This Is TASTE

By Matt Rodbard & Aliza AbarbanelArts Food

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on Food
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Typical duration
53 min
per episode

Based on Podcast App listening data

This Is TASTE episodes

May 18 777: At the Top of Mount Dunsmoor Stands LA's Most-Interesting Chef with Brian Dunsmoor
Brian Dunsmoor has cooked in Los Angeles for over a decade—from Venice pop-ups to Hatchet Hall to his namesake Glassell Park restaurant—and he’s always been asking the same question: What exactly is American food, and who gets credit for it? In this episode, Matt talks with him about cooking without electricity, building a kitchen around live fire, and what it’s like to be Brian Dunsmoor. Brian’s restaurant, Dunsmoor, has been named to the LA Times’ 101 best restaurants list and recognized by the 2024 Michelin Guide, and it’s one of the most referenced and favorite LA restaurants on this very show. I love this conversation.
Also on the show, we have a great conversation with Jordan Michelman. Jordan wrote a terrific essay for TASTE about Costco, and we talk about how the club retailer means so much to so many people.
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1 hr 26 min
May 16 776: Ghia’s Mélanie Masarin Will Never Stop DMing Restaurants Her Opinions
Mélanie Masarin is founder and CEO of Ghia, the Mediterranean-inspired nonalcoholic aperitif. Mélanie returns to talk about her debut cookbook, Riviera: Recipes from the Coast of France and Italy. In this episode, we talk about how the book is anchored by the handwritten recipes and philosophy of her grandmother Mymo. We also talk about working in the surging NA category and what is exciting in the land of Ghia. We have a lot of respect for Mélanie’s career, and I really enjoyed going over it.
Also on the show we have a great conversation with Nichole Accettola, author of Scandinavian Everyday: Vibrant, Simple Meals from Northern Europe.
Listen to Mélanie's first appearance on This Is TASTE.

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1 hr 25 min
May 15 775: La Copine Built an Oasis in Joshua Tree. The Crowds Followed.
Claire Wadsworth and Nikki Hill are the owners of La Copine, an oasis of a restaurant in California’s Mojave Desert. It’s been a beloved destination for over a decade, winning over a mix of Joshua Tree locals, LA weekenders, and celebrities passing through. Now they’re sharing La Copine’s thoughtful takes on all-day cooking in a debut cookbook. It’s so fun to have Claire and Nikki in the studio to talk about what it takes to run a restaurant in the high desert, their journey as a couple in business together, and making this book.
Also on the show we have a live recording from a recent panel conversation at Baldor BITE in New York City, a conference run by the legendary specialty food company. Matt is joined on the stage by four leading chefs including Missy Robbins (Lilia, Misi), Paul Carmichael (Kabawa), Tiffani Faison (chef, restaurateur, and judge on Chopped), and Tim Ma (Tim Ma Hospitality). The panel unpacks a pressing question in today’s restaurant world: how do you judge success?
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1 hr 41 min
May 13 774: Adeena Sussman Just Keeps Cooking
Adeena Sussman has published three solo cookbooks, with the latest, Zariz, landing as the culmination of a possible trilogy, arriving after Sababa and Shabbat. Adeena is a Tel Aviv–based, Palo Alto–raised food writer who joins me in the studio for a great conversation. I absolutely love an Adeena Sussman cookbook, which includes her own work as well as collaborations with Chrissy Teigen and others. Adeena’s books are creative, thoroughly tested, and show how Jewish food identity is represented in multitudes around the world. In this episode, we talk about her life in Israel and how this new book was written with ease in mind.
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44 min
May 11 773: Banza's Brian Rudolph Spent Years Avoiding Wheat. Then He Put It in Banza.
Brian Rudolph cofounded Banza in a Detroit kitchen in 2014 with a wine bottle, some chickpea flour, and a gluten sensitivity. Twelve years later, Banza is the country’s number-one better-for-you pasta brand—and recently, it launched its first-ever pasta with wheat. In this episode, Brian returns to the studio to catch us up on all things Banza, including the brand’s continued growth and how launching a non-gluten-free pasta required the company to dig deep and listen to its fans. I love catching up with food founders, and Brian is one of my favorites in the game.
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49 min
May 08 772: George Howell Invented the Frappuccino. He'd Prefer You Forget That.
George Howell has been working in coffee longer than most roasters have been alive. In 1975, he opened the Coffee Connection in Boston’s Harvard Square, with a strong conviction that great drip coffee—single-origin, lightly roasted, treated like wine—could change the way Americans drank their morning brew. It did. George also helped popularize the Frappuccino, sold his company to Starbucks, cofounded the influential Cup of Excellence, pioneered the freezing of green coffee, and opened a new café inside a Harvard Square bookstore—at age 80. In this episode, we speak with the godfather of specialty coffee about all of it.
And it’s the return of Three Things, where Aliza and Matt discuss what’s interesting in the food world, including a reminder that Hearth is one of New York’s finest restaurants. Potluck Club is cooking exciting things in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and Echo Lake is a celebration of rum in Brooklyn from a serious drinks world duo. Also: Tart’s black malt vinegar is inspiring some kitchen explorations, a scene report from the Kiln x Comal pop-up in New York, and high praise for the Barker Cafeteria roasted sweet potato sandwich.
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1 hr 31 min
May 06 771: 50 Years of Edna Lewis’s "The Taste of Country Cooking" with BEM’s Gabrielle Davenport
Gabrielle Davenport is the cofounder of BEM, a bookstore and community space for Black food literature in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. It’s been a wonderfully busy season of cookbook events and releases, and this week BEM is reaching a whole new level by hosting the Edna Lewis Festival. It’s a week of all-star events honoring the 50th anniversary reissue of Edna Lewis’s seminal cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking. Today on the show, Gabrielle shares updates from the always-busy world of BEM and goes deep into Edna Lewis’s legacy and how it’s living on today.
And it’s the return of Three Things where Aliza and Matt discuss what’s interesting in the food world including recent dessert explorations at Superiority Burger, Uncle’s Thai Food x Apollo Bagels, Hots Pizza is a new favorite NYC slice. Also: Chef Shuai Wang's Sichuan Hot Chicken Spice is terrific. Also, Oatly gets creative with NYC bar Schmuck and New York has a new cookbook store! Wild Sorrel Cookbooks is a gem.
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1 hr
May 04 770: Tacos, Tortas, Tamales, Tostadas: Jorge Gaviria & Fermín Núñez on Mexico's Street Food Canon
Vitamina T is the new cookbook from Fermín Núñez (chef of Suerte, Este, and Bar Toti in Austin) and Jorge Gaviria of masa company Masienda. This amazing book does exactly what it says, offering a deep dive into Mexico’s legendary “T” foods: tacos, tortas, tamales, and so much more. In this episode, we talk about heirloom corn, street food as serious cuisine, and how the pair wrote one of the year’s most exciting Mexican cookbooks.
Also on the show, we have a great conversation with Tommy Hunt about restaurant operations and the brand-new spot that is the buzz of New York City: Dean’s.
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00:00 – Burning It On Purpose: A New Mexican Home-Cooking Mentality
00:12 – Cosme, Corn Husks, and Catching Up with New York
03:16 – From Masa to Vida Mexicana: Writing the Sequel Cookbook
05:19 – Entering the Taco Canon (and Updating It)
08:09 – Shooting Mexico: Tortas in the Airbnb and Tortas in the Street
11:24 – The Architecture of a Great Torta (and the Magic of Laminada)
13:39 – Reading a Trompo and Talking to Taqueros
18:21 – Quesabirria, Birrieria Zaragoza, and Offal Lines in the Sand
21:45 – LA Taco Fieldwork and the Ditroit Taqueria Crew
23:35 – Running a Restaurant Group and Seeing Your Food Reflected Back
24:54 – Where Home Cooks Go Wrong with Mexican Street Food
36:02 – From the Pass to the Floor: Who Really Runs the Room?
39:15 – Hawksmoor, New York, and Learning the City Before You Open
43:48 – Why Should New York Care About Your London Hit?
48:24 – The New British Wave: Dishoom, Gymkhana, Ambassadors… and Risk
55:02 – Fixing Jupiter’s P&L Without Killing Its Soul
58:59 – Labor, Tipping, and Why No One Wants to Be a Manager
63:47 – What a British Pub Means in the West Village
67:50 – Pints, Pork Scratchings, and Triple-Cooked Chips: The Dean’s Menu
73:39 – Why Pubs Are Having a Moment in America
76:35 – Taste Check, Operations Edition

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1 hr 22 min
May 02 769: From Lucky Peach to the New York Times Bestseller List with Rachel Khong
Rachel Khong is the former executive editor of Lucky Peach and the author of Goodbye, Vitamin and the New York Times Best Seller Real Americans. Her new short story collection, My Dear You, is her strangest and most daring work yet: ten surreal, funny, and deeply felt stories about identity, love, memory, and what happens after you die. In this episode, we talk about the legacy of Lucky Peach, Rachel’s research process for writing fiction, and why the short story can hold what the novel can’t.
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51 min
May 01 768: Alicia Kennedy on the Power of Memoir and Martinis
Alicia Kennedy is a food and culture writer from New York based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She is the author of the essential weekly newsletter From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, the book No Meat Required, and a lush new memoir, On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites. It’s so special to have Alicia in the studio on her publication day to talk about making this book, her new magazine project, Tomato Tomato, and much more.
Also on the show, Matt catches up with Elizabeth Dunn to talk about her recent New York magazine story about how a caffeine-laced strawberry-açai drink at Starbucks became the allowance-draining status symbol of New York’s teen elite.
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1 hr 18 min

About This Is TASTE

From the publisher's feed

If you're a fan of smart and lively conversations about food, home cooking, and culture, this is the place. We interview the most interesting characters in the world of food, media, and cookbooks and release episodes several times a month. The program is hosted by TASTE editors Aliza Abarbanel and Matt Rodbard, and is sometimes recorded live at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City.