This Is TASTE

Fuchsia Dunlop is an English writer and cook who specializes in Chinese cuisine. She’s been researching Chinese culinary culture since the ’90s, when she became one of the first Westerners to train as a chef at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine (四川高等烹饪学校) in Chengdu. She has authored seven books, including the new cookbook Five Tastes: The Magic of Flavor in a Chinese Kitchen. It’s so special to have Fuchsia in the studio for the first time to share her expertise and what makes this new book so special.

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Jesse Jenkins grew up skating in Los Angeles, bused tables, moved to London, and spent a decade as a fashion photographer before a COVID lockdown instinct to start filming dinner made him ADIP—Another Day in Paradise—one of the most recognizable cooks online. In this episode, Matt catches up with Jenkins to talk about his California roots, his unique visual identity, and his mastery of cooking (and saucing and herbing) roast chicken.

And it’s the return of Three Things, where Aliza and Matt discuss what’s interesting to them in the world of food including a new coffee magazine from Bar Ista, a visit to the buzzy NYC restaurant Faux, and Buffet hosts a cool reading event. Also: Superiority Burger has a new chef, Diljān Bakery is doing great pizza, and on the scene at the California Olive Ranch fall harvest.

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Nixta Taquería is an award-winning, genre-bending restaurant in Austin, Texas, helmed by Sara Mardanbigi, head of operations, and Edgar Rico, a chef whose résumé includes Son of a Gun, Sqirl, and Pujol. The Iranian-Mexican couple has won the devotion of their city and recognition from Michelin and the James Beard Awards with an ambitious in-house masa program, duck carnitas tacos, and sholezard, a creamy Iranian rice pudding. Now they’re sharing Nixta’s greatest hits and plenty of homestyle recipes from their respective heritages in a new cookbook, Nixta Taqueria Presents: From Tacos to Tahdig.

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Anna Sonenshein and Niki Vahle are the chefs and co-owners of Little Fish in Los Angeles’s emerging Melrose Hill neighborhood. The pair met while cooking at Son of a Gun, turned a COVID-era pop-up fish sandwich into an Instagram sensation, and spent four years raising money to open their amazing restaurant. Anna and Niki join the show to talk about the money topics nobody likes to talk about. That includes cold-DMing restaurant owners to see their books and a $20,000 dry-aging fridge that lets them buy whole yellowtail straight from fishermen. We also talk about Little Fish Cafe’s return to Echo Park.

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The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers – not Resy—and do not constitute professional business advice.

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Ryan Bartlow spent his early twenties walking home from a three-Michelin-star kitchen in San Sebastián to living in a tiny apartment above a Basque tavern to working on the opening crew at Alinea—the kind of dedication to cooking that eventually becomes a book. Now chef-owner of Ernesto’s and Bartolo in New York, Bartlow joins Matt to talk about training at Akelarre, building a family restaurant group with his wife, and the stories behind his first cookbook, Essentially Basque. Ryan is a true living legend, and it was a blast having him in the studio.

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Listen: Founder in the Field with Fishwife’s Becca Millstein

Listen: Whole Foods Buyers Never Sit Still. We Followed Them to Spain.

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Brenda Storch has spent nearly two decades writing about Mexican food as something bigger than what’s on the plate. The Chicago-based writer behind La Vitamina T is an Eater Chicago contributor and a voice in Netflix’s Taco Chronicles. She joins Matt to talk about her amazing city, the relationship you build with your taquero, and what is exciting her outside of Mexican cuisine. We get into chiles en nogada as five centuries of history on one plate and why Chicago—not LA, not Texas—might be America’s most underrated Mexican food city.

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Anoop Pillarisetti has spent fifteen years helping diners book a table, place an order, and pay for it. He started by slicing cheese and building the website at Di Bruno Bros. in Philadelphia, then helped bring Momofuku Ko’s pioneering online reservation system to the public and led Shake Shack’s early kiosk push. Now he also is the co-owner of Strange Delight, a Fort Greene oyster bar where the main technology is a pizza oven. Anoop joins the show to talk about restaurant tech from the inside, and the exciting expansion in the world of Strange Delight.

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Jason Buechel is CEO of Whole Foods Market, and since January 2025, he’s also overseen Amazon Worldwide Grocery Stores, which includes Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go, and the online grocery business. That’s a lot of shopping carts—and a lot of data on what goes in them. Today on the show, Matt speaks with Jason about a topic we are always interested in covering: how people actually shop for food today. We talk about shorter trips, delivery, and how shoppers have less patience for high prices, and what Whole Foods is doing about it.

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Bill Addison is back on the show. The Los Angeles Times restaurant critic and his colleague Jenn Harris just revealed the 2026 edition of the 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles and it’s really good. Matt and Bill dig into how two critics turn hundreds of meals into a ranking, the big themes of the year, the new number one, and what’s changed since Bill gave up his anonymity. Plus we talk about covering all of California and whether restaurant criticism still moves the needle in 2026.

And it’s the return of Three Things, where Aliza and Matt discuss what’s interesting to them in the world of food including Aliza visits Paris with stops at Best Tofu, Montezuma Café, and Waly Fay. Matt talks about TASTE’s new podcast, Eye Level. The debut episode drops on Thursday! Also: Two great new coffees from Quills and Pascal, and The Perfect Pizza is Maurizio Leo’s great new book, and he will be live at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York on December 10.

Read: The 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles

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Cake Zine ⁠is an independent literary food magazine cofounded by pastry chef Tanya Bush and TASTE contributing editor Aliza Abarbanel. The newest issue, Spoiled Rotten, explores spoilage and the spoiled, digging into what’s stale, overripe, curdled, wasted, and reborn in food culture. Today on the show, we’re switching things up, with Tanya interviewing Aliza about the editorial process that brought this weird and wonderful issue to life.

Also on the show Aliza and Matt catch up about recent trips to London and Miami, with stops at Goodbye Horses, Impala, V&A Storehouse, Recoveco, Chug’s Diner, Madruga Bakery, and Books & Books.

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