352: PJ Vogt

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0:31One of the things we look for in topics or stories or interviews is if we can find something where, in a very minor way, once you've heard this interview, an experience you're used to having, you'll get to have in a different way. Like, you'll know a little bit more. You'll have different questions. Something might be funny to you that wouldn't have been funny.

0:52This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

1:23PJ, I am proud of you. What a great talk. I hope you enjoy it.

1:36PJ Vogt, welcome to This Is Taste. Thank you for having me. What's up, buddy? Good to see you. Good to see you too. It is the first snowy day in New York City in, I think, two years. I know. People aren't in the office today, so we're timestamping. It'll probably be 95 degrees somewhere in New York when we run this. That sounds really wonderful. I don't like winter. I dread winter. And the idea that there's a future is something that I forget. So it's nice to think that this could exist in a future. I wanted to have you in. Your voice is very recognizable to many of our listeners. You've done many podcasts.

2:07You worked at companies. We will get into the business later on. This is not a media. This is not Peter Kafka talking about media. But we will get to that at some point. But I want to just start by what's good in New York right now restaurant wise? What are you liking? Oh, so I live in Red Hook, Brooklyn, where we were blessed not too long ago with Cafe Spaghetti, which I really love. Yeah, yeah. It's like the best restaurant with the silliest name. And then they opened another restaurant, Swoony's. And I kind of just go between those two as the restaurant that I am most excited to be at in Brooklyn right now.

2:42They're also very, very close, but they're wonderful. They're like, I don't know. it's um cafe spaghetti it's just like really really good pasta and it feels it's like a nicer higher end place but it doesn't feel scary or pretentious it feels like a neighborhood spot i love that uh articulation because it's it definitely a lot of places are scary and pretentious yes right now and i'm i i don't know it's hard for me to enjoy myself at like the highest end i feel too aware that i might be enjoying things wrong to enjoy them freely sometimes and like cafe spaghetti is not a place like that. No, definitely agree.

3:14Now, what's the Red Hook Tavern burger check right now? Give us a checkpoint. I think the burger's quite good. Red Hook Tavern is like, I say I'm in Red Hook. I'm technically in Columbia Street Waterfront, which is a neighborhood that no one doesn't exist. It's like a comma of a neighborhood. For Robert Red Hook, I really like Red Hook Tavern. The burger's very good. I never remember to make reservations there, so I always end up, there's this one little corner they'll put you in by the door if you're desperate oh i love that corner i know that one it's very drafty it's so drafty it's super drafty yeah i was there with two friends the other day and like we were like balancing plates on our laps but it was still enjoyable yeah still a good experience so i've gleaned from the show uh we'll talk about the sushi episode which i'll link to in the show notes just wonderful journalism and we'll get into it without spoiling i don't want any spoilers in this conversation because they gotta listen to episode um but i've been doing work down in wall street so what's the lunch like in the search engine office are you guys doing like group lunches what's the deal okay so i didn't understand before i started working on wall street that i in my head i've lived in new york for uh i think over 15 years now but i didn't spend any time on wall street and i thought it was still like the 80s and there's like bankers with like giant ties whatever they've all left they're in midtown so wall street is kind of a ghostly neighborhood there's not a lot of options or if there are i haven't found them i go to subway a lot yeah i go to subway like a lot a lot like i eat a lot of half side sandwiches for lunch there is a gian famous food which is pretty good oh shien is but you can't do you can't do the lamb burger like five days a week no exactly it's like a special occasion and afterwards i can't work for two and a half hours or i'm just like digesting um is it pronounce shin uh shien like the province in china that's that's yeah shien i should say there's a shien famous food yeah um yeah there's a whole foods uh where i'll just like go for the salad bar yeah right um but there's like a lot of places i don't want to like denigrate any establishments but there's a lot of those sort of those restaurants where you're just like who goes here like they're sort of like they're kind of expensive and touristy they're not particularly wonderful they get foot traffic but like you just sort of the mid-towny whatever feeling diner that isn't hasn't been there for a million years and you're like it doesn't seem like the spot you would totally adore there's like a lot of that so it's tricky um the thing i've been doing recently when i really really want to treat myself is getting a full joe's pizza to the office and just splitting it with the team um which has been really good no joe's is slept on you see the lines in Midtown, you're like, oh man, Joe's is a tourist trap.

5:57It's still good. I think it's still really good. Joe's pizza is good. Now back to Subway. Yeah. Okay. Are you doing seafood? I'm not doing the seafood at Subway. We'll get to it. All right. If you did the seafood at Subway after that sushi story. No. And actually someone did for the times at some point, someone had questions about their seafood and tested it. I can't remember what they found, but the fact that it was worth testing scares me off. Yeah, I think it was a pre-acquisition story. It sounds, yeah, that was definitely they're questioning if it was real crab, if it was artificial crab, pollock, if it was, but what's your order then at Subway?

6:35I have a few orders. I do the buffalo chicken sandwich on the flatbread, which I think is pretty good. I do the meatball sub, which I would defend. And then they have an Italian sub, which I feel like I should stop ordering because I really, really love an Italian sandwich. And I don't think they're killing it there. Like, I think you want... They're not crushing it at Subway. They're not crushing it at Subway. They're not, it's not like DeFontes or... Oh my God. I go to DeFontes a lot. I go to DeFontes like alone on a Saturday morning a lot. PG, you're a sub guy. I'm a sub guy. I would say my favorite...

7:08Yeah. Yeah, I'm from Philadelphia. Yeah. Oh, cool. Where there's like a lot of hoagies, we call them. But like, it is an enormous Italian roll sandwich culture. And that is still the thing that makes me happy. What do you think about John's Rolls of Pork? I really like it. I'm like kind of in the cheesesteak wars. I'm like a noncombatant. Like I'll eat up and down, like really great cheesesteaks, really not great cheesesteaks. I think John's is very good though. I've gone back with my partner a bunch of times to Philly and tried to go to John's every time and every time it's been closed. And like we went - It's rough.

7:46We went around Christmas and we like drove downtown because I'm in the suburbs. And yeah, it's been disappointing. But John's is really good. John's is great. But I mean, like spoken like a true Philly local, you don't talk about cheesesteaks. No, no, no, no, no, no. No way. Yeah, no way. All right. A few more like introductory questions. I want to know about your breakfast routine. I feel like you have one. Do you have like a coffee breakfast practice? I have. So, okay. For a long time, what I was doing was the Nespresso pods. Yeah. Which was fine and was working okay for me. And then my friend Khalifa Sané, who's a writer and is like a really devout coffee person, has been slowly trying to radicalize me towards enjoying coffee.

8:32Oh, man. Yeah. You sound like most guests on the show and me trying to radicalize them. Oh, interesting. So most people are more like me. Most people are like you. It's a micro theme on our show, but we definitely, we try to like get into it because you should buy a fucking digital scale and weigh your coffee. Okay, so I will tell you about my week this week. I bought, so last, today's Tuesday. Yeah. Saturday, me and Kay went to three different coffee shops in Bushwick. We went to Say. Oh, yeah. I was on the subscription for Say for about 18 months. It's a good spot. He's on the subscription, he told me.

9:04Yeah. So we went to Dayglo, Loveless, and Say. Oh, my gosh. You didn't go to Drip. Is Drip, does that? That's my guy in Bushwick if I'm going to go there. but I do like Dayglo and say you did all right. Okay. He's trying to help me develop an appreciation for coffee so that I can enjoy coffee more so that I can make better coffee. And I'm like, it's not like I'm being dragged into this. Like I've expressed curiosity and now we were following the curiosity. But we had like three different cups. I like rated the cups. He was like trying to, the thing I noticed most, the difference between being kind of an idiot versus him being a connoisseur is that we would have coffee, he would have a sip and immediately be able to characterize, you know, this has like whiny nose or whatever.

9:48For me, the first sip of coffee is just hot. It just tastes hot. Which is a positive response versus not hot. Not hot would be worse. But I don't know how coffee people can taste the first sip. We're going to get to some food questions. I feel like if you can do a coffee episode on Search Engine, you're going to really, really, really, really not regret it. I think we will because he's been just teaching. Like, I like the feeling. one of the things that we try to do with the show or one of the things we look for in topics or stories or interviews is if we can find something where in a very minor way, once you've heard this interview, you'll, an experience you're used to having, you'll get to have in a different way.

10:27Like you'll know a little bit more, you'll have different questions. Something might be funny to you that wouldn't have been funny. And my experience of drinking coffee with Kay is that like he was telling me about batch brew and how batch brew is sort of a retronym. Like you didn't need to have a name for batch brew until recently, but now you do. And like, just that feeling of like, you're in a place you've always been in, but now you're noticing it differently is an experience I chase in the world. And when I feel like I'm learning about a subject area in that way, I'm trying to figure out like, what's the entry point where this could be an episode?

10:56Yeah, your curiosity definitely shines through in the episodes. And just to put a period on the coffee talk. Yeah, batch brew is a retronym. It's a good call because now we've got hand brewing, We've got forced pressurized coffee called espresso. We've got, you know, lots of different ways to make coffee. And I think, PJ, if you can get into that hand brewing and start tasting like natural coffees versus washed coffees. Yes. Go there. Go there. Well, so I bought, I don't, it's like my coffee budget is already spiraling. Yeah. I bought a digital scale. I bought, what's it called? The really nice grinder.

11:32Oh, you bought a Baratza? No, higher. I got a Oh god it's coming today Because like the Baratza is the one I use The Encore I told him I was going to get an Encore and he pushed me off of it My gosh well Encore is expensive so you went more? Yeah it was worse He told me to get a A fellow Gen 2 Ode Brew Grinder No comment

11:59It's okay But it's so funny it's funny to be the newbie in a space and to understand that you're like kind of like just like sashaying between like low stakes civil wars but not even have the level of appreciation like i told him i was like yeah i'm really excited i got like a a technover i'm like the mocha master yeah silence it was just like silence he was like i think you should start with the french press and then we we'll talk about what i think that that i'm not against a mocha I think that there's many ways to brew coffee, and there really isn't, like, a preferred method. But tell me about that, The Fellow.

12:38We'll regroup later. Okay, yeah, it's coming today. If it's a mistake, it's inexpensive. Yeah, but really, when it comes to a coffee budget, and my listeners are going to understand this more and more, but it's a small luxury in life, right? It's not that expensive when you look at the relative prices. No, that was actually, so we were at Dayglo and we were looking at really expensive beans. And then Kay was just running me through the math where I think the most expensive beans, if you actually, you know, divide the price, blah, blah, blah, this many cups. He was like, if you spend the most amount of money you could here, every morning you'll have a$4 cup of coffee.

13:16Agreed. And I like a world where luxury does stop there. You know what I mean? And the other thing I like, I'm not really, I appreciate food, but not at the level that probably a normal guest on this show does. But what I do appreciate is this feeling of getting to run experiments on what you like and perfecting what you like. And coffee is such a, in a way, the extraction process is so simple that for me, it has the potential to lock into something I can obsess over. Absolutely. It's literal math. I mean, if you have a unified distraction process or ratio and use the same type of water and use the same temperature and the same grind with the same grinder, you're going to taste the difference in all the different coffees you get.

13:56Yes, yes. And, you know, it's an affordable luxury. I mean, it's like$4 a cup for like the best of something in the world. Yes. It's incredible. Okay, let's move on because I feel like Search Engine taps into our biggest questions. we'll get to sushi we'll get to airline coffee but I want to know like what's on your whiteboard right now food wise questions I love to like tap into what you're thinking about yeah so is this do you want to know questions so the best part of this job for me right now is that I get I don't really use social media very much but I get in place of it what I have is an open email inbox that goes to my phone for the show where listeners are just constantly emailing me like the things that are bothering them in the shower or whatever and so I have listener questions that aren't things we're actively pursuing but that I'm curious about there's some food things that we are actively pursuing like what do you want to know about oh I just want I mean we're not going to spoil any big big stories but like thematic like you know are you thinking about like the future of the grocery store are you thinking about I don't want yeah I just don't want I don't want to like spoil any of the show listen to search and it's beautiful show but well what I can tell you the this will have come out by the time this airs, because the next two weeks is like a minor food episode, which is about, we're trying to solve the mystery of why in New York City and really any large city, why are there so many chicken bones on the street and like on the sidewalk?

15:25Wow. Which turned out to be a very rich mystery that we have solved. We set up surveillance cameras. We have answers. They are not the answers that anyone has spoken to has guessed. It's like kind of surprising. but also for that the the reporters who did this story wasn't me um they gave us a pocket history of the chicken and i had not known the chicken's like many thousand year history in relationship to human beings so that's one one that i want to pursue that i don't know if we're going to pursue is um why do we breakfast food for breakfast in america like why how did we settle on like like something kind of starchy and eggs and usually bacon, which is like a story.

16:06There's like a, there's a moment in American history where people who want that to be the case push for it. But like, we haven't found the interview that would tell the story. There's another one I want to do. God, I really shouldn't, whatever. It's fine. I'm trying to get, do you know Toby Cicchini? Yeah, of course. I'm trying to get him on the show. Yeah. You probably go to Long Island bar. Yes. And the guy invented the Cosmo. Have you read his memoir about the Cosmo? I've read pieces of him and met him a few times, but never had him on the show. Yeah. He's just an unusual, I find his memoir, when we were piloting Search Engine, I was reading his memoir.

16:38A friend of mine recommended it, and I really loved it. He's such a, for someone who's so successful in the restaurant industry, to also be such a talented writer, I feel like is very rare. And so he has all these descriptions of what it was like to be kind of a hipster bartender in New York in the 90s and aughts. And he really paints the scene really well. and so I've been trying to find the other way we'll think about episodes is just like you like this person you want to tell their story what's the question that would allow give a listener permission to listen to it so we might have him on it might be as simple as like how do you make a Cosmo we're trying to figure it out yeah um because also it's so funny that he's like such a like cool hipster and then he invents his cocktail or perfects his cocktail or whatever I know there's like and then sex in the city happens yes right right sex in the city happens and it's like this This cool cocktail becomes the least cool cocktail.

17:31Yes. But it's like people's creations have a way of having lives beyond their intention. And I think that's really funny. I love that about the show. It really is an interview show in many ways. And I think many of the critics you've written about your show recognize that. That you're having these great conversations with characters. And you're kind of backing into these answers. Which love the show. And let's talk about Sushi a little bit. Again, no spoilers. I want you all to listen to the episode. It's terrific. thank you PJ have you been able to eat sushi since you started reporting this story in late November I I haven't been able to eat sushi from the restaurant that I was ordering it from the so the story was like I there was a there was a takeout sushi place that I was ordering from really frequently it was making me ill very consistently I kept ordering from it which is yeah a problem for another day I was wondering about that but we won't even get to that you're admitting these things and yeah um uh and and eventually i began to suspect that the i could have been a victim of of what is sometimes called um seafood fraud or fish substitution but people will or seafood mislabeling people will sell one fish as another and in particular in some sushi restaurants there's this like problem of people selling what they sometimes call white tuna but which is actually escalar or wallu wallu or the x-lax fish yeah the x-lax fish you'll never ever ever order escalar ever again if you listen to this episode yes i think it's a cautionary tale of what it can do to one's uh gi system but we like investigated fish we dna tested the fish um i've still been eating sushi i like i my mind works in an unusual way uh which is that i tend to not notice anything and then notice one thing a lot and pay a lot of attention to it and then go back to oblivion and And so it's kind of great.

19:21It's like a journalistic trait. It is a bit of a because you have to move on. Yes. From topics, but you have to like nail the one and go super deep and then put out the thing, article, podcast, whatever. Yeah. And I enjoy I enjoy thinking really, really hard about something for a month and then almost never thinking about it again, which is a weird. It's it's like getting to be a tourist and a bunch of other people's interests. So fish fraud is rampant. I think 70, 80 percent of the seafood sold in America has some kind of fraud involved. It seems like that was a metric that came out of the reporting.

19:56Do you feel like it's going to get better? Do you think that we are going to turn the corner on this fraud or do you think that's actually embedded in the way seafood is sold? I mean, it's hard. The interview we did, we were talking to this academic who had tested a lot of fish and he'd found this very rampant fraud. and one of the things he said is that it's hard because seafood it's like we want it to appear on store shelves in a totally reliable way the way like agriculture foods do but it's it's a wild thing and so we want consistency from something that by definition really kind of shouldn't be consistent so it's part of the problem the other problem is just seafood in a way that you more often see in illicit markets like drugs it just there's a really long supply chain it passes from one person to another.

20:43And every one of those steps is opportunity for adulteration. Right. And then you get the end of it, the line, you get to the market, and then there's just like vague labeling. Yes, there's very vague labeling. And that's actually been this academic we spoke to, Dr. Peter Marco. One of the things he said was, so he'll publish these studies where he'll test, you know, red snapper, which is a commonly substituted fish. And whenever his studies get attention, the only real change he's noticed is that some seafood sellers will now just label things more vaguely. So they're not committing fraud. They're just doing marketing.

21:20It's just hedgier. Yes. He's seen fish just sold as fish. I mean, truly, that's the best way to hedge any weird better or avoid any kind of loxies. Yeah. Great. Terrific episode. Listen to it. And briefly, you did an episode about airline coffee and it definitely got some press and was passed around. a great episode too. What do we need to know about airline coffee? So we, this episode we did, we were investigating a rumor, a friend of mine had told me, which was that he said he'd heard that under no circumstances should anyone drink coffee on airplanes because according to him and according to a bunch of flight attendants he'd spoken to, the tanks that hold the water for the coffee, like the tanks in the body of the plane are very rarely cleaned and could be vectors for bacteria.

22:07so we did a very very thorough investigation into this and it was interesting it was sort of ended up being a story about rumors in a funny way because it was how do I put this so there was a point in time where you certainly should not have had coffee on airplanes and that point in time was much more recent than you'd think there was a homeschooled 13 year old science student who in 2002 I believe tested airline water and had all sorts of really troubling bacteria in it the wall street journal picked up that story they did more studies more stuff was found the government kind of got involved there's been some regulation um i think that the water on airplanes both in um coffee and otherwise is much safer than it was in the past what is true one the tanks can only be cleaned once a year but the water has to be tested much more frequently two almost no one we spoke to who studied this drinks the coffee on the planes like they all said yes it's much safer no we don't i ain't touching that shit i ain't touching it yeah yeah i ain't touching the water that's why they have the little water bottles that you can buy like for six dollars yes planes yeah um i'll link to that well in the show notes okay zooming out a little bit um this struck with me uh in a recent episode i'm not sure which one but quote refining your taste is not always for a net good what does that mean pj this is something i think about a lot And I think about it with coffee, actually.

23:34It's like, if you're somebody who, and this is often me, who kind of like moves through the world in a relatively oblivious way, everything is kind of fine. You know what I mean? Like a hamburger is a hamburger. You notice if it's cold. and as you become someone who has like more sophisticated or more refined or more intentional taste yeah you get to appreciate what is good about something that's good at a higher level perhaps maybe you're of the experiences you have the great ones are better um but you also just spend a lot of time being disappointed you know i was with with my friend calva when we were out doing this coffee tour his wife uh runs pies and thighs and so he's a legendary legendary oh my Oh, gosh.

24:15Very great New York City. Oh, I'd love to meet his wife one day. You should. Let's link. She's brilliant. Yeah. And so he knows food. He knows food really well. And so we had a pastry that day, and he's chewing it, and he pauses it, and he says, this was baked yesterday. And I was like, how do you know? He pulls up the pastry, and he shows me, and there's one stale crumb inside of the bite. And he's like, that's a telltale sign this was baked yesterday. I would not know that. and I'm not totally sure I want to know that. Like not because it's like gross to have a pastry from the day before but I just mean like, I feel like if you don't refine your taste, you live in a totally fine, happy middle.

24:54You don't have the peak experiences but once you refine your taste, you spend a lot of time just being disappointed in order to sometimes be really happy. I mean, it's like with drug use, like chasing the dragon. Totally. Once you like figured out like, oh my God, I had the best coffee in Copenhagen at that one market, you know, at that one day and you're like the rest of the coffees, it's just heinous. Yes. Yes. And it really does remind me of drug users. It's like you are pursuing something that you will either never find or find fleetingly or found once. And maybe the answer, honestly, like if you were to defend here on this podcast, the concept of taste, maybe the answer is that the pursuit itself is the reward that like this morning I was like trying to extract this coffee the proper way.

25:41And like, it was, it took me 45 minutes of trying to have coffee. Because I screwed up. You're on a journey, PJ. I'm very much on a journey. I'm glad we're capturing this. You're on a journey. So the first time I was like, I was supposed to grind the beans in a way that was coarse, but I don't have the new grinder. So I was using like, just like a whirly blade guy. Yeah. Oh, you were using like an actual blade grinder? Yes. Like the ones that make the heinous sound? Yes. Oh yeah. Can't use that. And I was trying for it to be coarse. And so I ended up trying to make a cup of coffee and a French press that had like actual beans in it.

26:13So that tasted like sour, hot juice. It was really bad. The second time went a little bit better. But I did have a thing where I was like, the Nespresso used to do it in 30 seconds. I'm not yet at replacement level Nespresso quality with this journey I'm on. Am I happy that I'm doing this? And what I told myself, and I think I believe this, is that having something to think about was fun. You know what I mean? like learning something and, and I did, I felt like it made me think of breaking bad. I was like trying to get like a higher purity level of this coffee. And, but yeah, I think you're signing up for a less happy life, perhaps, but a more interesting one.

26:49I love the sentiment about the journey. I think about it a lot when visiting restaurants, which we write about and I judge, um, I feel it's about the experience getting to the end result, which is the food you're eating. Yeah. And, and really the, the metrics are not just good or bad food. It's like walking in the space and enjoying the music or the aromas. Like that's part of it. And I think we will focus so much on like the quality of the food on the plate and that's just not life. Yeah. And like, I think, I think sometimes the other thing that can be nice about if what we're celebrating is appreciation is just the feeling of, I don't know how to say this exactly, but being in a place where everything is just so, where everything's been done correctly and where, because you've looked for that experience enough, you can just appreciate the just so-ness at a deeper level.

27:39You know what I mean? There's this dessert place called Chica-licious in the, it's East Village, I think? Yeah, there's one in the East Village. I think they had a few locations back in the day, but yeah. But it's this woman and her husband. It's really small. And there's a way that they move around that restaurant that's so, I don't know how to explain it, but it's like being inside a clock. You know what I mean? And it's not just, the food's really good, but it's like there's a precision and a cleanliness and it's like you're watching a dance and I feel like when we go there it's like I just enjoy watching that dance.

28:11It doesn't matter if the dessert is not your favorite. No, and it's like the dessert's good. It's just like I've noticed that I'm going there for the experience of watching someone do something well. I think it's true connoisseurship when you realize that, to be honest. So I'm glad you bring it up. Thank you. Not to get in the weeds. We tease at the top, but I mean we do podcasts here. You do podcasts. what the fuck's up with the industry it seems really challenging right now it is very challenging how how weedsy do you want to go well we have probably five minutes so let's just say i mean medium weeds yeah medium weeds yeah like we'll go shin length and eat weeds i think you um run a successful show you were at reply all at wnyc there's a boom in podcasts blah, blah, blah.

28:55Now the boom is, is passed. Um, do you think that, uh, the podcast as a medium can be sustainable? I think podcasting as a medium can certainly be sustainable. I think that whether the thing I love, which is sort of podcasting, that's trying to, at least as part of its mission, it's trying to do what journalism is trying to be journalistic. It's trying to do what like great magazines do in some form that's sustainable. I think it doesn't look like the high watermark. Um, I don't think it has to be as bad as it is right now, but I think like one of the things that most of the people I talked to are saying is look during the boom, when ad rates were so high, this was an ad supported medium.