368: Crystal Wilkinson & Howie Kahn

29:39It's a very labor intensive process. And that's fun to go to the distilleries and tour them. Yeah. And they give you a sip of moonshine at the end. I know. Yeah, they give you that white whiskey at the end. You're like, oh man, this is maybe not my favorite. Right. Yeah. Crystal, on This Is Taste, we have guests about the discerning taste. So to close this interview, here's a little rapid fire, fast and furious taste check. Are you ready? I'm ready. The best fruit. Plums. Yeah. You can't beat a plum when it's perfectly ripe, but then if it's a little too ripe, it's too... Yeah, or if it's too firm, it's...

30:16It's too tart. Yeah. Yeah. You got to get it right. The worst vegetable. Eggplant. Yeah. No baba ganoush. Yeah. No parmesan. Yeah. The skin. It's just too slimy. Yeah. I've had it a couple of times where it's done perfectly. And so I often go in a restaurant and I'll say, uh-oh. And I'll see the chef and I'll go, hmm, he looks like he could make it. and then I'll order it and go,

30:49I've done it again. I've tried the eggplant and I'm not liking it. It sounds, the name of it sounds great. It even looks great. Beautiful color. Yes. It's a beautiful shade. But then underneath all of that, there it is. There it is. It exposes itself in the worst way. I'll take eggplant parm for sure, but I agree sometimes the spreads can be a little not great and bitter. Yeah. The best dessert. banana pudding hard agree this city's got good ones this city new york city's got some good ones and i grew up with banana pudding but you know if i'm gonna be fancy creme brulee oh yeah yeah definitely i'll have to shout out sugar sweet sunshine in new york that's the best banana pudding around it's quite good but i love that one with nilla wafers of course right yeah that's the best i love that okay this is a big one your favorite cookbook of all time all of edna lewis's cookbooks yeah yeah all of them a favorite recent cookbook discovery i think it's called for the culture by clancy miller it's like this collection of of um black women in food and each of them has a has a recipe along with the the information it's great but we've had clancy on the show and I think it's a really remarkable book.

32:06And it's like, it definitely breaks form a little bit, which is cool. It's like, it's unique in the style. Your favorite city outside of America to visit for food? I haven't been outside. I'm so country. Yeah. I have not been outside of the States except for the Bahamas. Yeah. That was okay for food. Decent. But there's, yeah. But there are things that I have my eye on that I haven't got. Tell me about that. I want to hear that. Well, you know, I'd really like to have some authentic French food, some authentic French cuisine. And I really want to go to Africa to have African food. And my best friend is from Jamaica and she makes everything sound so amazing.

32:50Because if you go to a Jamaican restaurant, she's always saying, ah, this is not it. Oh, yeah. There's always that. There's always a friend who has like a connection or was born somewhere. It's like, it's never good in restaurants. So you got to go to the source. I mean, those are some pretty good trips you got planned. Yeah, they're on my list. Love that. A couple more. A cuisine you would like to learn more about? Jamaican cuisine, I think. Like authentically. I became really fascinated by Shauna and I. That's her name, Shauna Morgan. We did this whole sort of cultural exchange. I made Kentucky jam cake, which she thought was sort of similar to black cake that they make in Jamaica.

33:34So I gave her slices of jam cake and she made sorrel for me over the holidays. Oh, cool. And it was so good. Oh, that sounds amazing. Like sorrel, the tea? The drink. The drink, yeah. Yeah, made out of the hibiscus leaves. I love sorrel. we have a great recipe and taste i love that dish love making it it's just i call it dishes to drink but you know what i mean it's like really really good what a great swap yeah it was great really fun i love that okay last one your favorite sandwich the hot brown yeah kentucky oh my gosh so much um so many calories and so much uh i mean it's it's it's a wonderful delicious heart attack Explain it a little bit what the components are.

34:25So it has turkey. It's covered in Mornay sauce. Yeah. It has a fresh tomato and two slices of bacon on top. And it's like sliced bread usually? Yeah. Yeah. A big thick slab of white bread on the bottom. Yeah. It's like a club sandwich almost, but it's big thick. I've never had one in the actual hotel. Or do they even have it? Is there a hotel still around, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brown Hotel, yeah. No, it's the Brown Hotel. It's the Brown Hotel, yeah. It's still the Brown Hotel. Yeah, the Brown Hotel. It's the first thing I order when I go to the Brown Hotel. Yeah. Well, Crystal Wilkinson, thank you so much for joining us.

35:06It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

35:17How are we going to welcome this? This is Tate's. What's up, buddy? Hey, Matt. It's really cool. to have you in. Long time coming. We'll get into your journalism career. I mean, I've been reading you before I knew you and you were an editor at GQ. We can go through your work in the podcast realm now and your book work. But first, I'd like to get a sense of what's good in New York right now, restaurant wise. What are you and Casey, your wife, who I know as well, where are you guys going out? So restaurants are an interesting question. We have two really little kids. And so the orientation towards restaurants are a little bit different.

35:49And the thing I enjoy the most is staying pretty close to home. Sean Rembold, who's a great New York City chef, who I go way back with from his days at Diner in Williamsburg, opened a place pretty close to us called Inga's Bar. Yeah. And I don't want to say it's the only place we go. But when I got that like year in resi thing that tells you like where you went in 2023 uh you know it's the it's the kind of place where they should all be saying my name when i when i walk in the door which it feels like i mean it's a beautiful neighborhood place it's on a residential street there isn't a lot of the you know commercial uh high street foot traffic situation it's on a corner there's a lot of glass The light is low.

36:35Good burger, good martini, you know, good pork chop, good fish stew, like really straightforward food done really well. Beautiful technique. Sean's always around, which which feels homey and cool. And so we're there a lot. And I really like it. I feel like it's still a little bit of a secret. And I feel like because of where it is in Brooklyn, it has a good shot of remaining a neighborhood spot where it's not going to be the kind of thing where it's going to be like line out the door, but they'll be busy enough to survive. I think of Inga's like French Louie on Atlantic and some of these neighborhood Brooklyn restaurants by really seasoned chefs and restaurateurs.

37:13You know, I've been to Inga's a few times. Great call. Got the bridges in the background. It's beautiful. I mean, I think that kind of simple but elevated neighborhood restaurant where the cooking's more elaborate than what I can put into cooking on a weekday is, you know, what I'm really looking for. There's comfort, but it's also, you know, a bit of an experience. Let's cut to your journalism. You do lots of things, man. You've written about fine dining, world travel, and you wrote a book about sneaker culture. Howie, what drives you to a story? It's a really interesting question. I have to say it's really interesting to be here and to be reflective at all about what I've done because I'm always on the other side of the mic as a sometimes host and podcast producer and setting up other hosts to succeed.

37:59So it's a little weird to talk about myself. I mean, let's be uncomfortable this show. We like to get the journalists in who maybe don't have mics in their face. Yeah, I used to. I mean, I used to have a mic in my face all the time. But, you know, I mean, what drives me to a story? It's an interesting question because it shifted a lot throughout my career. But I think there's been one thing that's been, you know, kind of a North Star or, you know, something that's guided me. I've always liked to think about how people do the work that they do, how the work they do affects culture, and how they're changed through the work that they do.

38:35So I've always looked for stories where change is evident, either change in a main character, if it's a profile subject, or change in a place, if it's more of a travel thing, or, you know, profile of a city. But, I mean, I've always thought that that's the engine and that's what makes for interesting reading is, you know, the tension that happens across that change. because it's not easy. I think for humans, the easiest thing to do is just stay the same, be stubborn, no risks, stay the course, same oatmeal every morning. And, you know, the more outrageous or audacious thing to do is to be changing all the time and to take those risks and to push those boundaries and to see who, you know, you are across that experience.

39:20So I was kind of looking for people who could exemplify or places that exemplified something out of the ordinary or extreme or surprising or inspiring. Let me just build on the idea of change. I think it's really well said about how as journalists, we seek out that delta. We like to see tension. So let me ask you in food and reflecting back in your 20 plus years writing about food, what has been the biggest change that happened over the past 20 years? I think this is like a massive question, I realize, but I think you can probably articulate a movement that really you think like, wow, this was different.

39:53Oh, so I mean, it's us sitting here right now. We're on a podcast talking about food to a national audience. And you're talking to me, who's, you know, a working journalist who's had a byline in some places. But the fact that something like this even exists, right? And other shows like it exist, and people are talking about food and posting pictures of their dinner and posting, you know, their breakfast as if it's a badge of honor. This is not something that existed 20 years ago, food was personal. It was at home. There was a small group of people who talked about like what restaurants they went to and what kind of status that conferred.

40:31There were some people who understood foods from different places, but there was no like every day where you could pick up a device, a telephone and look at like 17 different examples of barbecued eel in the time, you know, in Kyoto, in the time it takes to like walk to the coffee shop in the morning or drop your kid off at school. The enormity of the communication and the interest that's grown out of it is the biggest change. I wrote a story for GQ in the early 2000s about a guy named Jim Denovan. The tag was The Wandering Chef. He has a company called Outstanding in the Field. He now goes all over the world cooking these elaborate dinners on farms.

41:10And he's done car commercials and has had major sponsorships. And he's an artist. He's world renowned. When I first met him, He was, you know, doing six dinners a year. He was really interested in organic farming because his brother was one of the pioneering organic apple farmers in California and in South America. And I think, you know, the story I wrote about him was the first time farming had ever been talked about in a food story in GQ in a meaningful way. And that was about 20 years ago. So, I mean, the conversation has changed so enormously and so radically that the thing itself is the biggest change.

41:45Yeah. I want to talk to you about the geotag because I feel like just talking it out a little bit, man, the geotag for social has changed the way we think of food so much. You can now look at a city or a restaurant or a market and have a grid of like a thousand images from that market. Isn't that that's like wild to like think about. Those deep dives and the images that go along with them and the quality of that presentation sometimes are honestly the only thing that keeps me on social media, which I find to be like an otherwise like very maddening, strange, potentially psychologically damaging space.

42:20But the deliciousness and the opportunity to feel like you've gone somewhere when you can't go anywhere just remains so cool to me and always will. I mean, it's sort of up there with the feeling of like, I can't believe I can get in this tin can airplane thing and be somewhere else, you know, totally different in six, seven hours. It's our version of that. I think like exactly. Yeah. The geotech's a total marvel. Yeah. Really. You grew up in Michigan as I did. You grew up on the east side. I was on the west side. But around the same time. Bless. Tell me. Right. for real. Everyone knows we got Michigan pride in the show.

42:53What was food like growing up for you? It was great. I mean, I grew up in a family where food felt really important. I had two grandmothers who were all star cooks in different ways, a rotating cast of aunts and uncles who all had interesting recipes and specialties, you know, from stuff that was deeply Eastern European, Jewish and things that came out of Austrian and Romanian baking culture to, you know, know, there's some Italian in our family too, and, you know, some Italian, some sauces and some kind of roasted meat concepts that felt really interesting to me. Because of Detroit's amazing Arab population in Dearborn, and even, you know, where I grew up in Bloomfield, we had amazing access to that kind of food from all throughout the Middle East.

43:40My neighbors growing up were Persian, who had come to America escaping the revolution. and the food they had at their house was constant and their door was always open. It was always a party. There were always cars in the driveway. We were always invited. And that was amazing to see too. So I feel like I had this really incredible front row seat to the foods of the world, you know, through the diversity of the community and even kind of the, you know, diversity within my own family. Really well said about the east side of Michigan, which sometimes Michigan is called the flower state and there's like people think it's one thing but man it's a real multitude of yeah i mean because of the auto industry so many immigrants landed there and there were so many jobs that were you know tangential and circling around automotive and then food service and convenience stores and things that popped up and you know people came from all over the world to be there there's an incredible eastern market where farmers from all over michigan come to sell their stuff and there were great specialty stores there and i mean i was really into it from an early age.

44:42I was really exposed to it because I think, you know, people, my grandparents especially, caught on that I loved being around it. It was delicious. Who doesn't want a treat? I mean, and great food retail. Were you a Johnny Pomodoro's fan? Yeah. Yeah. I love Greektown too. I mean, I don't want to forget that too. You can't forget about Zingerman's either. You went to attend the University of Michigan, and I want to segue. You attended a little bit before me, but we both were in, I was at the University of Wisconsin. We were in these Midwestern towns in the 90s. And I'd like to get your sense of what food culture was like on campus in like 96, 97.

45:17Okay. So I'm glad you brought up Singerman's because I worked there. That was my college job. Wow. Cool. Yeah. I mean, it still remains one of the best jobs I've ever had and I'll ever have. I know Ari was on the show not that long ago. Ari's not been on the show. He wasn't? And he is somebody I've emailed. Come on, Ari. Yeah, he doesn't come to New York that much. And I've invited him personally several times. He will be on the show. Good. I can't wait. I can't wait for it. Jihei's been on the show a couple of times. Yeah. So she's amazing. I can't wait for the Ari Wandswag episode. But, you know, Zingerman's is this incredible delicatessen and group of businesses and retail outpost in Ann Arbor.

45:55I went to school between 1996 and 2000. And I think Zingerman's in so many ways was the sort of natural continuation of the food education my family had given me. It was this place where you were just getting things there and we were selling things there that you weren't getting anywhere else. And it was, you know, between 96 and 2000. So a lot of things seemed pretty new to the Midwest at that time. You know, like semolina pastas that were artisanal and brought back directly from Italy. certain kinds of pesto felt really fresh and new. We were selling cheeses, you know, where I believe we were the only store in the, I still say we as if I still work there.

46:35It's really funny. You worked there more than a week. So you got, you get it. No, I worked there for a year and then they did a really interesting thing. You know, when you start working there, when you started working there at the time, they gave you this little purple booklet that they call the passport and there were different, it was like a checklist and it was a passport size book. And the passport was your training manual essentially. And you got to run through these tasks. And if, you know, every time you completed a certain number of tasks, you got something, whether it was a discount on your groceries, which was an amazing blessing in college, or an actual raise, which was incredible too, like giving you more money to learn.

47:10And the things in the passport, they were incredible things. It was like, learn how to do pour over coffee. We did pour over coffee, you know, in 1999 in Michigan. It was like a ceremony. It was incredible. So there was like one guy there named John Loomis who ended up opening the Zingerman's dairy as a partner. And John was just super into the coffee. And he was like, let me show you how to do this pour over coffee thing. I grew up in a house where my parents drank like Swiss mocha, which was essentially like hot chocolate, you know, the coffees of the world, international foods or whatever it was called.

47:42And sort of to see that there was this whole culture that went along with coffee and that there was a story about where it was from and who made it and how it was grown. And I know you're, you know, obviously a big coffee person, but this was an incredible thing to see. It's amazing, too. And also, I will segue about olive oil. It's, you know, the way Ari bought olive oil from around the Mediterranean and beyond. It was incredible. They were, you know, Ari was like part of my job at one point was to put out different olive oils and to cut up bread so people could taste them. And I remember the first time they asked me to do that.

48:12It's like, what do you mean in olive oil tasting? It's olive oil. And just to understand that all these categories had all these micro categories and all these stories within this bigger group and olive oil didn't mean the same thing in every bottle. It's such a cool thing to learn. Cheese doesn't mean cheese. Yeah. You know, and so I'm, you know, trying to get my raise going through my passport, and learning how to cut, you know, smoked fish, smoked salmon, like on Sunday mornings with a really particular clientele, who, you know, who's like a New York clientele who's like at Zabar's. And they're like, I want it paper thin.

48:46I'm like, what are you talking about? You want it paper thin? Like, what does that even mean? And I remember turning to, you know, my supervisor, it was John or this guy Dale, or, you know, whoever was around saying, like, how do I do the thing where it's paper thin? And they'd show me and they take the time. And we did the same thing with harmoni biraco and we did the same thing with certain cheeses and it was it was just so special yeah the 90s had to be cut tom monahan the founder of domino's pizza came in every sunday morning after church which was one of my shifts wow and he would that guy's a legend because that guy he owned the the tigers young tigers yeah and he founded domino's pizza which is a major thing and domino farms yeah it's pretty cool yeah and he would come in every sunday morning and ask for half a loaf of, I think it was, it was pecan raisin bread, which was one of the two breads that had to be sliced by hand.

49:36And we'd, you know, there was a bread slicer, the machine to use to cut a lot of the other bread, but that bread was just too chunky to go through the slicer. And so I would have to put on a chain mail glove, put this, you know, brick of a bread, they still sell it, it's delicious, down on a board. And I'd have to sit there and Tom Monaghan would watch me slicing his bread. And it was, it was surreal. And it was, it was so cool. It was like his version of church. Yeah, it was church after church. And he would, you know, he would wait. There was a line to get in the shop on Sunday mornings. He would wait and we'd do this thing.

50:07It was really cool. He appreciated the process. I think everybody there appreciated the process. And I think so much about what I learned about food was appreciating the process. All the steps you have to get through to make something special, to make something good, to make somebody care, to want to learn more. Yeah. Process, process, process. Howie, let me ask you, when was the first time you wrote about food in a meaningful way? Give me your early food story. The real entry point to food was when I started working at GQ as a fact checker. My boss was a guy named Luke Zaleski, who's still at Condé and is in charge of legal affairs for a number of the magazines and has become like a pretty big Twitter personality for his anti-Trump views and pro-democracy views.

50:50He's really great. asked me, like, who do you want to fact check? Who do you want to who you want to work with? And so I gave him a shortlist. And one of the writers on there was Alan Richman, who's, you know, the legendary GQ food writer is, I think, still won more James Beard Awards than anybody ever. And I started working with Alan because I was always, you know, really interested in in the way he wrote and the way he told stories about food and the people around it and how he brought so much life to something that didn't talk, didn't breathe, didn't move, how he could write about a sandwich and make it seem like magic and a world I wanted to be a part of.

51:25So I was like, I was interested in the writing. How do you do that? How do you do that within an inanimate object? How do you do that with, at the time, a very niche group of people? How do you make the masses interested in something that not everybody's interested in? And so I started working with Alan, fact-checking, fact-checking, fact-checking, learning how to be a reporter, going through all his notebooks. He'd bring home menus from all over the world. And this was like, it was like slicing the smoked fish at Zingerman's. Like, it's a long process to get it right, to get it paper thin, to make everybody happy.

51:57When you're doing the fish cutting for the customer, like, they only want it one way. They want it to be perfect. When you're a fact-checker at a magazine, and you're 23, and you're working for these legends, and you're responsible for making sure the story's accurate. but man, I feel it has to be perfect. I feel Alan is a name we don't recognize enough. And it sounds like he did the work, right? I mean, this, these James Stewart awards don't just happen in like, you know, being a columnist at a GQ is a pretty high profile gig. And I think later in life, he kind of fell off a little bit and maybe, you know, a little bit of like payola here or there just saying, but like, I think when he was at GQ, man, Alan Richmond was a name that you reckon with.

52:37Yeah. I mean, he was, he was on the beat. He was the definition of a beat reporter. He was on the road all the time. He knew all the chefs. He knew places that people weren't going. Like there wasn't social media then. If you wanted to know about the place, you had to find it. You had to make a phone call. You had to get in the car. You had to make a connection. It wasn't a DM. It was hard. It was hard work. So and he cared about every bit of his story, every clause, every transition, every piece of punctuation. And it was a beautiful way to be trained. So after fact checking Alan for a couple years, I think I finally got confident enough in my own thinking about how a story should be written to start maybe pitching some stuff myself.

53:23okay let's go there then yeah meeting how you're you're in gq at the time no phones no it's just paper i mean i was working at magazines in early 2000s there were barely phones but they're barely phones they weren't like you weren't like like on twitter during the meeting you literally were in the meeting and you were had a piece of paper and you had your ideas on there and it was like let's fucking fire let's go okay so what's it like okay it's it's it's a little bit different than that too because i was a fact checker so i wasn't invited to the meeting oh no right you're you're sort of editorial staff adjacent when you're a fact checker at that time anyways.

53:55And you really just had to prove to everybody that you deserve to seat at that table. So I wasn't going to the meetings because I wasn't an editorial assistant. I wasn't on that track. I was a fact checker. I liked that role because I thought that's where I learned the most about writing and work the closest with the writers. And so I found this guy, Jim Denovan. I was actually doing a service story in Portland for GQ for their manual section, which was the middle of the book. And it was like, you know, what to eat during a weekend in Portland, Oregon. It was like 2006, 2007. And I was just talking to people around town.

54:36You probably went to Le Pigeon. Yeah. So Le Pigeon was on your list. Poc Poc was on your list. It was before that. Oh, it was before Poc Poc. It was before that. I'm trying to think of some of the places. But it was like the time where like Michael Hebb and Naomi Pomeroy were just coming up. And they had merged their names. They were the Heberroys at the time. And I remember sitting at a dinner in one of their restaurants and Michael telling me about this guy who travels around in a bus and does these incredible, he used the term like pop-up dinners. I was like, what the hell's a pop-up dinner?

55:11What's this guy doing on a bus? What do you mean he travels around going to these farms? and I found his number and I called him up and I was like, hey, can I come follow you around? Would that be okay? Can we do this story? And I learned a bit about him and I wrote a proper pitch and I gave it to Andy Ward who works here. He does. He works at Random House. At Random House. Love Andy. You know, if you're doing a list of the great influential editors of words, period, over the last generation. Like Andy's right up at the top. Nice guy. Humblest guy you'll ever meet. You would never know. Absolutely.

55:53Perfect taste. A writer's editor. And I sent him this pitch, like kind of scared out of my mind, but kind of feeling good because, you know, this guy isn't overwhelming in any way. Like doors open. And he said, yes. He was like, this is a great story. Like, go do this. I know it's your first story. Here's some other examples of, you know, stories that I think are in the same vein as this one. And maybe you can learn a few things by, you know, the story by Mike Paterniti and a story by Alan Richman. And there was, I think, something by Liz Gilbert in there who I had fact checked this story where she like walked across France and ate a bunch of stuff.

56:30Like very, very Liz Gilbert-y. Liz Gilbert's a great food writer, by the way. Yeah, I know. Before, like pre-Eat Prela, which obviously had eat as the first word. But she has a great sense of how to write about food and what it means, of course. And so GQ said yes to this story. And I couldn't believe it. I remember being so excited that I left the office to take a victory lap around Bryant Park. And I felt like I had just won all the lotteries. The amount of wonder and awe and emotion in that moment, it meant so much to me to get any of those pages or the opportunity because at the time just because you wrote the story it didn't mean it was going to get in at all and there's like cut to space there's could be a front of book yeah front of book if it didn't work out with our program there's a lot of like or like jim nelson who was the editor at the time could have simply decided like you know what i changed my mind and that's fine yeah that would have been okay so i i went to go find jim we had agreed to to meet in in seattle and i i landed in seattle and I called him up.

57:36I said, hey, where do you want to meet? He's like, oh, I'm in Vancouver. I was like, oh. And that just was a great introduction to what this job really is. You had a Greenback or you had the Condé Amex so you were able to do some stuff. Yeah, we had a travel department. There was just a number we called. You didn't even have to ask permission. I was like, I need to go to Vancouver tomorrow instead. And they're like, okay, cool, no problem. We'll get you a hotel room for there too. but it was it was this idea that um no matter where you land you're gonna have to chase it you know what i mean just because you have the story doesn't mean you ever have the story until the story runs and that's what it felt like and that's what it feels like still doing this you don't feel like you have the thing until the things in front of the world it's a great reminder about to report a story overseas for a magazine i haven't done that in a couple years and like you just don't know until you're on the ground can't go in you have to do your prep but it's you got to be really prepared and also you have prepared for a surprise and well you want to be surprised yeah because if you write the story in advance it's not as good it just never is yeah and then i chased jim around we met up in vancouver and i remember you know this was really before chefs knew how to talk to the media and jim's kind of a quiet guy too and i had to chase him around for like five days before he'd even sit down and talk to me you know but this was also the kind of reporting where we spent 15 days together it wasn't like like uninterrupted yeah that's cool the the access was was incredible because the idea was to go on tour with him the budget was incredible dude the budget was incredible it was that piece was interesting because we spent you know we we went to vancouver to do this first dinner and then we drove from from Vancouver to Colorado.

59:25You know, that's not close. And, you know, sometimes he felt like driving all through the night and like whistling through the desert. He's a great whistler. And it wasn't the kind of story where we were checking in at like the Ritz every night. I remember sleeping. I brought a tent on that story. Like we camp. So the access was kind of strange in terms of like there's no magazine story anymore where you go and spend 15 days with a subject. Definitely not. A subject which is a laugh at you now. like you're lucky now with some stories even a feature if you get like 15 minutes times three i know with a person but this was like embedded and then i think i went out and did a second leg with him somewhere too like i i don't think the 15 days was even the end of it it's amazing well i'm gonna like fish that story out of the internet ether or the google ether and i'm gonna i'm gonna link to it it's available i hope it's available it's i can send it to you i don't know where it lives now i don't know if it lives on gq.com anymore i think it might well we'll figure it out we'll link to the show notes okay howie i have a couple quicker rapid-y journalism questions you know through your your work and in podcasting and magazines um i just like to get your sense of your favorite chef interview for a hot take like some like chef like he's gonna tell you or she's gonna tell you you know something really really controversial you know it's interesting because I feel like I've lived through a period where chefs want to give fewer hot takes and have become like very guarded about that.

1:00:51It's turning around a little, I must say. People just want to say what they want. I mean, I think it's turning around, but there was your partner on your book, Food IQ, Daniel Holtzman is great for a hot take. You're so right. He's great for a hot take. One of my other favorites for the kind of like zingy true thing is Alex Guarnaschelli, who I think is a wonder. And even though she has like this huge popularity through the Food Network, I think she still doesn't get quite enough credit, even though she's quite famous nationally. But I think she is super important and comes from this incredible like New York food pedigree and this incredible food family.

1:01:26And I always trust her take, which is, I think, important for a hot take because there's the kind of hot take where you can go to somebody who you know they're just going to say something stupid, but it's going to get attention and everyone's going to get in trouble. but it's not good. No. It has to be good. Like empty calories. Yeah. Yeah, it has to be right. So like an Alex Guarnaschelli hot take is a good hot take. Okay, so your favorite chef interview for a long, thoughtful quote. You know, I always love talking to Roy Choi. I always found that I would get something I didn't expect from him, something soulful, something moving, something that felt therapeutic for all of us.

1:02:06I saw Roy has a new book deal coming out. Yeah, he's coming out with us, actually, Clarkson Potter. I'm pumped to see what he does. I think he's always one that's pushed his own boundaries and gone further and deeper. And I always like the way he talks and tells stories. I love that you brought up Roy. He really does have an amazing way of putting a punctuation point, not an exclamation point, but some punctuation at the end of this long thought. He can land the plane really well. He's a great storyteller. He's present, too. Like I really appreciated all the ways he's shown up for a number of things like all these years.

1:02:40It's good call. Good call. I love that. I have a couple more. A chef who was the toughest to get to talk. Okay. So I thought about this question because you sent it to me. Yeah. Yeah. And I couldn't come up with a good answer. And then I was like, why? Why can't I come up with a good answer? And then I realized that it's about this process where it didn't matter if it was tough to get somebody to talk. I was going to talk to them again. And I was going to talk to them again. And I was going to talk to them again. And we were going to get close to the deadline. And I was going to talk to them again.

1:03:15And then I was going to see what I had. Because I think my whole job was to make the best and most interesting and truest reflection out of what was actually said. and to evaluate like what really came across and why and to put the context around that so i think i could eventually get people to talk through persistence but if they weren't talking there was a reason and there was some framing to do around that too yeah i mean it is asking you to say when did i fail as a writer um yeah because at the end of the day it's like it's my byline on it's your job it's my it's my job and it's just like if if they weren't getting it and some editor would tell me they're like they didn't say any you know was there anybody who was like just really hard to get the warm-up like a big interview you needed to do and it was just like really impossible i need to go back like i wish there was i wish there was there was something i mean i remember like on a totally different beat doing a baseball or a sports legends package for gq and picking up the phone with willie mays and him saying what magazine are you from like what what are we doing again and i'm like oh we're doing this whole like you know biggest legends in the history of sports package he's like what magazine is it he's like i'm like gq magazine he's like GQ magazine's a fashion magazine.

1:04:23What do you know about baseball? And the fact of the matter is I know a lot about baseball. And I grew up around baseball and studying the back of baseball cards and doing the scholarship of like reading Beckett's and Sports Illustrated, you know, RIP. And so that was a really tough situation to be in because I'm like 24 and Willie Mays is giving me pushback about the outlet because nobody explained to him like what was going on. And that sucked. That was very frustrating in the moment because I also didn't have the age, the experience, or the know-how to push back a little bit. But I softened him up, too, and we did a nice thing.

1:04:58We did a nice thing. Was Willie passed over for a cover? Is that why he was pissed? I don't know what it was. He was definitely older at the time. No, I'm kidding. I don't know if he was also just giving me a hard time, because that could have been two. Seems like a little hemorrhoidal of an answer, I must say. Okay, last one. Is there an interview that you wish, in hindsight, would have gone better? There's got to be one that you regret that you didn't necessarily get that follow-up or maybe some, yeah. Your eyes are lighting up. I love this. Again. Oh, you won't admit? I wrote on the - What's yours?

1:05:32What's mine? You're turning it on me. Yeah. So I had Guy Fieri on the phone and I wish in hindsight, it was like maybe 14 years ago, I feel like I wanted to push back harder on that really negative Wells review. I feel like I was a little bit like swayed by PR on that one. That was 14 years ago. It was like the day after the review hit and I was kind of part of a little bit of a softball play. I wish I would have been because I love Guy Fierce. I think the guy's a really interesting dude. Anyways, you ask me? What is yours? I'm still trying to get there. All right. We'll let that pass. Okay. Maybe we'll come back and talk about hard interviews.

1:06:11I had PJ vote on the podcast and I had a little bit of an industry talk with him and we're at the end of the interview So let's do a little industry talk. Free Time Media is your company. You're a producer. You do a bunch of cool shows with chefs and folks outside the food world, and I'll definitely link to that in the show notes. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, welcome. It's very true. And I kind of just want to know, you know, you're bullish on podcasts, obviously. It's your trade. Yeah, so am I, man. Let's go. Let's go. Let's do more. What do you look for in like a podcast interview or series or partner?

1:06:45What do you look for? Because I think you've got great taste. You're a journalist. You got, you're not going to say yes to everything. What do you, what do you look for? I love clarity of vision and I love clarity of vision when it's attached to somebody who wants to take a risk to try something new. Love that. Yeah. I think that's really fun. Like we did a series last year with, with Nike, with a bunch of Nike athletes about mental health and it was a new idea for them. It was a new idea for us. It was very clear what needed to be accomplished. And because everyone agreed on, on the values of it and what was important, like we made a show that reached people about something that was important to it's nice to when when the topic is like important yeah yeah definitely it's not just like fluffy fluffy it's actually real stuff i'm gonna follow your podcast work i just really love it and thank you i love yours too yeah on this is a suz guest about the discerning taste so to close this interview here's a little rapid fire fast and furious taste check howie you cannot take a pass on any of these questions no passing The best fruit.

1:07:40Okay. It's a specific answer. Alice Waters plucked a mulberry off a tree once during a story in the edible schoolyard in Berkeley for an innovator's piece for WSJ. It was a mulberry from Alice Waters. It felt very biblical in terms of the narrative of that moment, but the fruit was incredible. And in general, Alice Waters' fruit curation, her bowl of fruit on the table, so controversial, right? But she's right. There was a mango at Noma in Mexico also that was bananas off the charts. Yeah. The worst vegetable. Okra is a fruit, I guess, technically. It's green. I think we're calling it a vegetable.

1:08:20I don't love it. I don't love the texture. I keep trying and I want to have my okra moment, but it's not my favorite if we're counting it as a vegetable. I'm surprised how many vegetables I do like, but okra is not my jam. Yeah, it's a tough one. And I think you try to get roasted, crispy okra sometimes and it just never falls. I would love the essence of it. You know what I mean? I would love some like okra through a centrifuge, I guess. Or like something that's roasted that takes out the sliminess of it. I think that would be nice. Outside of Inga's, what's your favorite New York City restaurant right now?

1:08:54Great New York Noodle Town. Oh, yeah. It's still good. Banging. Yeah. It was closed a little during the pandemic. It was. They reopened. It's cash only. what I love about it is you can go in there with friends and have the best time or you can go like solo and eat lunch with you know people from Chinatown who have been going there for years and years and years at a communal table not because it's like hip to have a communal table it's just because it's what they do what they do in the restaurant and I love just like sitting around being part of the neighborhood and having a bowl of noodles there so good your favorite American fast food chain McDonald's it's so easy so easy I had it last week yeah I had it three weeks ago the the quarter pounder with cheese is still like number one for me what about you i'm a big mac guy yeah i was a quarter pounder person for a long time but i i think like all the rest of the fast food is cute compared to mcdonald's yeah they came to play that app is is quite good i know they've been doing a lot of interviews and podcasts and ads and everyone talks about the app but man it's just it's it's just a perfect thing they just have their systems down it's so it's so consistent were you big shamrock shake guy yeah yeah any of any of the special offerings.

1:10:01The Grimace was good. I was going to say my son had like a moment this summer with the Grimace shake. He was very taken by like their YouTube activations around it. Happy birthday, Grimace, playing in my head over and over again. And then there was actually like some YouTube, like older lady chef who was teaching kids how to make Grimace shakes. So we've made them ourselves at home. Oh, cool. Nice. Yeah. I like that shake. It was good. Your favorite cookbook of all time? The River Cafe cookbook. Yeah. The first one. The original. Yeah, it's a good one. It means a lot. A favorite recent cookbook discovery?

1:10:33Okay, so it's not recent in terms of a new release, but my engagement with it, I think, is more intense than it's ever been. You know, Jenny Rosenstrak has this cookbook, The Weekday Vegetarians. I did a project with Jenny. I did her podcast for a little while. I know she's been a guest here, and she's also the wife of Andy Ward, who we've mentioned previously. So this whole family means a lot to me. But Jenny's cookbook, as, you know, somebody who wants to cook healthier, you know, wants to cook more vegetables, wants to cook at home, wants to cook for my kids, wants to take like so many steps out of my process and like make food that's makeable on a Tuesday, on a Wednesday.

1:11:09I love that. That's so important to me. Making dinner and the whole, you know, community she's built around what she does, which is all, you know, dinner a love story. It's hard to make dinner. Yeah. You know, bless anyone who can get dinner on the table for themselves, for them, for their families to cook after a long day, even if cooking is your joy, even if it's your release, it's not easy to just get into a new process and start a new thing and make something delicious. And for people like us, like there has to be resolved. It has to taste good. It can't suck. And I think Jenny's stuff is so reliable and so smart and so efficient that it feels like a gift because I don't know how to get into that space.

1:11:49Naturally, my thing's like, I'm going to cook for two days straight and it's going to be this amazing thing. And then everyone's going to hate it, except for me, because they're not going to understand how much work went into it. So, you know, I know Jenny has a book coming up. She does in the fall. So pumped about that book and like how it's fit into my life. Love that. Favorite food writer, living or dead? God, I'm surrounded by food writers. I mean, I loved meeting and getting to know Diana Henry. Her work is just so clear and powerful and her taste is amazing. And her ability to write about recipe and place and meaning and feeling.

1:12:25All in one like tight British package is a marvel to me. I love her work. But, you know, like I have so many food writer friends whose voices are in my head. So it's interesting like how that plays across like the Adam Sachses and Jeff Gordon years of the world. And it's so hard not to just say Helen Rosner because like everybody sort of should. Like she's on fire. Yeah, her column is really, really solid right now. Yeah, she's really putting on a lot of work. And it's for a magazine. Yeah. She's writing a column for a magazine. Yeah, it's cool that it does have a print deadline that she works on.

1:12:54It's really cool. A couple more. Your favorite city outside America to visit for food? Got it. I can't believe I've ever been able to go to any American city for food, like for work or on any consistent basis. So I was in Tokyo recently and it's like, what's better than Tokyo? I'm going to Mexico City soon. It's like, what could be better than Mexico City? I have good friends in Singapore and every time I'm there, it's like, what could possibly be better than going to Singapore? At the same time, you know, anywhere, you know, drop me anywhere. And there's something interesting to find. And this is what's great about food.

1:13:25Yeah, I agree with you fully. And it's also the reporter's eye. And it's like we've been blessed with this career and this training. And we've been kind of conditioned to be stoked about anywhere. I will find something to eat that's exciting anywhere. Me too. I agree. So it's what kind of drives us both. Last one, your favorite sandwich. Corned beef, yellow mustard, rye, side of fries at Second Avenue Deli. Corned beef at Second Avenue. Correct. Pastrami at Katz's, corned beef at Second Avenue. 100 % correct answer. I love that. Howie Kahn, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure.

1:13:56Thank you, Matt. I've had fun.

1:14:02This is Taste 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.

1:14:23Thank you.