Culinary Characters Unlocked

Mesmerized by the chefs see saw on TV, chef Melissa Perello fell in love with cooking as a child. Her mom still talks about the leg of lamb she made from a cooking show recipe when she was 8 years old! After attending the Culinary Institute of America, she rose through the ranks of fine dining in San Francisco, even winning a Michelin star, before deciding great food could be comfortable, approachable, and casual. And she proves it every day at her own restaurants, Frances and Octavia. She even invented bacon beignets.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Their Washington state restaurant boasts of doing farm to table since 1986 and is credited with helping define Pacific Northwest Cuisine. It even has its own farm, and what they don’t grow there they get from a network of trusted local producers and foragers. When we talked in early Spring their remarkable seasonal tasting menu was spotlighting local specialties ranging from sturgeon to polenta to a Walla Walla sweet onion tart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Ana Sortun knew as a teenager that she wanted to cook. At 16 she decided to move to France for culinary school. It changed her life. But so did another trip many years later, to Turkey, where she found her true culinary passion. At her Boston area restaurants, she is cooking up the dishes she has found in more than 30 trips to Turkey, as well as some other flavors of the Mediterranean. And she’s won a James Beard award as Best Chef Northeast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Beard Award winning chef and restaurateur Spike Gjerde has totally re-thought the way restaurants ought to be feeding us. He’s obsessed with doing things his way, building a restaurant group to pursue that passion. And by the way, his food is terrific. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kari Lauritzen and Sonya Sanford met and became best friends when both were private chefs in Los Angeles. Now they are coaxing non-cooks into the kitchen and teaching home cooks how to make fabulous meals (and enjoy doing it) on their podcast Food Friends. And in this conversation, they offer some great tips for upping anyone’s home cooking game. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Travis Herbert began cooking with his grandmother as a child, but it was sharing a chairlift with a chef at a Utah ski resort that got him into the business. Now he’s got two restaurants at the center of a culinary boom in Salt Lake City, serving up bold flavors and unique dishes—like elk osso buco.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Star Maye has had a remarkable rise through the culinary world. Born in a small Alabama town, this self-described “black, queer single mother” went from a small Alabama town to the U.S. Navy, to prison, where she found a mentor who pointed her to the culinary world, to becoming a celebrated executive chef in Nashville and a champion on the Food Network show Chopped. Her creative southern cooking is groundbreaking, rooted in the concept of food from as close to the soil as possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Andrew Black got his first cooking job in his native Jamaica in his teens. That began a stellar career that took him to the Ritz in Paris and the Peabody in Memphis. When he was offered a job in Oklahoma City he sneered, “Where the hell is that?” But he checked it out, liked what he found, and has been at the forefront of a culinary revolution there. Chef Black now owns three restaurants in OKC, including the celebrated Grey Sweater, which he says is built on imagination to take diners on a journey of memorable moments, and where he won the 2023 James Beard award as Best Chef Southwest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a child, Chef Renee Erickson would go salmon fishing with her father. And fruits and vegetables came from the family garden. She’s taken that grounding in the fabulous foods of the Pacific Northwest and built a celebrated group of Seattle restaurants that serve up a range of cuisines, heavy on local seafood. She bought her first restaurant at the age of 25, she’s seen all the ups and downs of the restaurant business, and in this conversation, she is brutally candid about the financial challenges facing her and other restaurateurs in today’s tough economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Zak Baker cooks what he calls Midwest Italian and it's unlike anything most folks have ever had before. It began when he first went to Italy and was thrilled by the food, but also surprised. He'd never had anything like it at any Italian restaurant he'd visited in America. He returned to cook in Italy again and again. And that’s what inspires him at his Milwaukee restaurant Ca'Lucchenzo, where he’s serving dishes created with traditional Italian techniques and flavors, but using the best ingredients of the Midwest. It got him named a 2026 James Beard Awards finalist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Kathy Fang pretty grew up in her parents’ legendary San Francisco Chinese restaurant, House of Nanking. She tried a career in business but couldn’t escape the pull of the restaurant world. So she returned to her hometown and partnered with her father to open another restaurant, Fang, where she is creating innovative dishes inspired by her childhood favorites, but pushing the traditional envelope of Chinese-American cooking that brings to mind a range of non-traditional influences, even the taste of an In-N-Out burger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When he was in his teens, Zach Midgett found a refuge from problems at home by working in a suburban Philadelphia restaurant. He started as a dishwasher, fell in love with kitchen life, soon was promoted to cook on the line, and rose to the top of the culinary world when he was hired at legendary chef Thomas Keller’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant in northern California, The French Laundry, where he worked his way up to sous chef. Then, he made a move many in the food world might find inexplicable—he relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska where, as Executive Chef at Casa Bovina restaurant, he is bringing exquisite, elevated dining to a place where he says one of the challenges is convincing local diners to try something new. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this special bonus episode, we revisit great conversations with three chefs who just won James Beard awards. Nok Suntaranon’s Thai restaurant Kalaya won 2026 Outstanding Restaurant. Alinea veteran Dave Beran was named Best Chef California for what he’s doing at his L.A. restaurant Seline, and Sarah Thompson won Best Chef Southwest for her cooking at coastal Mexican restaurant Casa Playa in Las Vegas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Lonie Murdock learned to cook from her Jamaican grandmother. After years in other professions, she opened a Caribbean popup in Toronto, turned it into a highly successful restaurant with a menu of elevated Caribbean classics, then expanded to Washington D.C, where she’s doing Caribbean with a twist, and where the Obamas dined on date night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Canadian chef David Jackman faced hurdle after hurdle getting to cook in the U.S., from being unable to afford culinary school to problems getting a visa that would allow him to work in American restaurants. But he persevered, starting a pop up with his wife and building it into a brick and mortar, Wildweed. His menu features unique and creative dishes made from what he calls “wildcrafted” local ingredients sourced from local farmers and cheesemakers, even some he forages for. Wildweed has been named a 2025 Best New restaurant by Bon Appétit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Ellie Parker grew up in Las Vegas where she’s had a meteoric culinary career—cooking on the strip at age 17, helping Martha Stewart open her first restaurant, Executive Chef of a celebrated steakhouse at 25, then Hell’s Kitchen champion, and now running one of Gordon Ramsey's kitchens. She talks about it all—and explains how to make the perfect steak at home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chef Matthew Timoszyk first encountered global flavors while serving in the Air Force. He went on to cook in restaurants and as a personal chef before beginning a massive project he calls The Culinary Expedition. For the past year he’s been compiling and cooking recipes from as many countries as he can fit into twelve months, which he will be compiling into his third cookbook. He shares a few of them here, along with a fascinating life story that includes his personal commitment to taking the screaming and brutality out of restaurant kitchens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christina Theofilos was raised in a Greek-American family in Tampa, learning to cook Greek specialties from her mother and her yiayia (Greek for grandmother). After graduating from Notre Dame and spending some time in California, she returned home and, disappointed by the Greek restaurants there, decided to open one of her own, even though she had never even worked in a restaurant before. She called it Psomi, Greek for bread. It quickly became a big success, earning a Michelin Bib Gourmand, and she was named a Michelin Guide Young Chef award winner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dino Figaretti’s nearly 80-year-old Italian restaurant in West Virginia was born from his great grandmother’s homemade pasta sauce. Now it’s been named a 2026 James Beard America’s Classics award winner. And he’s burnishing the legacy and grooming his son to take over. Plus, the next generation of another family business, olive oil importer Nate Bradley, tells all about the ingredient nearly everyone uses and few know much about. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Johnny and Kasie Curiel met working in the restaurant business, got married, and opened a restaurant of their own. Then, they quickly began opening a series of restaurants, winning Michelin stars at two that don’t fit the Michelin mold within their first year-and-a-half. Johnny also won Michelin’s 2024 Colorado Young Chef award. Most of the couple’s restaurants feature regional cuisines from Mexico, where Chef was born, but they’ve now opened a Spanish restaurant, and they are expanding beyond Colorado as well, to Charleston and Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices