208: Alex Prud’homme

24:19And she was very effective. And so she was able to turn lemons into lemonade, essentially. And then you have someone like Jackie Kennedy, who really upped the game when she hired the French chef René Verdun and brought a whole new era of fine dining and actually modeled her entertaining on Louis XIV, the Sun King, who used food as a diplomatic tool. And to Jackie's credit. I mean, it was really amazing the things she pulled off and some of those meals are still talked about today. Do you have a favorite first lady or a first lady that maybe gets less exposure through your research that you think really you connected with?

25:00Like you felt like they had a real love of life and had the role down? I like Grace Coolidge. People don't talk about her too much, but Calvin Coolidge. Cool cow, man. Yeah. Silent cow. He didn't talk much. He was a Vermont farmer. You can go visit his homestead in Plymouth, Notch. I highly recommend it. It's fantastic. He was a farmer, so he had a chicken coop out back and his chickens tasted of mint because they were put on top of Teddy Roosevelt's mint patch, which he grew for his mint juleps. But Grace was this lovely woman. She adopted a raccoon who had been sent to them as something to eat, but she liked the raccoon and named her Rebecca.

25:42and she lived in a tree outside of the White House. Wow. And she was a cook. She would make an apple pie in the White House kitchen to which Cal would say, oh, you could use that crust to pave the road. And she just put up with him and she was just a lovely, gracious, warm person. And so she was kind of the lighter side of that Yankee persona. I love that. I think I called him Cool Cal because I had a teacher in middle school who just loved Coolidge and he went way over word count on Coolidge and our instruction. He's a fascinating dude, and he was one of the few who voluntarily quit. He did one administration, and then he was out.

26:17That was right. You were able to sneak in just in your deadline, the reporting that came out after the Trump presidency about President Trump throwing a plate of fries or a hamburger against a wall and ketchup standing on the wall. That was well reported. I have to ask you about Trump. I have a couple questions. First, did he actually eat as much fast food that was reported widely in the media? Yes. In short, he did. But he used food in a very shrewd way. And people are surprised when I say that. But think about it. When he was tweeting out pictures of his taco bowls or his pizza or he was hosting the Clemson football team to a, quote unquote, burger banquet in the state dining room, offending everybody on all sides of the political spectrum.

27:03Yeah, yeah. It was very intentional. And it was a message, a subverbal message to his base saying, you like to eat what I like to eat, therefore vote for me. It was much like Ronald Reagan eating jelly beans, which was a seemingly simple candy but actually was kind of more complicated than that. And it's a primal thing. I talked to some academics about this. When you see somebody else wearing a similar shirt to you, you think, oh, that's a nice shirt, but it doesn't mean much. When you see somebody eating what you like to eat, it goes into our lizard brain, our prehistoric brain, and it basically tells us, oh, we're of the same tribe.

27:44This person is safe. I like this person. And it's a very powerful motivator. The other thing is that when the public sees what the president is eating, they emulate him. Yep. So when the Obamas had their garden and they were eating healthy food and exercising, a lot of people got on that bandwagon and started planting and eating and exercising, including the staff at the White House and posting the numbers of pounds they'd lost and so on. But then Trump comes in and he's eating burgers. And that kind of gave us license to slip back a little bit and and eat things that are less healthy. I think about Barack Obama's almonds, his almond count.

28:25Seven only. Seven only. And that really resonated with so many people who were in variety of reasons eating a lot of almonds like almonds. Hey, they're good. They're great. Almonds are great. And they're domestic product. And honestly, it makes sense. Did you, through your reporting, come across anything about Donald Trump's diet, about his particularities about eating that maybe would surprise us? Only in that it was more than we realized. He really did. More food? More food and more red meat than I think people. He hardly ate any vegetables. He only ate iceberg lettuce when it was sort of shredded in his taco.

29:02He was one of those guys. Yeah. Interesting. And he liked his – he would get these beautiful steaks, dry-aged steak, you know, a$50 piece of meat. And he'd have the cook grill it so intensely that it rocked on the plate according to his valet. I mean he would incinerate this thing. And then he put ketchup on top of it, which is sort of replicating all the juices that were cooked out of it and is also largely sugar. So I don't think people realize that that indicates something about his personality. And food can be quite revealing. You know, when Richard Nixon ate a little dollop of cottage cheese every single day for lunch, that's odd.

29:43And it tells you about him. No comment on ketchup on steak, my gosh. Back to the Obama administration. Michelle Obama's garden was symbolic in many ways. I think there was a little bit of controversy around the way her healthy eating initiative rolled out. Of course, anything the president does is controversial. So we don't need to get into that. But I want to get a little bit more into what that garden meant. Many called it revolutionary, but you would argue that it certainly wasn't. Well, it's interesting. It was considered radical to rip up this beautifully pristine manicured lawn and put a vegetable garden at the White House.

30:25But actually, it's a throwback because the early White Houses often had vegetable patches and certainly had cows not only in a barn, but some lived in the White House. So they had fresh milk there. I think the taffs were the last one to have a cow or chickens, as I mentioned. And the garden actually was a brilliant piece of political theater, I think, because it was hard to assail, although it was assailed because people mistakenly thought it was, quote unquote, organic. She never called it that. It was fresh vegetables, which she fed to her family but also gave to soup kitchens and fed to guests.

31:04And it got people outside. It got them gardening. It got them thinking about victory gardens from the First and Second World War. That history is there. And so I think it was a very potent tool and it remains today. I think the controversy that I'm thinking of, and maybe it's not a controversy, is that it wasn't enough, that a garden is not enough to cure hunger or to create a healthier environment for children. And I think people sniping at the First Lady, which will happen forever, took advantage of that with the symbolic garden, which many argued wasn't really that much. Well, you know, yeah, but it's better than nothing.

31:41Green. Yeah. And so I think it was actually very effective getting people out and about and exercising and learning about vegetables. I mean, Michelle herself had never gardened before. Exactly. And this was, you know, malnutrition or poor nutrition is a real problem in this country. And it just got people thinking. Yeah. And it's just wonderful to see like Alice Waters and Michelle Obama in a garden at the White House. It's cool. I love Michael Pollan's line. He suggested that not only they have fruits, but also I'm sorry, not only have vegetables, but also have fruits and then some animals. And he suggested a donkey and an elephant who would wander around and then we would use their manure as compost.

32:17Great line from Michael Pond. Love that. Let's move on to the rest of your career. I mean, we could honestly have two episodes to talk about presidents and talk about the rest of your career. But first, your great aunt Julia Child. What was your relationship like with her? Well, I was related to Julia through her husband, Paul Child, who was the twin brother of my grandfather, Charlie Child. So I grew up with them in the family. I would see them often. And they never had kids of their own. And so they would treat my sisters and my cousins and me like surrogate grandchildren. Thanksgivings were epic.

32:49But often we would spend time with them in Maine or California, occasionally in France. And she just got us all cooking. It was I never learned. I never got cooking lessons per se from her. But we just by osmosis, we learned how to cook and clean and have fun together. And so she was a very powerful influence on my life. And one of the things I loved about her is her inquisitiveness. She would always go into the kitchen after a restaurant meal and talk to every single person there, spending the most time with the dishwasher, who she knew the least about. And just seeing that as a kid made a huge impression.

33:26Yeah. Did it give you, I mean, a sense of journalism as a future? I feel like, you know, she is a journalist. I mean, was a journalist. And certainly her work in her journal, her writing was not just cookbook writing. It was cultural anthropology. Absolutely. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think having that model in our family made writing as a career seem possible to me, even though it wasn't a conscious thing. I just I'd always like to read. And so writing came naturally to me. And so but seeing how she worked with people was just a wonderful life experience. Later in life, you and Julia collaborated on a book, which has now been adapted many times over.

34:08I think any time you've seen Julia Child in popular culture is based on your book, The French Chef in America, and lots of the scholarship you worked on with your great aunt. Let me ask you, what was that conversation like initially with Julia when you're like, let's work on a book? Well, she had been talking about doing a memoir of what she thought of as the favorite years of her life, which was 1948 to 1954 when she and Paul lived in Paris. He was a diplomat, a cultural attache. She was an unknown diplomatic wife who had never been to Europe before, fell in love with French cooking on her very first day, November 3rd, 1948, when they ate in Rouen.

34:47They had a sole mounier with a sputtering butter sauce. And, you know, she was off on her adventure. and learned to cook and teach, collaborated with Sim Quebec and Loisette Bertol on mastering the art of French cooking. So since 1969, she had been talking about doing this memoir. And it never appeared. It never appeared. I grew up. I became a writer. Once in a while, I would say, hey, Julia, how's that memoir going? Oh, it's coming along, dear me. You got it. You nailed it. There you go. And finally, she was 91. And I made my annual visit to her in Santa Barbara, where she had retired to. And I said, well, how's that book coming?

35:23And she said, well, it's not so good, dearie. And I said, well, I'm here to help. And she said, OK, let's do it. And so. Wow. That was it. That was it. We were off to the races. A shot to enough to pop over a class of something cool. Actually, I was so unprepared because she'd always said no before because she wanted to do it herself. But she didn't like to talk about herself. And that's why it never got written. So it took someone like me who knew her well, who could extract the stories. And then we had these wonderful letters that she and Paul wrote to my grandparents every week from Paris and Marseille back to Pennsylvania.

35:57And they had kept the letters. And it was – so for a writer, it was like discovering a cache of gold. I mean it was just kind of glowing to me. And so we had a great time doing that. And unfortunately, she died halfway through it right before her 92nd birthday. And so I had to finish the book without her. And I had the great fortune of working with Judith Jones, her lifelong editor, who became my editor. And it's a legend. And between us, we were kind of able to do this ventriloquy where we could use Julia's idiosyncratic syntax. She would say – she never would say, I put a bowl on the table. She'd say, I plopped that bowl on the table.

36:35So getting that flavor of Julia into the words took some work. But it was a really fun project. And then we didn't know how it would do because she had passed away. That's really interesting. You didn't have a sense that this figure in American pop culture wouldn't become what it is today. No idea. I mean, I sort of hoped because I grew up hearing these stories around the dinner table. But who knew? You know, she was passed. What year is this? The book came out in 2006. Yep. And then in 2009, the skies parted and Nora Ephron and Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci descended from the heavens and made Julie and Julia, which was based on the memoir, My Life in France.

37:16And then, you know, that, you know, that just did wonders. Lots of meat, lots since then. That put the book to number one on the Times list and, you know, led to many other things. Well, it seems 2006 is in a different era. It's a little early for food culture. I think we had the celebrity chefs of Food Network, but we certainly didn't think about cookbooks as like cultural documents as much. I think that we as a generation discovered them late in the 2000s and, of course, in the 2010s more. So that had something to do with it maybe? Could be, although I would argue that the seeds of that were planted back in the 60s by people like Julia and James Beard.

37:54Sure, of course. All of the writers that Judith Jones worked with. Yeah. So I think that that stuff was there, but it was nascent. And as you said, the Food Network was just beginning. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, Julia put people like Emeril Lagasse on television or Lydia Bastianich. And these people became huge stars, but it was just the beginning of that food media, which has now become this, you know, 24-7, 365 juggernaut. Yeah, it's definitely a good point there. I agree that we have to obviously look back at the history of cookbooks, but it's more like the pop culture and like the resonating of cookbooks like the world of Alison Roman didn't have wasn't happening in 2006.

38:33Although, yeah, but I would argue that young people now are going back and rediscovering some of those early books. You know, Alice Waters early books. I love that. Richard Olney, who was an expat American living in Provence, who had a wonderful cook, kind of an irascible man, but he was a wonderful cook. And, you know, these things are there, but they are just slowly being rediscovered now. And it's kind of anthropological. Yeah. Judith Jones, legend in the game, especially here at Penguin Random House. Lots of anecdotes on our show about working with Judith. But what's yours? What was it like working with her?

39:09Well, she's the best editor I've ever worked with. Just remarkable. Very light touch. When we were working on My Life in France, Julia's memoir, she hardly changed anything. But she made these little subtle changes that just made the thing sing. And it was such a great collaboration. And she really knew American food history. And so when I had a question, I could turn to her and she would know the answer or who to turn to. And so just in terms of her deft approach and her level-headedness and judgment, she was just extraordinary. Was she hard though at times? She could be tough. Yeah. She was this slight, small woman who people, you know, a little bit like Joan Didion, people mistook her for being fragile.

39:59Neither of them were. They were tough. Good comparison to Didion. And so was Julia. Julia was big and tough and Judith was small and tough. And that's one reason they got along. Judith wrote a book about her dog, a cookbook for her dog. Exactly. We have a copy in my office upstairs. And she also wrote a cookbook about cooking for one. Her husband, Evan, who was a wonderful food writer, died and she was alone. And so she learned to cook for one. And it's quite a good book. Yeah. She also wrote two books with L.L. Bean, which we are working on a story right now. It is in edits and it'll be published maybe when this interview runs.

40:31And I'll link to it. If not, it's coming. It's that the writer is on it. Oh, excellent. Because I've heard about those things. I've never seen them. Yeah. Our writer got his hands on a couple of those. More questions about your career. we can thank you for the soup Nazi on Seinfeld. You wrote a piece in The New Yorker called Slave and you profiled a chef who I would say has a very close comparison to that character on Seinfeld. How did you find this individual? Who is this individual? Let's get a little into that. I love this story. His name is Al Yagane. He ran a little storefront, like little storefront on West 55th Street here in Manhattan.

41:08Yeah, it's right around the corner. It's literally right behind our office. And a friend of mine knew that I was a foodie and told me about it. So I stopped by one night and I just started chatting with him. And he was this kind of brilliant, crazy genius. And his soup selection was kind of mind-blowing. So I tried a couple and I was like – and I didn't go over there thinking I was going to write about him. I just went for the soup. And I was so enamored of the soup. I was like, I got to write about this. So I came back for lunch a couple times. And the scene there was just hilarious because it's this long line of people.

41:41and he was very brusque. He was the soup Nazi. He was saying, you know, if somebody couldn't make her mind about what she wanted to eat, it's like, okay, move along, you know, and like, and, you know, just the chatter in line about what people wanted to eat. And so I did a talk of the town piece for The New Yorker. Pure talk of the town. And I got a huge response to this thing and, you know, I got a Japanese magazine, wrote about me writing about him and, you know, people all over the place were reproducing it. And then ultimately a writer for Seinfeld picked it up and did an enhanced version of my piece.

42:20Sadly, I never got paid for that because I was at the beginning of my career. I didn't know what my rights were. But, you know, it still lingers in the culture today. People still talk about the Soup Nazi. And he's still fabulous. It's still fabulous. In New York, it's on reruns like eight or nine hours a day. Exactly. You're going to get a few Soup Nazi episodes a week. What happened to the chef? Do you know anything about his current situation, his current status? I don't. I should check back with him. I know that he would take half the year off and he would go traveling and he would collect recipes all around the world.

42:51And, you know, he made a really good living out of this tiny storefront. And he's a real health nut. And so he was really interested in the beneficial aspects of certain herbs and spices. And he got really into it. So he deserved his success. It's crazy. See, it's right next to Yakitori Toto. If you know that location, New York, it's this little stand. I've literally never had a soup from there. And my office, I've worked here for several years. Is it good still? Oh, it's great. Oh, my gosh. Get thee over there. I got to get me over there. Okay, a few more questions. I want to know, you're a journalist.

43:23You're always on the hunt for stories. And I have to ask, is there somebody in food who's under the age of 30 or so that you'd like to write about, like to profile that interests you enough to kind of follow them and do something there? Interesting question because actually at the moment I'm contemplating a story. My brother-in-law is a beer brewer in Connecticut. He runs a company called Cottrell Beer. And I've been sort of tuned into the young beer brewing, winemaking, alcohol distilling crew. There's a real energy there now. I mean I live in Brooklyn, New York, which is sort of one of the epicenters of it.

44:03But it's nationwide. And there's this new influx of energy and money and talent. People are taking it in different directions. I have another friend who is making pre-mixed cocktails, which has become a huge segment now. It just seems that that's a really interesting area. I don't have any specific names that I want to mention yet because I'm sort of at the beginning of this. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this, but I find that area really interesting. I think it's cool if you took your background and started looking at that world. I mean there's plenty. I have to point you to Punch. They do incredible work when uncovering the rising talent and brewing and et cetera.

44:43But also N.A. is blowing up too, the N.A. movement. Exactly. And for me, Paul Child was a great mixologist back before that was even a word. Wow. And he would make up these cocktails, some of which Julia reprinted in her cookbooks, and which if you go to a Julia event, you'll often have a Paul Child cocktail where he takes marmalade and rum and comes up with some crazy thing. And he always used poetic names for them. And so that's kind of in the back of my mind too. And I want to do something with this area. Yeah. Let me ask you, Alex, if you could go back to any era and dine then, this could be five years ago, it could be 150 years ago, it could be 5 ,000 years ago, with a notebook for a weekend, what would it be?

45:29I would have to go back to that dinner table bargain that Jefferson held at his place on Maiden Lane with Hamilton and Madison because there was so much happening in that room that night. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall or a guest. The wrap, the room where it happened in Hamilton is wrapped by Aaron Burr, who was not invited and was deeply jealous about that. Talk about FOMO. Yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. And and, you know, not only were the participants interesting and the issues fascinating and still relevant today, by the way, taxation and the role of the federal government and even Washington as a capital.

46:12But the cooking was a extremely high level done by James Hemings and was really sort of the beginning of modern American cuisine. So that dinner I would have loved to have been at. Alex, we asked all guests in the Taste podcast if you could write a cookbook or food culture book without the burden of time, meaning you have no deadline, or the burden of budget, meaning you have all the money in the world to create this book. What would that be? I would expand this current book, Dinner with the President. I hope you do. I really do. I would make a 12-volume set because it's so darn interesting, this subject, you know, the politics of food and the food of politics.

46:47And there's so many aspects of it that I had to ignore or cut. And I would like to return to them. I'd like to do more recipes. I'd like to expand on indigenous and slave cookery. I'd like to go abroad and spend some time where people like Jefferson or Obama hung their hat for a while and get into this notion of gastro diplomacy, which is now actually having a little renaissance, which is this notion of sending American chefs abroad to act as kind of soft diplomats, cooking American regional cuisine and expanding our global footprint that way. And, you know, we're at a very interesting moment in global history right now.

47:34And there's a lot happening around food and politics. And I just think I would love to keep going on this. Oh, my gosh. How about Rick, Ken, the Burns Boys? I mean, you talk to them. Like, I feel like let's go. Why would you not stop and watch a show or a series about this? I'll mention it to them. I hope. No, I think it's a rich text, and I think you've done such an amazing job of bringing it all together. Your knowledge is unparalleled, and I really appreciate your time. Thank you for joining the Taste Podcast. My pleasure. Thank you so much, and bon appetit.

48:15Eliza, it's great to see you. Matt, how are you doing? I mean, how are you doing? I'm good. I have a little sun on my nose right now. I know you do. I have a little sun, too, on my nose. But let's talk about our trips because I wanted to go over our kind of recent few, let's say a month. We've had travel in our lives. Yeah, we went to be warm somewhere else for a little bit. We did. We played that one well. But you first. You went to Miami for the first time. Yeah, I went to Florida for the first time. Back up Florida for the first time. Yeah, it was incredible. I felt like I had so many questions at every step of the way.

48:51You know, there's so much to take in. It was all, you know, I'm from California. So some of it felt very familiar. And then at a certain point, everything would just be completely different. Now, was there something that you knew going in that kind of was a self-fulfilling prophecy about the state of Florida or hashtag Florida man or all the loaded things you talk about Florida? I guess I went in knowing that I wanted to eat a lot of tropical fruit that I know grows in Florida. I was available there that I couldn't really find in other places. And I did fulfill that prophecy for myself, which was kind of amazing.

49:24Let's get into your tropical fruit journey. But first, best meal you had, single best meal you had in Miami. I mean, it was one thing, probably. Well, I liked a lot of things, but there was one day that I was like, you know, I had a late night. I was really hungry and I went to this place called Sanguich that does like Cubanos and other Cuban sandwiches. And I had a medianoche, which is a Cubano, but it's on sweet egg bread, almost like challah instead of that kind of crispier Cuban bread. And it was just like everything I needed. I ate it in the parking lot. I cried a little bit. It was just like a soul fulfilling sandwich.

50:01Is there a condiment on there? You know, it's like a normal Cubano in that it has sweet pickles and mustard and Swiss cheese and that really good kind of like thin ham. I don't it didn't come with a dipping sauce. It didn't it didn't need anything. So the Miami version has thin ham because sometimes Cubano's in like New York or wherever is like with a roasted pork. And yeah, no, not like pernil or lechon, but like a really thin, almost like a little rose petal of thin ham. Damn. What time was it that was it in the threes was it in the twos uh this was a I think we had to wait for a while so by the time I ate it it was around 3 p.m and it was my first meal of the day and I had had two Cuban coffees at that point so I was really you know needing something you're ready but I think even if I had been like totally fed and watered it still would have been a phenomenal sandwich what about uh just like visiting Miami you know we you talked about Cuban food which is obviously a big part of it was there a cuisine or was there something about it like the food scene that surprised you?

50:59Maybe who's making food down there? I mean, I knew that there was some of that like Peruvian style, but I didn't know quite how substantial that was. And that was another great meals that I went to. There's a restaurant called Ceviche 105. They have a couple locations in Miami. I went like that was my first meals that in South Beach went there for dinner, had a really good tiradito, which is kind of like ceviche or sashimi in that it's thin raw fish. This was hamachi and this is kind of maybe a miami move it had some truffle oil on it which i think is like a controversial flavor but it honestly was so good that was one of my favorite things that i had i mean truffle oil is kind of delicious low-key yeah it was the right amount it didn't overpower anything it felt like i was entering my miami era a little luxury you know you pick up any pieces any clothing um i did not oh i did i got merch from the fruit stand that i went to in the everglades which is called Robert is Here.

51:56Okay. So let's go into your fruit journey because I think that's a cool thing. You picked up some new tropical fruits in your kind of catalog. Yeah, I tried so many. Well, I had fresh mame, which I'd had before in Oaxaca. I'd never had it fresh in the United States. What is that? I am unfamiliar. Mame zapote is like very hard on the outside and then very orange inside. It's almost like an avocado texture. It's incredibly creamy. You can kind of scoop it and it will mold around the spoon. Papaya-like? yeah um even like creamier than papaya really like a haas avocado but the flavor is like caramel um so when i've had it in mexico before i've had it as ice cream or milkshake that's a really common preparation and i did get a milkshake i'm on my milkshake at the fruit stand as well um but just the fresh mame i think is is really good but the best thing that i had i'd never had before have you had um guanabana before yes i've had that before yes i've had that in vietnam i think It's amazing.

52:53Yeah, I had never had it before. It is like a jackfruit-like texture. For anyone who hasn't had it, kind of shreddy around these seeds. And then the flavor is almost like pineapple mixed with peach. Wait, that's crazy. Pineapple and peach together. Because pineapple and kind of a rounder fruit is cool. It was so good. They had it sliced in the fridge. It was very expensive. And it said best fruit. Oh, Robert's not giving the shit away? No. I mean. Robert knows what he's doing. I would pay so much money for this fruit. At first, I was kind of like, this is a lot of money for half a fruit. And it said best fruit in the world, which to me is a crazy claim for a fruit stand to be making because they're selling all of these incredible fruits.

53:33But then I tried it and I got it. You got the claim. Now, what's the temperature that they're serving at? Because I feel for me, fruit needs to be served at a particular temperature. Really, too cold or too hot, it'll ruin the whole experience. Yeah, this was, you know, you could buy a whole one and slice it. They slice it for you, which is kind of cool. but uh we just got half of one even that half was like twelve dollars for half a fruit which which is like a large it's you know size of two fists and that was in the fridge but then it was pretty hot out so by the time we were eating it it was kind of like room temp you know and that's great i feel like room temp works sometimes because i think the flavors actually are more pronounced when it's room temp yeah it was um or like off the vine it's like the natural temp we call it room temp it's like vine temp vine tree temp tree temp yeah yeah i don't even i think they probably grow on trees but um yeah that was great and then i brought back a cherimoya with me smuggled that is still not ripe but it is sitting on my countertop and every day i just hopefully give it a little squeeze and see how you're feeling it you're tapping on it yeah i've never i've never had a cherimoya also but my sister um came back from south america with a real obsession for them and they grow them i've seen them at the la farmers market before so i i'm eagerly awaiting Apparently it tastes like raspberry yogurt.

54:46Like definitely not in my top 10 of yogurt flavors, but I know what you're saying. Raspberry yogurt as a fruit. The creaminess, I think, that that suggests is interesting. You know, I get it. I wasn't trying to shade the fruit. I'm just saying that's not my I don't think of raspberry yogurt as a reference point. But now I see what you're saying. Yeah. It's like the creamy texture of fruit. Yeah. Really dope. That was really great. Another sweet thing that I had that I really liked was I got some chocolate chip cookies from a pop-up bakery in Miami called Liger's Cookies that started during the pandemic.

55:21That was just a really good, crispy on the outside, gooey on the inside. Yeah. Just a platonic ideal of a chocolate chip cookie. Always nice to find a pastry on the run. Yeah, it was so great. And then I found one in my bag and ate it on the plane. And it still was that mixture of textures. You know, I don't really like a crisp cookie all the way through. We've definitely established this on taste. It's definitely a gooey, chewy kind of hive here. Yes. So totally with you here. Yeah, no, it was perfect. It was exactly how I wanted to leave Florida with tropical fruit in my suitcase and cookies.

55:52It was great. I love this recap. I feel like I've never been to Miami myself. Been all over Florida. You haven't? No, I've been to everywhere else. I grew up in the Midwest, so I'm like definitely west coast of Florida. so like St. Pete you know all those like you know Sarasota all that stuff and of course did the Disney one time. Do you have any interest in going to Disney? No I have negative interest in going to Disney. I think that would be like my worst case scenario but I did do an airboat tour in the Everglades. So cool. And saw all these wild alligators. Held a baby alligator. Oh my god it's so cute.

56:30It was so cute. I really was like maybe this would be my new pet. Are those airboats like scary? They seem kind of like crazy, like the way that they drive them and stuff. They're really fun. You know, you can just kind of Tokyo drift around the whole Everglades area. And we were, there's two sides of the Everglades. There's the National Park side and then there's an Indian reservation. And we were on that side. We did a like indigenous owned airboat tour company. And I ended up getting basically a private airboat tour because no one else showed up for the time slot. And I just kind of convinced them to take us out.

56:58How fun. Yeah, it was really fun. And I was like, I don't know what I was expecting, but being that close to an alligator really gets your adrenaline. Yeah. Oh, wow. I'm going to go. Yeah, you should go. And I would say like just the funny thing about the tropical fruit alligator connection is that Guanabana looks a lot like alligator. Really? From the outside. Yeah, it's scaly and green. and the like back-to-back videos of seeing a baby alligator and then a video of somebody slicing that fruit was really traumatizing because it looked like we were eating alligator, but it was just fruit. Just the fruit.

57:32Oh, my God. Let the record be clear. Yeah, only fruit, no gators. Yeah. I've eaten alligator. It was fine. Yeah, I've had it as like a sausage before in Louisiana, you know, at a festival of some kind. But now that I've held a baby alligator, I feel a little, you know. They're really cute in baby form. They're like little lizards. Yeah, a lot of things are cute in baby form. It's true, actually, yeah. Yeah, I want to hear about your trip. How was Israel? Israel was great. So I was there for two weeks with my mom and my father, Lama Abba and Tamar. So the four of us, we had this kind of great, like, let's go to Abba's, like, army base.

58:10Let's go to the monument. You know, he served in the 1973 war. So, like, let's go to that monument. So like the back half of it was not like food focused, so to speak. Obviously, when you travel, you get to you eat, obviously, three times a day. But it was less less that. So I'm going to focus in recapping it for you on Tel Aviv. Can I tell you about Tel Aviv? Have you been to Tel Aviv? I've been once over a decade ago. So I'd love to hear about your take on what's happening in the city right now. Like, truly the best city. Truly. I mean, it really is a special place. It's a merging of culture.

58:51It's extremely modern. Everyone is hot as hell. It's one third. We went on a great tour with our new friend and he showed us some spots and he said, one third of Tel Aviv residents identify as queer. and it's like a real mecca for uh for lgbtq like life and it's very accepting so and pride there is like massive party yeah i've seen photos of that before that's that's cool i'm curious what the food scene is like does it feel like um there's like a specific style of food happening there or is it pretty varied good question um i tried everything from misrahi arab food to uh Ashkenazi, more European-centric.

59:38I had gelato or glita. I had gazos or gazos. My Hebrew is not good, obviously, but I'm also very bad at just pronouncing. I can't even say the word pronunci. Pronouncing Hebrew in a Romanized way, in an English way. So apologies to all Hebrew speakers out there. I have a lot of thoughts on what's happening there. I think like modern restaurant culture is alive there. Service is better than ever. This is my third trip there in maybe six years. And I think it's certainly service was not always, you know, what you would expect in New York, but it's gotten really great. And I think that's important.

1:00:19Like when you're going to a restaurant to have somebody really present the food on the service side, it's important. Yeah, for sure. My friend was just saying that she's Israeli and that her family dream is to start a seltzer brand because everyone drinks seltzer in Israel, but there isn't a locally made seltzer. It's all being imported. Did you see a lot of seltzer? Well, that's Gazuz's seltzer. Yeah, exactly. And there isn't like a La Croix local. So I think your friend is totally on point. I think that there's Benny, who is the Gazuz guy, Benny Briga. He's written books about it. He has a spot at Levinsky Market.

1:00:56And he does like botanicals and he's doing like they're kind of like any cocktails. They're beautiful and mostly water. But then Benny showed us his lab and he's got all these amazing tinctures and fermentation projects going on in there. Yeah, I didn't get like a local. There's no like Topo Chico of Tel Aviv that I could find. So that's dope. A couple of restaurants come to mind. I think one that I always go to is Basta. I think I've been there every time since I've visited, which is right by the Shuk in Tel Aviv. And it's like I think it's like the coolest, most modern restaurant and modern meaning it feels like it could be stuck in Paris or New York or it doesn't.

1:01:31It feels like it's taking the inspiration from outside of Tel Aviv, which, you know, is not necessarily a good thing. But I think what they do is they're just creative and they're doing raw fish and they're doing braised meats. And I think I just love the way they operate. So Basta is one. Cool. I really love. um i went to art glida uh a-r-t-e uh like three times i think it's like the best gelato that you're ever gonna find the dairy in israel is out of control yeah do you have a go-to gelato flavor i went like two flits two styles of chocolate but for me it's like dark chocolate like almost on bitter is like my go-to i also had raspberry raspberry thinking about raspberries i had strawberries strawberries is like in my top three yogurt flavors by the way so raspberry whatever like irks me a bit for yogurts i think that blue raspberry has given raspberry a bad reputation because it sounds artificial yeah a good raspberry i think is worth having i agree i i think you're right um so art is is a place i really liked for gelato or glida um a few other places that i want to share i have like a list here shout them out because i think tel aviv you could go to we and we didn't go to to jaffa which is the southern port of tel aviv we didn't even go there and there's like stuff happening there we didn't even go to the far northern port either so we only had like three or four days we were up in like haifa and in the golan and went to jerusalem for a day and have a restaurant there and then we went to beersheba so we were all over the country um ibn ezra probably my favorite meal of the trip and my abba's favorite meal my father-in-law's favorite meal too which he's a tough customer uniting the family he's like a kibbutznik he he has like very different tastes than than me He's like very simple food.

1:03:17He like ate like the schnitzel everywhere we went. He wanted schnitz. I love schnitzel. So I respect that. Was this more of like what kind of food was that? This even as a restaurant. It's a kosher restaurant. It's in Florentine. It's opened by the son of this famous restaurant. The chef is the owner of Azura in Jerusalem, which is a market restaurant. So this is their Tel Aviv kosher grill. so they did like a like a simple braised uh braised short rib that was seasoned um with like pomegranate and it was just perfect the hummus was adorned and we had hummus in many places including ben sirrah in uh in jerusalem which is super dope but the hummus there was um it also had a meat um kind of like a gravy on it that i loved there was a braised chicken which is something that like a very Ashkenazi like something you would get at Passover yeah and like I didn't see a lot of that in in Israel in general this like sweet like date syrup maybe apricot braised chicken but really um outstanding they had chicken patties which were cool I thought that like doing a chicken patty or like a grilled chicken kebab with a lot of cumin and fenugreek in there I went with Dina Sussman, a good friend she took us there her book is coming out, Shabbat, it's gonna be dope I love Sababa, it's something I cook from a lot.

1:04:47You cook from Sababa? Yeah, yeah dinner party vibes Totally, well Shabbat, I have a PDF and we'll have her on the show soon it's just celebration of Shabbat food, but also just like the kind of lifestyle but you know what I also had a sandwich that I kind of, it's changed the way I think about sandwiching. Is it a verb? I'll use that as a verb. Yeah, it's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle. Back to schnitzel, but with challah. Wow. It's really interesting. Like, I never really thought about that. How does that even, I feel like schnitzel is, you have to really bite into that, and challah is squishy.

1:05:28Is it? Very thin schnitzel. Okay. This isn't the German style or even the American Southern style. It's a very thin pound. It's like probably a quarter inch. Wow. And was it the bread toasted or no? No, it was like just a totally dry, like a normal roll. You could put like a mustard or a mayonnaise on it. I preferred a mayonnaise. But I loved it. It was like a really fresh challah. I think that was like one of my awakenings there. That sounds delicious. That sounds like comfort food. And also similar to the Medio Noche that I had in that it's a sweet egg bread that's being used with this meat.

1:06:03I think that, you know, I always want all my food to hit on all the different flavors at once. And having that kind of savory sweet combo is really fun. I have to call it a SIF. Have you heard about the Jewish Food Society is involved with this? It's called a SIF and it's the Culinary Institute of Israel. And they're doing an exhibit there that I was able to attend that was dedicated to workers, restaurants and worker food in Israel. And it's really, really a nice brief exhibit. And it kind of goes through the Mashav kibbutz era of dining, but it also gets into like migrant work in Israel and how that's important to the economy.

1:06:40And they've sent photographers to cover the different styles of dining. And that institute or organization is amazing. And I'm going to have the founder Nama Shefi on the show at some point to talk about it. That sounds really cool. I'm curious, like, are there any co-op models for restaurants happening in Israel right now? I feel like that whole kibbutz, moshav mentality could kind of translate in that way. In a modern sense, not that I know of, I know the moshav, we were on several kibbutz when we were visiting family. And like that's still, kibbutz lifestyle is still real. Yeah. Northern Israel where we were, we went to a couple.

1:07:18And I'll just say visiting kibbutz is something that I think everyone should do. And I think that it's a kind of lifestyle that harkens back to a different era. It's interesting. For sure. If there was one like menu item that you could have available at a restaurant here in New York and eat it whenever you want that you had in Israel, do you have one in mind? So many. I would say it's simple, but the hummus there, the hummus is hard to describe the creaminess of it. And it's everywhere. So it's like good hummus everywhere and hummus as a meal combined with a pita that is thick. Like we're talking like thick, like, you know, four or five inches thick in some cases, like very thick bread.

1:08:10Thick crust, I think is what I call it. It's just different. I mean, it hits different, right? I mean, it really is a special style of dining and having like the pita and hummus together. and when you reflect on what hummus and pita is like here, it's extremely sad. Yeah, you know, I had really good hummus in Miami, actually, at this restaurant called Mandolin that is a Turkish, Syrian Greek. I know that name. I definitely know that name. Yeah, you know, it's beautiful outdoor dining. I had to Google, I just Googled TMZ Miami Mandolin because I feel like a lot of celebrities probably eat there.

1:08:45That's really what you Google? That's hilarious. Yeah, and Beyonce and Jay-Z were there, you know, so that vibe. That's probably why I know it. Um, but it made me think about how excited I am to be cooking now that the weather is getting nicer again and using dip as a vehicle for the meal. Cause I had really good, um, hummus with a merguez sausage on top and pita and a veggie on the side. It was all I needed. And I think that, um, just thinking about eating differently as weather is getting warmer, I'm trying to do more dip as a meal. Dip as a meal is great. Dip as a meal. Interesting. We should do that story.

1:09:16Dip as a meal. Yeah. Yeah. Let's, let's, let's get that story. I'm down. Hey, Eliza, thanks for sharing Miami. I'm going to have to make it there. Anytime.

1:09:30The Taste Podcast is hosted by Eliza Abarbanel and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com. And make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things that are happening.