614: Is Substack the Most Exciting Place For Food Writing? Austin Tedesco Has Thoughts.

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. There's a future in having a space where the algorithm is specifically designed to drive subscriptions instead of eyeballs on advertisements. I think that inherently rewards quality in ways that is incredibly cool. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

0:59Today on the show, we have a great conversation with Austin Tedesco. Austin is head of business development at Substack. But really, I think of Austin Moore as an infinitely curious restaurant superfan. He's worked as a line cook and dines out with the frequency of our best critics. He writes about it all on his own terrific Substack, Bangers and Jams. and we talk about his journey from MBA reporter to restaurant professional to helping promote the growth of authors on the Substack platform, particularly in food. Is Substack the future of food media? It's still really early to say, but I'm personally a major fan, and Austin gives us some insights into how it all works.

1:39I hope you enjoy this episode.

1:45Austin Tedesco, welcome. This is Taze. It's great to finally meet you, man. Yeah, it's so great to meet in person. Thanks so much for having me. Well, I wanted to have you back in after our great conversation about Substack. We did that a few weeks ago, and I'm going to link to it. It's a great conversation, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about you because you've had a really cool career working in kitchens. You've worked in the media as well, kind of like at the same time, which to me is very interesting. Before we get to that, you're in New York for a month. Like, what's your hit list for restaurants, man?

2:13I went to Borgo last night that I actually really liked. I had it's one of those places where you get like the mixed reviews going in some people really love it I had some people say that it was absolutely terrible but it gets me excited to go definitely I've been an Andrew Tarlo stand like since I was a teenager coming here And I loved it like I love when that kind of cooking is good It's like I looked at the menu and I was like this is all I want to eat So that really hit I loved crevette I thought crevette was stunning It like compelled me to take back my anti-entree stance that I've held for a long time.

2:47You wrote a great piece about that on your own sub stack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I typically never order entrees if I can help it. But Cravette, like they really know what they're doing there. Some friends work at the bar that I used to cook with, which is like usually a good way to get me to try a place. I'm going to Le Vaudourne tonight. Oh, right on. Have you been there? No, first time. Oh, cool. I also like the Frenchette Lerac crew. I always love. They really know what they're doing. And I have not heard a single bad thing about this restaurant. So I am inordinately excited. I mean, you moved to L.A.

3:18a few years back. We lived in New York. So you have this like bicoastal kind of viewpoint of dining. I mean, are you excited about New York at all? I'm really excited about New York. And I think it's because my like my friends in the industry are excited. Like my friends were telling me how great working at Corvette has been, how how like excited they are by the food and by the drink program. Yeah. I left I was here for two years in New York I was in LA before and then I came to New York and kind of like did the most and then conceded that I'm too weak to live here like I like I need my default in LA yeah so when I'm here I'm so excited by the restaurant scene I'm excited by what's happening I'm excited by like the the ambition and the vibes and the restaurants I I like really look forward to coming.

4:06So we'll get to that. You mentioned that you worked the line at a restaurant and you've worked in media. What's food like growing up in your household as a young 'un? Like what's kind of forming you as kind of somebody who has a lot of strong opinions in the best way? You must have had a kind of an interesting background. Yeah, I'm Austin from Austin, unfortunately. Okay. For me, I have to do - Named after the city that you were born in? I was born here. And then by pure coincidence, when I was one, my dad got a job in Texas and we moved to Austin. And I have two very wonderful parents who both like I get my like workaholic nature from them.

4:42They both worked all the time. And so I grew up without a single home cooked meal. It's like not a thing that I knew. Wow. At all. In high school, a girl I was dating was like, oh, I'm going to come over and cook. And I was like, okay, I want to warn you, there's nothing here. And she showed up without olive oil or salt. Assuming we had that, we had nothing. We would order a lot of takeout. I would eat a lot of fast food, frankly, like Sonic and Chick-fil-A. And then we would go to restaurants, too. We weren't going to the most interesting local places in Austin. It was still kind of... Before Contigo.

5:18Yeah, exactly. Like I don't, I had no idea what Contigo was until I started going back home after college. It wasn't really on my radar. I got really into restaurants at like my senior year of college of like, I'm interested in this unique place from a chef and how it, how it actually works and what's actually happening there. But growing up, I ate a lot of fast food and I was I was a fat kid growing up, too. I just like chugged a bunch of candy and pizza. Yeah. Well, I mean, you went to school at BC in Boston. And were you like Craig Young, Maine? What were some of these restaurants about you or not?

5:58Like I have a real distaste for Boston, despite having a wonderful time in college and having some really great friends. Really is the city and I like don't get along. I still don't really know why I chose to go there. I was choosing between UW and Seattle and BC, two wildly different places and wildly different parts of the country. And so what actually really got me into restaurants was taking trips up to Portland, Maine during the beginning of the Portland, Maine peak of Central Provisions and Eventide. I remember I did a day trip with the person I was dating at the time to Central Provisions and my mind was blown by all these things I would roll my eyes at.

6:39now of like pork belly and like i got things it's a great restaurant but it was when it was 2014 they they get grace for serving pork belly in 2014 it was great yeah totally blowing my mind yeah um yeah that's really what did it for me was these trips also trips to providence like going to oberlin in providence yeah um and i think there's something too about like being transported somewhere uh that's not the place you're living that really got me well let's talk a little bit about your media background because it's cool. You worked at ESPN for several years. You were on the NBA beat. You had some woge time.

7:13You also worked at Square and eventually made it to Substack. So let's talk about ESPN. Like what are you doing there? And is food at all in your worldview when you're covering the NBA? It starts to be. So I started at ESPN like two days after I graduated college as an intern on the digital NBA team. And then I was there for six years and like worked my way up from there. You can only work your way up so far when you start as an intern making$10 an hour. Like even being there for six years, I was like, I have to find something else to do. And they made me move to central Connecticut. Yeah. Like this is like an essential part of being.

7:49Rough hang. An absolute food waste. Rough hang. I worked in Stanford for a year. Yeah. At least you're further south in that case. I moved straight to Bristol and then moved to West Hartford. Yeah. but it was I just remember that summer of 2015 so well when it's like wild air has like just opened in New York and I'm taking the train down like every weekend I can to go see friends and just to have fun but also trying all these new places at the same time because there's truly nothing to do besides work in Central Connecticut I bought a bunch of cookbooks and started teaching myself how to cook like I cooked my way through the Mamafuku cookbook and all these other cookbooks Like that was my relationship with food.

8:33And while I was an editor, I got really close with our beat writers and reporters and would, you know, travel sometimes with them, meet them at games. And of course, like then I entered into this world with with Kevin Arnovitz, who's like one of my favorite people in the world. I think one of not just the best basketball writers, one of the best like journalists of all time, like really underappreciated and an enormous food person. I think Kevin loved writing but also loved that ESPN would send him across the country to try new restaurants. And that became a regular part of the job of, oh, we're in Cleveland and we're trying new places.

9:08Yeah, so how does that work with the team at ESPN? You're covering a game and it's like 9 or 10, whatever, and then you're going out and surveying? Are you going on a crawl? We would usually, like, there's an off night where you would do a big dinner. Or there's like, I remember so vividly after Kevin Durant left the Warriors for the Nets, we had been like covering free agency all day. But since we were in L.A., we had like a 930 reservation at Bevelle to kind of decompress after, which would be like a regular thing. It's like the July 1 sweepstakes. Exactly. Yeah. It's like we had it ready. We're like, OK, we kind of know how it works.

9:48we'll be fine or we sit down at bevel and then we get a call of like oh the the like something might be up with the deal maybe and we literally just ordered the lamb neck like i don't don't do this to me please one reason why i left espn is the amount of times that i would sit down at a bar with friends or at a restaurant yeah and immediately leave because some second round pick had like twisted an ankle like that was like really starting to break me yeah i mean you had to leave man because clearly you had passions outside of basketball it must have been exciting to cover the beat but yeah I mean it was I uh I think 2016 it was the last good year in the NBA I say this is someone who hasn't watched any NBA basketball since I left ESPN but like that last KD year with the Thunder I was like I was just starting at ESPN it was one of an amazing playoff run even in like leading up to that Warriors Cavs final um and since since then like my interest in it really went downhill we have much more going on yeah uh I want to like go back to that teaching yourself to cook with cookbooks because you write about it on your sub stack like extensively and I love your sub stack it's terrific like how are you thinking about cooking through these books are you picking cuisine and finding like the best cookbook are you cooking through it because you seem to be pretty methodical with this approach yeah I um I like started doing this when David Chang was the most like famous chef in America so it's just like made sense to get the Mamafuku cookbook and then I would literally cook every recipe in the book besides ones that included ingredients I like couldn't get in central Connecticut but I would still try I would still like drive around and try and find stuff I'm someone who if I'm interested in something I get like absolutely obsessive about it and I I don't really like trying things unless I can be really really good at them yeah uh I'm extremely competitive and I think that like that sense of uh like competition with myself showed up in this uh but at the same time like i i was making like a fried rice recipe for the very first time and i didn't cook the rice before frying it because it like it wasn't said in the cookbook to to do it i think it said cooked rice but i but you didn't think about it so you're cooking with dry rice i'm cooking with dry rice i'm frying i'm like this doesn't really taste right and so i'm starting at absolutely nothing which i think is actually in a lot of ways incredibly dumb to do if you're trying to teach yourself how to cook like you should start with some some more basic basic cookbook, some like basic learning.

12:15And instead, it's the same thing I did when I started cooking in restaurants. Like the first restaurant I ever cooked at was at a Stella on a Friday night rather than like working my way up. So yeah, I was really methodical about it. I was like, I want to get good at everything. I want to try everything. I want to learn from the best. I want to get like a bunch of restaurant cookbooks mostly rather than like a home cooking cookbook, which is much more how I cook now. Like, I am so excited for the Kang cookbook to just see how Claire especially talks about food in that book. And it won't be all of these, like, I know it won't be all these, like, weird, like, overly showy techniques that I was making myself do when I started cooking for the first time.

13:04I can't wait for that book. Is there, like, one canonical book from the restaurant space that you just keep going back to? I have become, like, completely obsessed with Nick Cartola's Four Horsemen cookbook since it came out. I think I've cooked every recipe in it, which I don't do anymore. I'll read through a cookbook for inspiration and then stop. And I think I just love the way that Nick thinks about food, the way he layers, like, frankly, like, cheese, nuts, and vinegars in interesting ways. It's like, oh, I really love this. And so that's a recent one. And I think the Prune cookbook is the best cookbook of all time.

13:41Yeah. As a literary work, it's definitely up there. And like the way, especially before I worked in a kitchen, the way it reveals how a kitchen works, the way Gabrielle in the margins is like kind of like dropping in little digs at her cooks of what she knows they'll do wrong. It helps you learn in such an incredible way. So Prune is that. And then in 2017, I remember that that's like the year that, the dining in from Alison Roman, the night market cookbook and salt, fed acid heat all came out as I was like really learning how to cook. And to me, that's like my, my like base triumvirate of like things that shaped how I think about cooking and how I think about flavors and just like the, the things I naturally go back to.

14:27Dining in is terrific in that way as well. I think Alison, that first book was, was really groundbreaking and just bringing the idea of the combinations and and just like really tight recipe writing. Yeah, I mean, I'm a 32-year-old man who spends time between New York and LA. Like everyone just has her recipes as like a shorthand. It's like everyone recognizes it wherever you go. And I think it's as influential as any book that like isn't my friend group. Like I think it's as influential as any, like a Sally Bruni book as well. I love that comparison. I'm curious about Cool World. I want to talk about that.

15:00We touched on it on our last episode very briefly, but I wanted to have you back in. Yeah. Like, what's this experience like working the line at a restaurant that ultimately failed? We don't really do postmortems for restaurants on the show, and I think we should. And you're very clear and candid about, you know, failure and success. I think you write really well about this. And bangers and jams. I didn't even plug the name of your sub stack. Take us through, like, ending up at Cool World on the line and then kind of like the path that that restaurant took in its short life. Yeah. So I was working a tech job that was like perfectly comfortable and what I needed after running myself into the ground at ESPN and was a good reset for me.

15:44But it was like not a thing I was passionate about. And I was like desperately looking for something. I was in L.A. and I felt really aimless. I actually was before moving to New York and working in restaurants here. I was very close to signing like a six month short term lease in Portland, Maine to like really escape my life and go cook. The plan was to go cook in Maine. And I got talked out of that by some friends. Just come to New York. You're being so stupid. So I got to New York and I emailed all of my favorite restaurants this like plea to let me go work there, including like Wild Air and Estella and Hearts.

16:20and I got an email back from the team at Estella that said to like come in on a Friday night for a trail. And so I Googled like, what is a trail? That's incredible. I had no idea what that meant. So this is 2022. It's right in that post-pandemic, like desperation for cooks, desperation for any like qualified adults. I looked up like, what does a cook wear? Like I had no idea what I was doing. I told friends I had an interview at Estella, and they all thought that I was looking to be their social media coordinator. Right, like marketing or something. Yeah. What's the level of anxiety, like going into a trail at Estella of all places and not having worked in professional?

17:05I'm like a bit of a psychopath in that way. I'm like inordinately confident in myself. I don't really know why. It's like deeply unearned, but I was like, I'm just going to do it and I'll see what happens. You know, if I fail, I fail. But I really wanted it. So I was like, let me just try. I talked to the head chef there at the time. I got in at three. He said, you know, this is the strangest application we've ever seen. He was like, you're a product marketer? I don't really know what either of those words are, you know? And I was like, yeah, but I'm really passionate about this. I've cooked my way through the cookbook which was true and he was like that's not the same yeah he like came correct right away he's like I didn't even look at that thing that's for the novices exactly but they my plan was mostly just to trail and like shadow and maybe do some knife cuts but I think they were down a person that night oh shit and so it's a Friday night of Stella it's packed and they show me the technique for the endive salad I think like to me objectively one of the best dishes in the city the beef tartare all the things on the cold station um and then they got slammed and they um I had watched them plate the endive salad and they asked me they're like can you plate four endive salads and they look kind of nervous asking but they also needed me to do it and I was like sure I plated it one of the um sous chefs took a bite and was like that's great and they sent it out and I was like I think that sounds It's like$32.

18:37Someone was definitely trying it for the first time, not knowing me, a doofus, had made it. And then they were supposed to cut me at eight, and they just let me stay. And I was like, this is the most fun I've ever had. You had fun doing this. I had never had more fun working in my life. I had spent my whole life working mostly remotely from my computer, sending emails about basketball trades. And this was an entirely different thing. I burned my hand so severely that I had like this enormous mark on it for like two months because I was asked to go grab something and I'm so stressed that I just grabbed like the hottest pan imaginable.

19:15And they needed it. So I, again, because I'm a little crazy, I just kept grabbing it to like move it over. And then someone finally like grabs me and hands me a towel. And he's like, you obviously don't do it like that. That was the response. What is wrong with you? Which people said to me a lot. and so they offered me a line cook job that night. That night, Austin? Yeah, I talked to them. Like that night, they're like, you're hired. We talked for a bit. I was explaining to them my very fluid schedule at my tech job and they were like, oh, if you can be here at this time, that's fine. And then they ghosted me, which happens, and that's totally fine.

19:51But I was hooked, right? And so I kept looking around. I went on a date at Cool World. and we had fries and dessert Amanda Perdomo, who I still think is the best pastry chef in New York. I'm deeply biased after working with her. I tried two of her desserts. I was, like, blown away by that, and then I looked online and saw they were hiring cooks. And so I sent an email and got a response from Q, who's now the head chef at Demo. He was the head chef at Cool World, and he, same thing, told me to come in for a trail. and then I like I basically from that day I spent like 60 hours a week there for the next from that year so backing up you were there as a guest you'd heard about cool world uh you're obviously into restaurants you tried it out thought the desserts were great were you like about to quit your job at that point pretty much no I um you know I conceded that I'm unfortunately much too bougie to live off of a line cook salary but I still really wanted to do this thing and so I was like i think i can do both i think it's a probably a real reflection of where the like um tech work from home culture was at at the time i mean it was like quiet quitting era there was quiet quitting definitely post-pandemic people were like kind of making up their own rules yeah like once a week i would have uh a like tinge of guilt about it but then i would also i would also think like i'm doing what I love this is working no one at the day job is really saying anything about it about about like my um I didn't tell them I was doing it but like no one said anything about like the quality of my work really um so yeah I was like no part of me thought about quitting um the day job I was like let me just try to do both and let me see how long I can do this how does this work scheduling wise you've got like a day job you've got this so I don't I don't have any direct reports so I kind of just have projects I have to finish.

21:49And so a typical day for me would be to like, um, wake up, uh, at around six or 7am, go to yoga at Sky Ting to try to like maintain some sense of like balance and like a relative health in my life. Um, do as much work on my computer as I could from like nine to one. And then I would, uh, put a DNS on my calendar starting around two for like a do not schedule block. And that's when I would be on the line. And then I would work at the restaurant from like two to midnight ish, at least five days a week. But because I was, you know, the least experienced and the least skilled, I would always, oh, I would drop everything to step in and like cover for someone, which I didn't realize how often that happens in restaurants that it's like, it's 2pm and a cook calls out and someone needs to come in.

22:44and so I would often work there like six days straight sometimes seven while were you like on slack like on the prep line and shit like that yeah I was I also would occasionally go like um headphones on camera off for a zoom while I was doing like knife cuts for prep um yeah it's a real like there's there's a whole other side of it about like tech workplace culture that I would like to write about at some point but have like not really yeah dove into as much but yeah I would do all of that and they, you know, my coworkers in the kitchen were deeply confounded by me and what was happening. But it was really fun.

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25:22Well, let's talk about Cool World. You're there. You clearly write about restaurants, and you're, like, thinking about restaurants from the long view, and you're also close in, working the line. Take us through the failure of this restaurant. I want to know what happened. Because, like, give us the post-mort. I think it was Dune from the start with the name, frankly. Tough hang. Not a big fan of that name. I would tell people I was a – it was one of those things, like, I used to be this way about being from Austin. I'll be like, oh, I'm from Texas. I'm like, where in Texas? I'm like, Central Texas.

25:52And they're like, I'm, like, avoiding it. And I did the same thing with Cool World where I was like, oh, I'm a cook. Like, I'm a cook in Brooklyn. And they're like, where? I'm like, Cool World? It fails this very important task that you need in restaurants that you have to be able to. I say this about people with subsect, too, for the name. You have to be excited to recommend it. The main reason why, like, Feed Me from Emily Sundberg is good is because it's good. But it also helps with Word of the Mouse, but you've got to check out Feed Me. It just rolls off the tongue. You've got to go to Cravette, rolls off the tongue.

26:22You've got to go to Cool World is, like, doomed from the start. and I really think it, not to, you know, say like it wasn't our fault in the kitchen with the food because there's certainly plenty of things we could have done better, but it never became a daily destination either for people all across the city or for that neighborhood. Yeah. We were always pretty much slammed on Friday and Saturday nights. Typical Brooklyn story. It's Greenpoint, right? Greenpoint. It's now the Brooklyn outpost of Rays. Yeah. But I mean, I remember I would go in and I was like, there's no way in hell I'm sitting in this dining room.

26:56Like it felt a little weird. And it was impossible to describe what the food was too. I think there were ambitions for it to be kind of like the Brooklyn Odeon with cues spent on things with like some Asian flair. That's literally every restaurant. Yeah, that's a very good point. Every restaurant would be the Brooklyn Odeon. But also we wouldn't, we didn't lean into it enough to say it. I think if we had been like, oh, we're actually pretty Hellstony, but with more like lightly Louisiana influence and a lightly Asian influence, it could have worked. The concept is tough. But there. Yeah. And then also, not only did it not get good reviews, it kind of didn't get reviewed.

27:36Like it didn't get into that hype cycle of any kind that could build momentum. Yeah. And I think like I didn't really know any better. I obviously would know that if I, you know, if I was standing around for 90 minutes and I had made one crudo and one salad, that probably wasn't good. There were days where I would be naturally given like my previous jobs. I'd be doing the math and I was like, I think they're losing money on me right now as a cook. That can't be good. Yeah. But I think most of the reasons that restaurants are succeeding in New York when they do is that they have good enough food, but they reach this escape velocity via reviews and TikTok and buzz and hype and that it feels good when you're in there.

28:25That is what's actually essential. I mean, also, I would say when you approach a restaurant from TikTok, they deliver on the promise in some ways. And it might be like a price point. It might be self-service. It might be a couple of banging dishes, all of the above. Yeah. Right? I think another thing, too, that some friends would say was that, like, not only did the menu not feel cohesive, even if most of the dishes were good, I think it was a little, like, the best stuff was also a little heavy and, like, a little intense. And we had friends come in, friends come in, and you, like, crush them with food.

29:05that was like a thing I learned of like sending so much stuff out and my friends would be like I feel pretty horrible after coming the food was good and I had a lot of fun but I don't feel amazing I think it's interesting to compare it to demo where Q is now where I think it's like so dialed in I think the dishes are so good it's like the point of view is like it's a wine bar it's a wine bar with food it's that thing it's a very good version of that thing in a neighborhood where people are looking for it and it just kind of clicks it just kind of works in a way that cool world never clicked and demo is a much better name for a restaurant the name is is i think better it's still a tough name for me okay i always forget about it because i'm like people do i'm like i remember i heard about this place that had four i mean i really literally on this show maybe talking to eliza for three things i couldn't remember demo for whatever reason anyways i know a lot of food friends who still haven't been despite me recommending it despite lots of people recommending it i don't really know why but i think it's a little underappreciated so i mean also the quality of food i mean you literally had no training and you're cooking every night sure maybe it's an indictment on them that they hired me that's a little bit i'm not trying to be unfair like i appreciate you being honest i'm sure q uh running a successful restaurant now would appreciate the honesty because i think we don't really talk about that on the show yeah yeah it's probably a failure to hire you um yeah estella was right of like probably i'm sure they found someone yeah with More experience.