428: Steven Rinella & Darin Bresnitz

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. I see people try to make a fire. They get it going. They smother it with something that's too wet. They smother it with something that's too big. They got a big smoky mess. They never get to, like, cooking. And it just leads to, like, a bad experience and, you know, whatever, a hot dog, corn, soot, what have you.

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

0:59Stephen Ranella is an outdoorsman, conservationist, writer, and television personality known for translating the hunting and fishing lifestyle to a wide variety of audiences. On this episode, we talk about The Meat Eater Outdoor Cookbook, his latest in a string of books that merges hunting and the culinary world. Also on the show, we have a great talk with Darren Bresnitz. He's a co-host of the excellent long-running podcast Snacky Tunes and a great guy to know in Los Angeles. We talk about his career working in early food television and how he's really at the center of food and drink for nearly two decades.

1:37I hope you enjoy these conversations.

1:48steve raniello welcome to this is taste how are you doing good thank you for having me on i appreciate the opportunity well i have to say it's really nice to talk to a fellow west michigan dude so you grew up in twin lake i grew up in kalamazoo uh that's where my wife's from no way okay let's go there let's talk let's talk food so what's food like in twin lake growing up my parents they had a garden so they kind of came out of the like younger people now probably don't even know about this but there was a little bit of a back to the land movement i don't know if that maybe influenced my folks or not but they they kept a big garden and they canned a lot right and we hunted and fished a lot but we also ate all the normal stuff everybody eats you know um but there there was a definite like uh they leaned into self-sufficiency around food and we were very celebratory about wild game and would have people over to have fish fries and stuff but at the same time i mean you know we even call it like midwest mom chili right like a lot of chili with ground meat and kidney beans um pizza night was a thing i remember um encountering my first artichoke i remember encountering my first uh boneless chicken breast so i do remember so like i remember the advent of certain things kind of coming into our awareness that other people probably knew about i remember like encountering granola i remember just a lot of things that i now take for granted and that my kids have known their whole lives i remember it like seeing it the first time which makes it seem like weirdly isolated right and i remember later in life like we had these kind of like we had these crazy hippie relatives and i remember being in junior high maybe and them having yogurt and granola and being like i'd never seen this before what is this funny food this yeah so i meant by it was by by saying i remember when i just know that when i was born in 74 so there was we had a low we didn't have a lot of outside food influence you know um we had a pretty, in hindsight, a really limited set of exposures to the food world.

4:17Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, I grew up, I was born in the 80s, so I'm a little bit younger, but not much. And I have to say like Kalamazoo at that era in the 80s, you know, not a lot of people come in there for food, gotta say. I mean, let's talk about pizza though, because you've got Domino's Little Caesars, you've got Godfather's, which is a regional chain. Are you leaning towards any of those? No, my mom would, she would make pizza and we really liked it. And she'd put like regular sausage or deer sausage on it, but she would make these square, she'd make her own dough and roll out these square sheet pizzas.

4:54But no, we didn't have like, no, there was not that level of, we weren't regular consumers of what's now these sort of mainstream pizza joints. You know, like if you, when I was in high school, man, if you wanted to really, really like if you're gonna do it up for prom like do it up you would go to red lobster oh that was like dude that was the epitome of fine dining lobsterita man and some hush puppies all right let me ask you steven if you could could list a food as a true west michigan food what would it be i mean from my perspective it would be to me it's fried like to me it's fried fish which is legit like a big deal there but we ate a lot of fried fish because we caught a lot of fish and not too long ago i was in seattle and i was at a gun range shooting and i was talking to a guy and he was explaining to me how he walked out of a marriage he didn't get married he was gonna get married this is in wisconsin so just across the lake he was gonna get married and then bailed on his girlfriend and as when i was asking him like what was the defining moment like how would you also decide to not get married when you already have set the wedding in motion and he said one day i asked myself do i really want to eat fried fish every friday and i said no and that's what i knew and i laugh because i'm like dude i'll marry that girl right now that's a good one yeah it really is it is almost a religious activity i mean it's tied religion a little bit but you know like fried walleye come on it's such an amazing fish and i love local stream fish and lake fish i mean bluegills largemouth bass northern pike walleyes oh man such good fishing over there i we got a lot of michigan pride here and i want to talk to you about venison because i grew up eating it myself and we weren't hunters but we had you know it would once in a while land in our table and what let me ask you about this protein because i think we don't really we don't really prize it as americans as much as as we probably should because hell man there's a lot of deer out there and it's an invasive species i live in upstate new york bit of an invasive species in new york no not really no it's totally no it's native i mean it's yeah you it's native problematic in its abundance yeah but it's not invasive yeah invasive is the incorrect term right it's it's an abundance makes it feel like it's invading my personal space that's what i mean that's that's a widespread feeling americans who don't hunt don't give a shit about venison man it's like compared to if you go like you look in europe you know and uh it's a very common food item you're like in scotland they raise deer on these estates i mean they're wild deer but they're raised on these estates and if you go hunt there you're gonna have to fight to keep some of the venison from the animals you hunt because the landowners are going to sell it into the markets it commands like a high price and in germany you can go into the meat market and find wild harvested venison there's a reason we don't do that in the u.s because market hunting caused our wildlife populations to collapse and we as a society really moved against market hunting or hunting wildlife to sell as food so it just became culturally taboo for us and perhaps because of that taboo and a legal framework that made it you know illegal to sell wild meat into commercial markets it became a food strictly of hunters and growing up uh you know everybody hunted this is another wisconsin anecdote but i consider them to be my brothers my friend pat durkin once who's an outdoor writer he once said in wisconsin if you're not a deer hunter you share a bed with one and i i grew up like that but it wasn't it wasn't like a thing that people did fine preparations with you you might get a deer and just grind the whole thing into burger and and produce what my buddy clay calls the the trinity which is uh tacos spaghetti and meatloaf yeah and and it was just used like that like you'd kill deer grind them and just use the ground meat as a commodity yeah i mean it's it's a really good point about how um we as a culture have moved away from wild hunting effort for me and we now have factory farms which are you know problematic in many ways could could we actually sustain a culture where wild hunting could end up on the marketplace was this a mistake to to ban this practice funny you ask funny you ask because there's a lot of people toying with that idea anew in response to excess deer populations now let's unpack that a little bit because the reason we have excess deer populations um is because we because whitetail deer love suburban landscapes they like edge habitats right they like disturbed landscapes so white-tailed deer have learned to do very well around humans now when you get around humans white-tailed deer like it but those humans don't like hunters that much so that's where you get into situations where people agree that there's a white-tailed deer problem but they don't agree on allowing access to hunters who would very happily come in and utilize the resource and then you wind up with these kind of crazy counterintuitive things like municipalities hiring sharpshooters to come in and remove deer in the dead of night or to toy around with these ridiculous programs of trying to run spay and neutering programs on deer or drug deer so they can't reproduce.

11:15Just a lot of insanity because people are uncomfortable having hunters out on the landscape. And it's also the hunter's fault because also as a residual effect of having nearly lost whitetail deer in the late 1800s and early 1900s due to commercial hunting, there's a sort of reluctance on the part of hunters to kill enough does to kill enough female deer to slow population growth people want to get a big buck right they want to get a buck when you remove a buck you remove a single deer from the landscape when you remove a doe you remove her plus all of the offspring that she would have had so hunters don't shoot enough does in some places and people don't let enough hunters onto their property to be effective at deer removal.

12:10Therefore, some folks are proposing and have proposed that we move back to a commercial market system. I'm very reluctant and very hesitant about this. You'll notice Mount Rushmore, Theodore Roosevelt's likeness is carved into that rock. And Theodore Roosevelt is a politician that every politician would like to see themselves favorably compared to. And Roosevelt led the charge against market hunters. The fear of extinction is probably the biggest, I would say, cultural taboo, right? You don't want to kill too many of a thing. Culturally, people get weird about that. They feel a little bit uncomfortable.

12:53If we re-engage with market hunting and we re-engage was selling American wild deer. It won't be a thing that it pushes deer to extinction. It would never go that far, but it would put us back down a path of commodifying an animal that has a lot of social value as a democratically allocated resource. Meaning I can buy my state hunting license, depending on what state you're in. You buy your resident hunting license for 20 bucks and you're allowed to go out and utilize this wild protein to bring a market back to it and commodify the animal. To do that would to kind of spit in the face of the very thing that makes American wildlife management so unique, which is that wildlife resources are owned by the public for the benefit of the public.

13:54and that these resources are allocated democratically um so it's just down a whole it's a whole new path man and and it's a path we went down in the past and it led to the to the literal extirpation of deer across a lot of their native range people forget this but even my my buddy doug who's 15 years older than me he lives in wisconsin they have up to 40 deer per square mile on farmland in wisconsin now wild deer per square mile he when he was a little kid he remembers going home to tell his mom and dad that he saw a deer track right it was that that that rare yeah it was that bad so to now be in the sort of good old days of whitetail deer in some respects to bring up this idea that the answer to our problems is to go back to a market hunting solution.

14:52I'm just really uneasy with it. I'm very uneasy. It's a lot of factors at play. You've measured them quite well, Stephen. I appreciate that. I want to ask you, how do you like to hunt? And in general, do you have a couple of favorite places that you are drawn to and you keep going back to? yeah i do all kinds of hunting man i mean um i hunt all over the place i i hunt whatever i can whenever i can with that said like i like to hunt squirrels i still like to go back to michigan and hunt squirrels i love hunting with my kids we'll go out and catch some beavers this weekend trapping but i particularly like now that my kids are getting old enough the funnest thing that i do is participate in our state's youth deer season, where the kids get a couple days all to themselves to hunt deer prior to the general firearm season.

15:44That's a hell of a lot of fun. I like hunting in Alaska, and I have a place, a fish shack in Alaska, and I hunt all over in Alaska and love it. I love to hunt where I live in Montana. If I had to probably pick one state And I was like some weird gun to my head scenario. And I had to be like, okay, I had to lay it all down and pick a place. I'd probably, I'd probably pick to hunt in Alaska. I just, every time you hunt there, it's some kind of adventure. Takes your breath away. When you look out at the terrain, I've been able to go to Alaska myself. It really is just, you're like, wow, I can't believe I'm here.

16:23It's like amazing. It's astounding, man. I love being up there. I love having a little shack there. I'm a non-resident, but I love hanging out there. Yeah. When you're driving around Alaska, what are you driving? What do you got up there? Man, we don't drive anything, really, because our fish shack is you have to fly there or take a boat there. And then once you're there, we just use Lund skiffs. Everything we do is out of 18-foot Lund skiffs. and then most of the hunting i do we'll use the highway system to get to certain access points there's only a handful of highways there i mean they're big and long but but we'll use the highway system to get to certain access points and then hunt with boats or hunt out of aircraft uh hunt using aircraft a lot of times we'll hire bush pilots to drop us off in places we want to get to gnarly sounds really fun sounds really fun to hire that's most of what i do in alaska now is just hire bush pilots yeah have you encountered uh bears all the time yeah that's that that's the thing about alaska it's it's there's more bears than people right i mean it's like pretty tremendous yeah a lot yeah i mean you run into uh you know we run into a lot of them you know all over the place but matter of fact we were hunting in sonora mexico this year and uh just i mean within sight of the u.s border saw a black bear down there and then uh and one night saw two mountain lions but yeah i've been i've been charged by bears uh and have had a lot of run-ins with bears in montana with bears in british columbia with bears in alaska it's when the kind of places where we hang out and the kind of activities we engage in just leads to those yeah interactions you know so the meat eater cookbook i have a couple questions about it and I really enjoyed reading through it one thing I noticed is there's a real art to building a fire and I feel like you're talking about the new one the meteor outdoor cookbook yeah exactly because we have a fish and game cookbook oh no the outdoor cookbook yeah there's a lot to say about making fire I love it it's like almost like an art to it I'm like really fascinated that you dedicated so much time and space to to showing the different ways to build the fire i'm like this is great well how often do you see someone go to make a fire that doesn't work out i mean it seems funny but it's all the time it's all the time and from an outdoor exploration standpoint you kind of have you have to learn to get good at making fires because quite often you're making them just to get comfort right to get comfortable um we were recently me and my buddy and our combined five kids were recently all out uh running mountain lions with his hound dog and we me my buddy had to leave our kids for quite a while a little unexpected emergency and we came back they had a little fire going in the snow you know and so we're like oh that's fantastic you guys are great you did great you did everything just right you got a fire going in the snow so like outdoorsman kind of it's a skill that you want to have you know and and then when it comes to cooking you why not take that same skill set of being able to make a fire anywhere anytime and apply that same skill set and those same fire making styles in that way and i just so often people i see people try to make a fire they get it going they smother it with something that's too wet they smother it with something's too big they got a big smoky mess they never get to like cooking when they are cooking they don't have a good bed of coal so So it's not as fun.

20:02It's not as effective. It's not as versatile. And it just leads to like a bad experience and, you know, whatever, a hot dog coated in soot, what have you. So yeah, learning how to like quickly and efficiently with a minimum use of fuel, get a good workable bed of coals that lets you cook with some flexibility and a little bit of delicacy. it's that that's like super important to learning how to do much of the stuff we discuss in the book right and again i and i'm prioritizing there like efficient use of fuel you know if you go and buy some so you know let's say you buy a load of mesquite or something like get your money's worth out of it you know uh use it in a way that's smart and not and not burn up 50 bucks worth of wood because you want to grill a couple steaks yeah great point about the fuel fuel kind of uh management.

20:55It's really, really key. I'd like to get a sense we're approaching outdoor cooking season for many Americans. And I must say, there's a lot of recipes in the book that I'm interested in. But if you could point to one in particular that is going to get us excited about outdoor cooking, what is that one recipe? Man, you know, so we have 100 recipes, about 100 recipes. And when I think of recipes, I think of very specific preparations that call upon specific measurements, right? I'm trying to give like a lame definition of a recipe because I'm trying to set up a juxtaposition. I'm into it. I'm buying this.

21:35Thank you, Stephen. I'm into this. I'm going to juxtapose a recipe with what I would call a methodology or preparation style, okay? So mixed in with all these recipes, which is tablespoon of this, teaspoon of that, cook for this long we we talk about a lot of of ways like ways of going about things um things that would be really engaging for a group of friends to do things that are almost like like wild experiments you know and and in the book we really try to arm you with recipe level detail about how to do some of these more showstopper, cool, day-long preparations. But in the end, it does rely on you applying a little brain work, applying a little elbow grease, being up for an adventure, okay?

22:32So we try to describe, for instance, in there, I like to do underground cooking. Dig a hole in the ground, get a fire going in that hole. The hole could be as big as your head or it could be as big as a five-gallon bucket, or it could be the size of the back of your car. Dig a big hole, get a ripper going in there, get some rocks real hot, and bury stuff in there and dig it up later. I mean, it's the funnest thing in the world, and it's like an ancient cooking technique. So we talk about versions of doing that and try to set it up. As much as you can't tell someone, here's exactly what'll happen.

23:12It'll take three hours. You know, we say, who knows? But here's some really good things to keep an eye on. And here's some milestone moments that you're going to want to watch for. If you're not hitting these milestones, here's some things to check. And so it sets you up for success to do some really interesting experiments while still leaving a lot of room for you to adapt it to whatever situation you're in. That's the kind of stuff that excites me the most. And that's one of the things I was most excited to deliver in the book is like explaining these methods or also explaining how to cook really great, really cool stuff using nothing but native materials, sticks and rocks.

24:01Okay. At the same time, you can think of it like we used to joke about subtitles when I was working on it. We'd be like, okay, it's backyard to backcountry, caveman to haute cuisine, right? So it just covers a lot of ground. So in the same way that we're talking about these Ice Age cooking methods that might have been used by Ice Age hunters, you know, like cooking methods that might have been used to cook a woolly mammoth. we're also talking about making some really beautiful uh stuffed hamburgers on your back porch over a weber grill or throwing a really cool elegant dinner party or making great cocktails that are suitable to prepare outside so it's so varied in its approach but it all lives under like food that's best to eat outside it's best to serve outside it's best to prepare outside And that's why we regard it as a celebration of outdoor cooking because it's best eaten or fixed outdoors.

25:04Steven, really, really, really fascinating stuff. I'm really buying into this methodology and I like the detailed explanation. And I feel like we sometimes as home cooks don't necessarily think about the meat we're buying. We just buy it by price. I think what you do with your writing is you're talking about hunting, but you're also talking about cooking meat. I'd love to get a sense of how do you square the kind of escalating beef prices in our culture? I mean, beef is more expensive than anything, right? It's like really like the one. How do you think about your meat consumption and buying meat when you're given that fact?

25:44Oh, that's interesting because I have a lot of friends that raise cattle. and it's it's amazing how those prices have not moved um have not have not benefited the suppliers quite like you would think i recognize absolutely it's not it's not the at the source it's it's a lot of other things happening yeah and i know that's not where you're digging at but i'm just pointing out that that's a you know as a i'm a cows not condos kind of environmentalist and so uh i'm always rooting for farmers and ranchers and and i uh and and as much as you hear about you know certain high meat prices uh and then you hear about ranchers still struggling it always you know it's sad to me oh it's like restaurants too when people complain about restaurants it's like they're not getting rich because they rate they charge 42 for an entree it's because they have to they're getting killed by yeah the margins are horrible margins are horrible it's somewhere it's yeah it's a subject for a whole other podcast for you with a better guest than me but uh you know i eat a lot of i eat a lot of wild meat and wild fish now what i've learned from that is let's say i wasn't doing that um and i was buying all my protein from the store i would probably buy a lot i would mostly not probably i would certainly be buying a lot of the cuts and a lot of the species that are available in the markets that aren't favorites uh among american consumers this weekend we have a big cold so sub freezing cold snap coming right now but we were this weekend supposed to be going out me and my buddy and all of our kids we were supposed to be going out running set lines for channel catfish cool wow cheap dude that is a cheap fish that i don't care you know we like to catch them we'll go we'll drive two hours to check catch a channel cat and if you go into a fish market and buy channel cat that's probably gonna be the lowest pricing in that fish market next to perhaps tilapia so i don't have expensive tastes like because i don't have expensive taste because i have experience in taking things that maybe other people don't want and making them really good i have a friend nearby me north bridger bison is his company he doesn't sell the markets he sells the animal on the hoof to buyers and a and four people might pitch in he kills the buffalo on his place it's born on his place it dies on the place he kills the buffalo gets it processed and then whoever whatever group of people pitched in they're getting a they're getting a grass-fed very humanely raised product from him but what's funny is i could call him up and get all the hearts and livers and cheek meat and tails and kidneys uh that i could ever want from what uh people aren't utilizing you know so in our books we usually try really hard in the cookbooks i've done we try really hard to to celebrate these these alternative meats tongues right like like things that are that are just regarded as oftentimes producers when they're the slaughterhouses they send it in for rendering right so uh if i was out just as a consumer i don't think i would be out buying a bunch of filet mignon i'd be out buying the stuff that i'm after now i'd be out buying catfish i'd be buying beef tongues i'd be buying uh head meat i'd be asking them why can't i get some uh fresh liver you know it's just how i would approach it because it's there it's great it's underutilized and it feels really good to to eat the stuff yeah it does especially when it's wrapped in tortilla and it's lingua and it's a taco in mexico or la oh my gosh talk about the best tacos out there but yeah really well said steven um on this is taste we asked guests about the discerning taste so to close this interview, here's a little rapid fire, fast and furious taste check.

30:13Are you ready? Yeah, I'm nervous about this because I saw that you do it, but I didn't look at what you do. My man, that's the way to do it. You saw that it was going to happen, but you want it to be spontaneous. The candor is appreciated. Let's do this. I don't want to think about it. You're going to do it great. The best fruit. The bananas. Yeah. I'm only saying that. I was just in Hawaii and my body has banana trees and we went and scrounged around and found a big those big huge piles those little short bananas and dude we ate so many bananas they're a little different there than like at the mire right after they've been like four like four inch long four inch long bananas my god those are good those are great uh the best dessert man uh bananas foster yeah i catch a theme here well yeah that's yeah you're seeing the whole banana thing.

31:03I'm seeing it. And I love ice cream. And my kids love ice cream. So yeah, Bananas Foster. And everybody likes to stand around and burn off the rum. Oh, it's pretty fun. Your favorite American fast food chain? Dude, I have no idea. I guess Dairy Queen because my kids like it a lot. Ooh, into that choice. Yeah, they love Dairy Queen. I don't know. Dairy Queen markets well to my kids. Yeah, they tagged your kids into Instagram or something. Your favorite restaurant right now? what's it like up in montana do you have do you live in an area with with with a lot of restaurants oh yeah man we got a million restaurants and i don't want to get into details but what was my favorite restaurant had a real tragedy occur at it um and now i guess the thing i like most i like a thing called the ale works here in bozeman montana because um it's big and I can go there and I don't really get bothered.

31:59And we always get a great place to sit. You're in the action, but out of the action. The food's very reliable. I like it so much that it drives my wife crazy that I don't ever want to go anywhere else. Yeah. Let me ask you, is there a restaurant dish that you seek out? Yeah, man. Lately, it just changes over time. but we fish so much that I'm not going to go into a restaurant and buy fish. We fish so much. And this is going to harken back to something you brought up earlier. When I go to a restaurant, if they have it and I can get a good steak, a beef steak, because I don't eat a lot of beef. If I can get a good beef steak, that's probably what I'm going to order.

32:44If I go into a Mexican place, I'm going to get the flank steak, you know? Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You got to let the experts do their thing. Yeah, because I don't eat it at home, so I like to see it when I'm out. And I eat tons of fish, so I'm never going to order that. Right. Favorite city outside America to visit for food? Anywhere in Mexico that they're grilling, marinated, well-exercised little chickens. Like, all over. I don't know. Okay, I'll put it more specifically. Grilled chicken along the highway between Cancun and the C and Khan Biosphere Preserve is good. Really good chicken.

33:30Those little muscly, little wiry little chickens grilled on an open grill. Oh, man, they're good. Yeah, you get a little bit of rice, a little bit of beans. Oh, so good. Last one, your favorite sandwich. Cuban. Yeah. It's a good call. pickle has to be right Swiss has to be right and I like grilled peanut butter and jellies too now tell me more how's that work just float it in a boat make a peanut butter and jelly and just float it in a boatload of butter in a pan that's pretty good oh that's oh that way of course oh that's Elvis Presley come on that's good I love that Steven Ranella thank you so much for joining this that was really fun yeah thanks man I appreciate it

34:17Darren Bresnes, welcome to This Is Taste. How are you, buddy? I'm so happy to be here and to see you. I'm happy to see you. I love this, that we're doing a podcast interview. I've been on your show, I think, like a bunch of times. And you're going to be back when the book comes out. Absolutely. Snacky Tunes, if you don't know it, it's linked in the show notes. Subscribe. Long-running show. Started at Heritage Radio out in Bushwick. IRL, right? Yeah, we started 2009. Amazing. We knew Brandon Hoy, who's the owner of Roberta's. When Greg, who I started the show with, and I were still DJs at the Royal Oak, he was bartending.

34:55And then one day he was just gone. And the next thing we knew, he'd opened up Roberta's. And they'd put two shipping containers in the back, Patrick Martin, Heritage Meats. And we went to Patrick and said, we want to do a music show. and he's like, you got to do music and food. And I already had dinner with the band rolling along at that time. And we started that. And pretty much every week for the last 15 years, an episode of Snacky Tunes had come out. We're about to hit episode 600. It's incredible that run and just sticking with it. And you've since moved to Los Angeles. This will be a theme on this episode.

35:31We'll also talk about old school food media, early 2000s food media stuff. But let me ask you, What's your draw to merging food and music? I feel like it's a challenging one because for me as an editor, you've got fans of food and you've got fans of music. It's often hard to get them to overlap in interesting ways, but you've been able to do it. You know, I think when I had the idea for Dinner with the Band, this was back in 2003, 2004, and I was still in college, and the idea of bringing the world of food and music together, it was novel. It was, you know, there were no festivals with a big food component to it.

36:06There wasn't chefs who who love music. You know, there wasn't a lot of crossover. And we just saw a lot of the similarities between what people who worked in food and people working music. And I think you're right. I think we have found over the years that trying to really force that narrative hasn't worked as much. It's just you got to find people from either world who loves the other world. And that's where you really get the best stuff. That's the best stuff. It's hard to find, though. It's really, really tricky because I think every musician probably fancies themselves as a food person. But certainly, as you know, they're not all food people.

36:43They're not. And I think a lot of our questions in the early days were very much, what do you eat on the road? Or like, what do you cook when you get home? And every once in a while, you'd find bands like Chris from Grizzly Bear would cook. And there's this new band out of Philly called Snack Time. A lot of them used to work in the food industry. and they're really big into cooking. And then obviously there's chefs who love music. You know, when we did the book for Fade In, I mean, we found 88 chefs around the world who really love music. But there was quite a few that we had asked and they're like, I don't love music enough to be putting together a playlist or talking about a dish inspired by a song or things like that.

37:26Is Chris Baer, is he nice in the kitchen? Because I know he wrote the book for us at Clarkson Potter back in 2015 or 16. Yeah, I've had his food twice. I want to say once backstage at Bonnaroo. He was grilling, and that was just super fun, although, you know, it's grilling while music is playing. Yeah, by bands. I mean, it's a pretty cool environment, right? And then he did a pop-up at our friend's studio at Max Sennett, and it was great. You know, he can cook. Interesting. Did you ever get sick of Roberta's Pizza when you were doing your 15 years of recording at Roberta's? You know, it's funny because we were at Fowl Witch, their new restaurant.

38:04Yeah. And you like it, right? A few minutes ago. I love Fowl Witch. I'm going to say the best tortellini I've had. Wow. Yeah. Your guy strikes me you've been to Bologna, too. I feel like you've been. Yeah, I've been to Italy. And I mean, we've been to like Modena. Yeah, yeah. You've been to Mille Romani. You know some stuffed pastas. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Damn. And I was saying I was at Fowl Witch. I was just like, you know, when we used to do the show in the studio, we were there every week and we had the pizza and the salad because we got this nice chicory salad at foul witch yeah and i was like it's dressed so perfectly and i was like you know i had that salad every week at roberta's and i never got sick of it and i think we're probably even gonna go this week and i'm looking forward to the salad i love that shit i love it um let me ask you about early episodes of snacky tunes like the early years first three four years do you have any favorite episodes i mean this is a time when brooklyn music scene was was really something i mean it really really when it was a monoculture in a way the way that it's not now the way that music is so spread out but back when you're doing it 15 years ago Brooklyn was a definitive scene you were at the center of it and doing your show and and being around with your brother yeah I mean those early days were really great because even being in it I think we all knew that we were part of something really special and getting perspective on it years later we were really part of something special but even when everyone was around in a band or a DJ, things like that.

39:29You know, one of our friend's roommates was dating Dev Hines at the time, and he was winding down Lightspeed Champion and winding up Blood Orange. And we had been hanging out at our friend's apartment. We used to do the show live on Mondays. And so if anyone ever canceled Monday morning, it was a real scramble to get someone on the air. And we were hanging out at our friend's apartment, and Dev had really gotten into sleight-of-hand magic. because he had stopped touring with Lightspeed Champion and was getting these demos going. And the band canceled, and I just texted him, and I was like, hey, can you come and play some demos?

40:07And so we had some very, very early Blood Orange demos. I don't know if you can even find that episode, because we've done so many episodes that they're not all on Spotify or Apple Music anymore. Oh, really? They've taken some down? Yeah, you have to really know how to search for them on the Heritage Radio Network. Which I'm sure is not an easy thing. I remember seeing Dev play as, remember Test Icicles, that first band? Of course. In Mercury Lounge when it was like that weird noise band. Yeah. I mean, I saw it at Cake Shop. Yeah. I'm trying to think what else. Moby was an early guest. Yeah. Which I think Greg booked.

40:39And he had us sing backup vocals on Walk on the Wild Side. Oh, fun. And then like a lot of early chefs, you know, we had Mark Vetri came on. He played guitar. we had this great episode with Reggie Watts and Maharlika that stands out it was just you know it wasn't just the music scene that was really emerging like the Brooklyn food scene that was a little less perspective of what Roberta's was doing and how much it's radiating out from there and how much that would really influence the world because still at that time it was like all right we're going to Bushwick to eat pizza and it changed the way that a lot of restaurants are designed a lot of the way the food is made.

41:18And, you know, it's just, that was really fun to be a part of it. It felt like, to me, JellyNYC's pool parties at McCarran Park Pool, that was like a big moment for Brooklyn music. But also, they had some cool food elements at that party, on that Sunday day party that ran for like three or four summers. And that, to me, is Brooklyn in a nutshell for this era that we're talking about. I mostly remember, I want to say it was the Doers backstage. Yes. Yeah. Blended Scotch definitely ran through my body for many Sunday mornings. To this day, all the medals that they won for best of and category, I never checked about what those categories were, who hosted them.

41:59But Greg and I actually, we DJed the very first pool party with Les Sebi Fav. I mean, just to be a part of it was really fantastic. And I don't think I've ever been a part of something like that since then. You had Macaulay Culkin and his band play, I believe they played, or maybe they just played some of their music. And that was a memorable episode because it was really weird. Yeah. I was stuck in the city trying to race back, and Greg wound up doing it solo. And I believe they played their Pizza Velvet Underground medley. Right. Well, they were called the Pizza Underground. The Pizza Underground.

42:41What was the name of the band? And yeah, I mean, listen, people may underestimate what it was to say, come to Roberta's. You're going to hang out in the shipping containers. We're going to feed you pizza and salad. If you want a beer, no problem. And a lot of people just did because it was just a good hang. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was. It kind of marketed itself. I mean, you had to book the show and you talk about just getting people to show up. I mean, it's a big, to have it run for so long. The booking is just, is relentless, man. Yeah, it's, and right now I'm doing the show by myself and the bands have wound down a little bit.