really thoughtful perspective to the sacredness of food and the idea of giving farmland time to rest. He reminds us all that caring for the soil and each other go hand in hand.

Michael Twitty isn’t giving up his Klondike Bars. On April 29, the celebrated food historian will appear at the Foundation for a Healthy St. Petersburg for a public discussion about how we can apply our ancestors’ culinary traditions to live a healthier life. Click here to register for free tickets. 

But even as we strive to eat healthier, Twitty says there’s still room for the occasional treat.

Based in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Twitty is the author of several groundbreaking books including the James Beard Award-winning The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, as well as Koshersoul: The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew and Rice: A Savor the South Cookbook. His newest book is Recipes from the American South.

You might also recognize Twitty from his appearances on shows like Bizarre Foods America, High on the Hog, Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi and Michelle Obama’s Waffles and Mochi! 

Ahead of his visit to St. Pete, Twitty chatted with Dalia about culinary lessons from our ancestors, how ingredients change as they migrate across the South and how he enjoys his soul food favorites while keeping a kosher kitchen.