The Rich Roll Podcast - Jeff Gordinier Is Hungry: Perfect Plates, Punk Rock & Prolific Prose

Episode Date: July 11, 2019

Why is great food important? How and why did restaurants become culturally significant? And what life lessons can be gleaned from the world's greatest chef? There is no more enthusiastic ringmaster for this exploration than the merry man of food himself, Jeff Gordinier. A writer, journalist and author who sits at the converging junction of food and culture, Jeff is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and currently serves as the Food and Drinks editor at Esquire Magazine. A graduate of Princeton University where he studied writing and poetry, Jeff is a former writer and editor for Entertainment Weekly, editor at large for Details magazine and over the years has written about music and culture for a multitude of national publications, including Travel + Leisure, GQ, Elle, Creative Nonfiction, Spin, Poetry Foundation, Fortune, and many others. The occasion for today’s conversation is Jeff’s new book, Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World*. Equal parts mid-life crisis autobiography, adventure travelogue and biography, it chronicles the four years Jeff spent traveling with René Redzepi, the renowned chef of Copenhagen's Noma — recently fêted as the #2 best restaurant in the world — in search of the most tantalizing flavors the world has to offer. And yet, the book really isn't about food. A meditation on risk, re-invention, creative breakthroughs, and human connection, it sits atop my recommended summer reads. I first met Jeff in 2015 when he visited our home for a New York Times feature he was penning on the rise of veganism. Dubbed Vegans Go Glam, the piece caught fire, including a day spent as the #1 most e-mailed story on the entire New York Times website. Suffice it say, this was an insanely big moment for us, and the plant-based movement at large. In the aftermath of that experience, Jeff and I struck up a friendship He sent me an early copy of Hungry, which I devoured. It left me wanting to know more about Jeff. About food culture. About the mysterious René Redzepi. And what can be learned about life from this charismatic, cult-like genius redefining cutting-edge cuisine. So here we are. This is a conversation about total commitment to mastery. It's about creative expression. It's about the cruciality of constant, fearless re-invention. It's about investing in experience. And it's about the importance of deep human connection — to others, oneself, and the environment we share. As an anecdotal aside, it is this conversation that inspired my recent and uncharacteristically spontaneous decision to join Jeff and fellow food writer Adam Platt in Copenhagen a few weeks back. A once-in-a-lifetime, seat of our pants adventure I won't soon forget, we toured the city with René and his head fermentation wizard David Zilber (a seriously fascinating dude in his own right). We experienced the Noma phenomenon behind the scenes. And we enjoyed the premier of the restaurant's new forage-forward Plant Kingdom menu — a truly psychedelic experience incomparable to anything I have previously encountered. Peace + Plants, Rich

Very interesting. I talk about in the book that when I first got a seat at Noma, I got a table for two. And I had all these friends when they knew that I'd met Rene. They were like, okay, listen to me, dude. Seriously. You ever get a table at Noma? Text me. I will buy a ticket immediately. All of those people, some of whom have unlimited resources, which I do not. Some people with a lot of money that was like, I got a table at Noma, join me. No, I got to rake the leaves, man. I'm supposed to get a haircut. I'm not kidding. It was really interesting to me how many people for absolutely sensible reasons do not say yes to the greatest experiences in life. And I could not afford this. I really couldn't do it, but I found that I needed to.

I needed to say yes to it. And I realize it's an extraordinary set of circumstances that I happened to meet Renee and everything. But I do think that these opportunities come about all the time. And it could be a group of old friends from college, a group of swimmers from the team. We want to finally get together, you know? I mean, this is true.

Me, friends of mine are dying. I mean, I'm starting to lose people in my life, or they're getting sick. It's like, let's get together. Let's go for a hike. Let's have a weekend together. Say yes to that. You know, I'm not trying to make some snotty argument. I'm like, everyone should eat in Denmark. I mean, it's about like, you are here now. Make the most of it and change what's not working. And I think it's crucial. Like I'm a much happier person now. That's Jeff Gordoneer, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. What's up, people? How you guys doing? What's happening?

My name is Rich Roll. This is my podcast. I am your host. Welcome. Take a seat. Put those earbuds in. Do whatever you're going to do because I got a great show for you guys today. But first, before that, quick announcement.

On Friday, September 27th, I'm going to be appearing at the 1100-seat Wilshire Ebell Theater right here in Los Angeles. It's going to be appearing at the 1100 seat Wilshire Ebell Theater right here in Los Angeles. It's going to be amazing. I will be doing what I do, a live podcast with a guest to be announced, but also so much more. We're designing this live event, this show to be a standalone, unique, one of a kind kind of immersive experience that extends beyond just a podcast. And I'm excited about how all of this is shaping up. You don't want to miss it. All indications are that we will be selling it out. So for more information and tickets, which are now available to the general public, go to my website at richroll.com.

Click on the Appearances tab. You'll see a hyperlink right there and pick up your seats while they're hot and I will see you guys there. Okay. My guest today is Jeff Gordoneer. Jeff is a writer, a journalist, and an author who I see him as sort of sitting at the intersection of food and culture. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and currently serves as the food and drinks editor at Esquire magazine. Jeff graduated from Princeton University where he studied writing and poetry. He is a former writer and editor for Entertainment Weekly. He was the editor at large for Details Magazine for a number of years,

and subsequently has written for publications such as Travel and Leisure, GQ, Elle, Creative Nonfiction, Spin, Poetry Foundation, Fortune, and many others. The occasion for today's podcast is Jeff's terrific new book. It's called Hungry, Eating, Road Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World. It's part autobiography, part sort of travel adventure narrative, and part biography because it chronicles the four years that Jeff spent traveling with this guy called Rene Redzepi, who is considered to be one of the greatest chefs in the world. He is the genius behind the renowned restaurant in Copenhagen called Noma, which incidentally was just lauded as the number two best restaurant in the world. And they went on this search, all of these travels together, questing for the most tantalizing flavors the world has to offer.

Like I said, it's a great book. It's much about risk, the power of reinvention, of creative breakthroughs, and of human and planetary connection as it is about food itself. If you follow me on Instagram, then you know that I've got this great story to tell

about what this conversation to come inspired in me, which I will explain in a moment. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide,

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again, go to recovery.com. Okay, so I first met Jeff back in 2015 when he visited Julie and I at our house for a feature that he was writing for the New York Times that ultimately came out and was called Vegans Go Glam. I have to say that that was a pretty big moment for us. It was an article that was all about the rise of the plant-based movement. And it ended up being a very popular article. It was the number one most emailed story on the entire New York Times website for, I think, about a day, which was totally insane. Anyway, Jeff and I struck up a

friendship in the aftermath of that experience. And he recently sent me his new book, Hungry. I loved it. I love Jeff. I wanted to know more. And so here we are. And Jeff has lived a very interesting life. And I got to say, he is an incredible storyteller and conversationalist. And this exchange is just pure, unadulterated joy. In addition to his personal stories, Jeff's stories about Rene Redzepi are just insane. Stories about why he is so revered and respected, about what Rene is doing at the cutting edge of cuisine, his courageous, fearless commitment to not just mastering his craft, which is really art at the highest level, craft, which is really art at the highest level, but also Renee's commitment to things like risk and doubling down on reinvention. And all of this just left me fascinated. In any event,

after the podcast wrapped, I had to ask Jeff, so like, just how hard is it to get a reservation at this crazy Nomar restaurant place? And Jeff's like, dude, it doesn't really work that way. It's sort of like you're either in the club or you're not. But here's the thing. I might have a table coming up soon if you're interested. And I said, maybe, like I might be. Fast forward to Jeff texting me a couple of days later saying, I know this is bonkers, but my reservation is for June 23rd. Are you in or are you not? Bear in mind, that was like four or five days from the date of the text. So Jeff started calling my bluff like I claim to be into adventure and experience. And here is the litmus test. And I realized this was like a once in a lifetime opportunity to go eat at perhaps the greatest restaurant in the world

to test their new plant kingdom menu before it even became available to the public. Like I was just never going to get an opportunity like this again. So I jumped on it. I booked a last minute ticket to Copenhagen. I dropped everything and just flew there. And if you follow me on Instagram, I think you will agree that it was the right choice. I'm really glad that I did. It was incredible. I thought I knew what to expect after reading Jeff's book and after the conversation that you're about to hear, but I can tell you that I certainly did not. I spent the first day with Rene and Jeff and Rene's fermentation expert, this amazing, brilliant chef called David Zilber. We toured Copenhagen on a boat. We talked food, adventure,

what goes into creating his menu, how he cultivated his community. And I realized very quickly that Rene Redzepi is a truly extraordinary human. And then the next night before our dinner experience at Noma, Rene was gracious enough to give us a tour, which I also shared on Instagram. And then came the dinner. And look, I'm not some big gourmet. Like I'm a rice and beans guy. You know, I'm just fine with the very simple staples and basics. And even though I've co-authored a couple cookbooks, I'm really not a foodie. And so I wasn't really sure how this experience was going to land for me because this is like fine dining, you know, to the nth degree. But I got to tell you that I was amazed.

The food, of course, as you can see also on my Instagram, was totally unlike anything I'd ever experienced. It was divine. It was transcendent. It was like a psychedelic experience. But what I was most struck by was this operation that Renee has created. Because Noma, this restaurant, it's not just a restaurant. It's a community. It's a compound.

There are multiple kitchens and test kitchens and gardens. There's a staff of like 50 people, dozens of young people in the kitchen collaborating. There were perhaps 30 or 40 people cooking that evening to serve 40 people. And I just saw a guy who is an incredible leader, whose greatest talent beyond food is this ability to spot talent and potential in others, to mentor and empower the young people that work underneath them, to be their best, to actualize their potential. And this incredibly tight-knit community that Rene has cultivated and crafted around the ideas that he cares about, like community, like living in alignment with nature. And look, I could go on and on and on. I've already gone on way too long already.

I'll just close by saying that I was hoping to get Rene on the podcast while I was in Copenhagen. That was part of the agenda, the idea. Unfortunately, that did not happen. He was just too busy. Although I would say I'm committed to making that happen at some point in the future. Nonetheless, it was an experience I won't soon forget. It was an experience that I'm grateful Jeff and his colleague, Adam Platt from Grub Street, who joined us as well, allowed me to kind of crash. I was an interloper. And it was all inspired by this conversation. So let's have it. This is me and the ebullient Jeff Gordoneer on everything from REM to Red Zeppi and all matters in between. Enjoy.

Everything's a job, it turns out. Absolutely everything. I recently did some teaching at Drexel University, teaching writing, and the students were terrific, very engaged with the reading, very intelligent and insightful. It turns out that when you teach, you have to grade like hundreds of papers, right? Right, they don't tell you that part. No, you have to grade like so many papers. You have to read. I assigned a paper each week for 10 weeks.

So it turns out I had, you know, over a hundred of these things just to read. Right. And you're like, wait, I thought it was just being the cool teacher. Right, where's the dead poet society part? We're just going to recite poems, man. Like, what do you mean grades?

Like, what do you mean computer program? I had to learn this whole computer program. When did you do that? I'm technically still doing it. I just have to finish the grades, which I have to completely understand this computer program, Rich, which I don't. And I think they've already graduated, so I need to get this done, but I'm here. Well, you're a handwriting guy, right?

Like you do all your writing in longhand, don't you? I wrote probably 75% of the book by hand. That's amazing. Yeah, I heard you say something like you didn't even know what you had or how many words you had written or anything like that. You hadn't put the pieces together and realized that you had much more of a book than you originally thought because you've just been taking notes the whole time and jotting down your thoughts. Well, I'm on planes a lot for Esquire and other magazines and newspapers I contribute to.

And I'm on trains a lot. I don't go into the city all the time, but when I do from the Hudson Valley, I take the Metro North. I'm in public libraries a lot. And I'm at bars a lot, it turns out. And I bring along these just cheap paper notebooks you get at Walgreens or something or Staples. And I write, just start writing, almost like automatic writing. Like, let's just see where this goes. I'm just going to start and fill some pages with ink. And obviously, the chief benefit of that,

I'm not on Instagram. I'm not on my phone. I turn off the phone, I turn off the laptop, and essentially force myself into a monastic circle of focus. And what I found with this book is I wrote a lot of it by hand and I ended up with, you know, 80,000 words. I didn't know how much I'd written. I knew I'd filled a couple of notebooks and my wife was terrified that I would lose the notebooks and have to start over. The perils of the analog life. Yeah. And guess what? I almost did. Did you? A couple airports. Yeah, I didn't tell her, but I mean, disaster was averted, but the sweat beads on my forehead, I was in a deep state of panic a couple of times. But even then I would just say, okay, I guess I'll write the Norway section now. Why not? I'm in the mood for Norway. I'll write

the Bronx section now. And I didn't really know how the sections fit together until later when I started to put them into the laptop. Do you write in the moment of experiencing it or how much objectivity, time and space do you need to put between you and the experience before you feel like you can chronicle it in the best way possible? can chronicle it in the best way possible? That's a good question. There definitely needs to be some kind of delay. Some sort of lag deepens it, enriches your knowledge, and you have to almost lessen the energy a little bit so that you can look at it more clearly. It's very rare that I write about something right away. Like on a lot of the trips through Mexico with Rene Rezepi, I would take a lot of notes, just sit at the back of the van essentially and capture what everyone was

saying for days on end and then come home and sort of process it. You don't tape record though, because you have these long quotes, you know, you have this recollection of these conversations. They're just written down. They're written down in notebooks. I do occasionally record, but I spent weeks with the NOMA team. You can't record weeks and weeks. You just end up with endless files that you can't do anything with. fact, Renee Rezepi's wife, Nadine, gave me an interesting compliment. She was like, so I'm talking to the fact checker and it's uncanny. Like you completely recreated entire conversations we had. And I was like, okay, are they accurate? She's like, they're precisely what we said. And I was like, okay, that's what I want. That's a compliment. If I'm unclear about something, I just didn't include it. I only included the passages that I was clear on, that that's what the conversation was, and the quotes

were precise and everything. Sometimes at the end of the day, because one's handwriting can be messy, I will type the notes into the laptop, not as a written document, but just so that the quotes- Make sure you have it accurate. Yeah, because like two weeks later, it might just look like scrawls. But I find that there's more continuity to writing by hand. You sort of snap out of this trance after four or five hours. You're like, wow, I filled a lot of pages. And there seems to be a different kind of flow from that. Well, you don't seem like someone who gets easily blocked. I mean, you're incredibly prolific. I mean, the number of articles, sheer number of articles that you've

written is insane. It is. And I know there's tons that even aren't online. Oh yeah. There's an entire decade that's not online. The entire decade I wrote for details magazine that from an online standpoint does not exist. And, And frankly, that was the best work I did, but you can't, I mean, I have it in my garage in boxes. If anyone wants to see. Why didn't it ever get put online? Because details folded and Condé Nast, I believe, shut down the site. And so there's simply no way to access those stories. I mean, I did a Tom Cruise cover story, a Keanu Reeves cover story. I remember that.

That may be my finest moment. All I remember about that is something about Book Soup and like the search for a sandwich. Search for a sandwich. Yeah. Yeah, we went to Book Soup. We talked about Proust. We talked about Updike.

And then we went looking for this sandwich in Santa Monica. Right, Bay Cities. Bay Cities. It's got the lettuce, the shredded lettuce. He like lurks around BookSoup late at night, right? Like he's a frequent customer there. The guy is a deep dude and a deep reader. Did you see the thing he said on Colbert the other day?

No. Colbert asked him something about, he said, Keanu, what is the meaning of life? And I'll paraphrase, cause I don't remember exactly what he said, but there was a long pause and he said, Keanu, what is the meaning of life? And I'll paraphrase because I don't remember exactly what he said, but there was a long pause. And he said, all I know is that when you're gone, the people who love you will miss you.

And it was like this mic drop moment of deep profundity. All religions boiled down to that. All belief systems encapsulated in Keanu's, you know, cone there. Well, his myth has never been, you know, deeper or richer than it is now. I feel like I was maybe ahead of the curve because my Keanu profile in details was like 2007, 2008. And I was sort of, you know, arguing for the depth and importance of Keanu Reeves as icon at a time when he was a little bit marginalized. His star had dimmed a bit, you know? And I was like, let's reconsider Keanu, poet, philosopher.

And not in a joking way. I mean, he is incredibly literate and thoughtful when you meet him and sensitive. He's a really cool guy. But anyway, you can't read that right now. I mean, if your listeners want to read it, I can find a way to post it somewhere. Yeah, I mean, do you own those stories

now that it's defunct? You could have somebody type them up and put them on Medium or something. Yeah, it'd be fun. I mean, there was a piece about the Wedge Crew, which it still is a gang of sort of rogue body surfers down in Orange County. They surf a wave called the Wedge. Yeah. Famous wave. Yeah. Destructive. Crashes right on top of you. Yeah.

They don't even, they're body surfers. You know, you can't even have surfboards in there because they'll impale people. I wrote about them. I got them to talk. They were like fight club. They wouldn't talk. And I have roots in that part of California and got them to talk. And actually some friends of mine from high school were in the wedge crew. I wrote about a mafia lawyer. I wrote about a contortionist. I wrote about a guy who repaired broken sex dolls. Sex dolls get broken.

We don't want to get into the details. Hanger onto that story. You know, a lot of it is desperation. You know, your editor will come around like, come on, what do you got cooking? What's next? And you're like, I don't know. I don't know. You know, and so you start Googling madly, talking to people.

I think I got in a, I do remember this. I did some sort of event, a reading or something in Nevada. Of course. It would have to be Nevada or Florida. Florida. Yeah. It's like a classic Florida man story. And somebody said to me, how do you come up with articles? How do you come up with story ideas? And I said, you know, it's just, I believe in the universe. It sends me signals. Like, I'm a Californian. I believe this. I talk like this. And she said, if I come up with a story idea for you on the spot, like, you know, you can owe me dinner or something like that when I come to New York. I was like, okay, nobody ever wins at this,

but let's give it a go. She's like, I know a guy in Northern California who's the only person in America who can repair broken sex dolls. And I was like, where do you want to go to dinner? That's a sure thing. It's irresistible. That's an amazing story. Is this a real individual? She's like, yeah, his name's Slade Fierro. Of course. Slade Fierro. Of course that's his name.

And guess what? He had been in like a parachuting, what do they call it when you jump out of planes with a parachute? Parachuting. Parachuting, airdropping, whatever it is when people do that. Skydiving. Skydiving, thank you.

He had been in an accident with that and had really hurt his spine. And so he walked in this kind of serpentine contorted way. He was fairly severely disabled from this accident. And so there was this interesting poetic connection, actually, between the work he did on the dolls and his own body having been hurt from this crash. So as often happened with my stories

at Details and Elsewhere, it started as a lark. It's just like guy who repairs sex dolls. And it actually ended up becoming a deeper piece about the human body and about the way this gentleman would work with these dolls in an almost cathartic or therapeutic way regarding himself. Believe it or not, he was a pretty deep dude. Yeah, because it sounds like a character

from a David Fincher movie. David Fincher or David Lynch. Yeah, exactly. One of the Davids, one of the weird Davids. But those were good times and none of those, you know, you can't find those stories online. So what about, what was Cruise like? Oh, wow. Tom Cruise was like this. I'm looking right, like he doesn't blink. He's like looking right at you. And so I did a piece pegged to The Last Samurai, which is one of his movies.

And, you know, it was all, he wanted to do something connected to Japanese culture. And so we went to Urasawa. Urasawa is like, you know, one of the really high-end omakase places. Yeah. And the fact is, it was in some ways one of my first pieces of food writing because the whole piece was about the meal at this restaurant and how Tom didn't actually eat it. So he kept talking about he's smitten with Japanese culture. He's obsessed. He kept talking about he's smitten with Japanese culture. He's obsessed.

And he had these books. He'd brought a backpack full of books of samurai quotes and haikus and Buddhist wisdom and all this stuff, which I'm all about. I was into that. But, you know, I was like, you know, on the other hand, Japanese culture is right here in front of us being presented by these artists. This is a part of that. It's right here. And Japanese culture is sort of lined up on the runway, like planes at LaGuardia, waiting to get eaten here. And he was like, oh, no, I'm not that hungry.

And I was like, okay, well, I'm eating it. So I ate two omakase meals. Because there was this chawanmushi, which is kind of like a custard. And it had flakes of edible gold on top. Wow. And I kept going like, Tom, you're going to eat that? You're going to eat the custard? You're going to eat your pudding? You know, and he finally, he finally, in one big slurp, you know, took a spoon and just slurped down the chawanmushi and the gold. So the end was him eating gold. Wow. Oh man. Of course, man. was him eating gold. Wow. Oh, man.

Of course, man. Everything I've heard about that guy is that he's just, he's everything that you want him to be. He's hyper-present. He's completely focused on the person that he's talking to in a way that's, you know, that sort of transcends being a human being, like in an alien sort of fashion.

Yeah, you're wondering like, does he break? Can he be broken? Can I knock him off track here? He's definitely not aging. He's not aging. He is not just mentally focused on the conversation, but physically focused. There is a sense of,

like he would grab me on the shoulder to make a point and squeeze hard, you know, even hurt a little bit. Like he's strong. And I'd be like, let go, Tom, let go of my shoulder. There was a meme that went around the internet recently. It was a picture of Wilford Brimley from Cocoon. We've went from Tom Cruise to Wilford Brimley. I love that.

The joke was, this picture of Wilford Brimley, I love that. The joke was this is, this picture of Wilford Brimley, he's the same age as Tom Cruise is now. Oh, wow. That's heavy. I know, right? Well, you guys are aging backwards here. You're like Benjamin Button. We're just, we're fighting gravity here.

We're doing the best we can. Which kind of brings us to how we met. I mean, we met a couple of years ago. You came here to interview us for a piece that you were writing for the New York Times. You were exploring veganism. And I remember being kind of equal parts delighted by you and also a little bit trepidatious, like, okay,

this guy's not like some blogger. Like this is the New York Times. Like this could go either way. Like I had this terror that you were gonna write this piece that was gonna be, you know, snark filled and kind of, you know, use us as comedic fodder for something. Very easy to do that.

I don't tend to, I can't think of many examples in my career where I've decided to take that route. I don't think it's fair to people. I have this terrible blind spot as a journalist that I see human beings as human beings. Sue me. And I enjoyed talking to you guys. You've thought it through. You had an intelligent viewpoint.

And frankly, I love writing about veganism, and I love writing about the people who are passionate about it. And I think the movement behind it and the growth of it over the last 10, 20 years is quite intoxicating and exhilarating to see. I don't like to write about a system of eating or looking at the world like that in a snarky way. I don't think that's fair to people, particularly when they're giving you their time. Also, maybe your listeners don't know that I live here now. As soon as I came to the house, I loved it so much that I never... You've been here ever since. Yeah, I've lived here for years now.

We're finally let you out. Rich adopted me. So that shows you how much I like these people. No, I mean, it was a beautiful experience, you know? You have to really ask yourself some hard questions, especially these days with social media, about how far you want to go with mockery. I mean, I honestly think the politicians are fair game, but beyond that, how much you want to contribute toxicity to the world and negativity. Criticism is one thing, but just sort of like there's a way in which snarkiness tips very quickly into bullying, like a kind of form of bullying.

But do you feel- Now all journalists hate me for saying that. Yeah, but I mean, there's a sort of built-in pressure into the clickbait nature and the manner in which business is done in terms of online journalism that I would imagine puts pressure on journalists to come up with a hot take or the crazy headline, the clickbait headline.

And Snark works. It gets clicks, it gets eyeballs. Get you followers on Twitter. Is that part of the conversation when you're, you know, sitting with the editors that you work with or how does that work in your own? No, I've been blessed with some really wonderful editors who are basically like, do your thing, write the pieces that reflect what you believe is happening in the culture, whether it's the food culture that I cover now or music or film. Right.

I don't get pressure to crank out hot takes. No. Yeah. I did do a hot take that went live today. Did you? What was that? Yeah. Is it okay that I,

it's about Barada, which is like- Oh, I saw that. Like, fuck you and your Barada or something like that. Well, and it's not, you know- Do you come up with the titles too? No, I didn't really.

I might have just said that informally, and it ended up being the headline. But I don't write the headlines. They had an extra page in the summer issue. This is essentially what happened. They had an extra page, and they're like, there's something you want to just riff on. And I travel around the country all year going to restaurants all over the country and the world. And that's research for our best bars issue package that came out this summer and the best new restaurants that comes out at the end of the year. It's a lot of eating.

It's kind of punitive amount of eating. It's not a healthy enterprise, let me tell you, Rich. But you get weary of things you see on every menu. You're in Minneapolis, you're in Dallas, you're in San Francisco, you're in Atlanta, and you see burrata everywhere. And you just start to loathe the cliche of that. Burrata itself, whether it's a dairy version or a non-dairy version, is a delicious thing. Okay, I'm not opposed to the deliciousness. It's just like if you saw bands using the same chords over and over or using the same drum sound, right, which happened a lot in the 80s, or you have authors mimicking each other or using a

certain voice in their writing that strikes you as shop-worn. It's just tired and derivative. Yeah, I just don't, like, why is Burrata on this menu? It's there for a simple reason. People order it, they pay for it, you know it'll sell. And there's nothing wrong with that. I just thought I'm a little weary of it. But, you know, dude, people hate the hate. Like, the hate feeds the hate.

I've made the mistake of going on Facebook just moments before I parked here. And all these people are like, well, fuck him. Oh my God. So many people. I was like, oh no, what did I do? Like, am I just like pouring toxins into the water supply here? Like maybe I should have just left Burrata alone. I didn't even name any chefs. I mean, so it's not like I'm attacking anybody by name, but, um, I do. But part of that is driven by the title of the piece. Like when you read it, it's not exactly as snarky as the title would imply. And what you see in magazine publishing more increasingly is the difference between the title of the piece in the online version versus the title in print. Because in print,

you don't need to grab people in the same way. Yeah, this is a good question because very perceptive from a media standpoint. Like I did a piece on this chef, Francis Malman, who's down in Argentina. Well, he's traveling all over the world, but I interviewed him on this island in Patagonia. And in print, the headline was some Led Zeppelin-like, you know, old kind of old school Esquire thing, like, in the land of fire and ice. You know, you can almost imagine that Led Zeppelin song where they're like, like Valhalla. And then in print, it says, like, is Francis Malman the most interesting chef in the world? Right.

Okay. I didn't write that. I don't even really agree with it. It's meant to be, I suspect, a nod toward that Dos Equis ad with the most interesting man in the world. And so there's an element of satire to it. But that headline alone brought so much spite upon the piece. The way that you take a stance like that, it draws eyeballs, but it also draws... Ire. Ire.

Yes. Well done. So I understand it from an SEO standpoint and everything. I understand they don't want these stories to vanish. And if they put something too nuanced as the headline, people just keep clicking, I guess. I don't want these stories to vanish. And if they put something too nuanced as the headline, people just keep clicking, I guess. People would probably know Francis Malman from Chef's Table.

That's right. There's an amazing episode on him. He's one of the most influential chefs on Julie. And he was kind of the original core impetus to us doing these retreats and the Italian cookbook that Julie put together. No way. Because not so much the fire part of what he does,

but more the kind of traveling gypsy, travel the world and take your crew with you and set up shop and have an experience that brings your expertise to a different region and welcomes the expertise of that region into it. And that was really the spirit. Like we wanted to take what we do and go to different places of the world

and collaborate with the local chefs there. And we've kind of done that in Italy and a book came out of that. The idea was broader though. We're gonna go to all these places, but we're so busy. We just keep going back to Italy. Yeah.

But she just absolutely loves Malman. That's amazing. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did not, that's, you know, Malman's next book is apparently a vegetable cookbook. Oh, is it? He's obviously intensely associated with meat,

but he himself seems to be moving away from that. Right, that it? He's obviously intensely associated with meat, but he himself seems to be moving away from that. Right. That's interesting. It's really interesting considering his philosophy. Jeff, the world is moving away from meat. Well, I suspect that is true. I suspect that is true. You kind of have to. I mean, the chef's table I was associated with and the thing I'm sort of, the only thing I'm recognized on the street for now and then is the Jon Kwan episode of Chef's Table that I appear in. Although I look much better with the lighting they had. So sometimes people are like,

are you the Jon Kwan guy or did you just get really old and fat? I'm like, no, I'm him. I'm just, don't actually look that good. Well, a couple, first of all, put that aside. But I remember when you came to our house to spend time with us for that New York Times piece, you had just returned from South Korea

having that experience with her. And you were telling us about it and neither of us had heard of her. I didn't know anything about her. And you were just going on and on about what an extraordinary, incredible experience this was. And then a couple of weeks after the piece that you wrote about us and kind of veganism,

the piece that you wrote for Anzhung Kwan about that experience was in Tea Magazine. That's right. It's one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. And the photographs were just exquisite. I mean, that must have, I mean, yes, being in Chef's Table, but that article was really something remarkable. Well, that article is why the Chef's Table happened.

David Gelb would admit that. I mean, a lot of Western readers and viewers were not familiar with Jonquan until that piece. So- Right. Explain her for people that are listening. She is a Buddhist nun at a monastery in South Korea. She's not a formally trained chef. She doesn't have a restaurant. So she's the only person who's appeared in Chef's Table with that kind of background.

Her ethos is temple cuisine, which is a form of cooking that's been around for centuries, and it's associated with Buddhist temples throughout Asia, not just Korea. associated with Buddhist temples throughout Asia, not just Korea. There's different manifestations of it throughout Asia. And it's a vegan cuisine. And everything that's used is from the surrounding landscape, with the exception of the rice. I mean, they bought the rice. But mushrooms, herbs, leaves, vegetables, fruits, all these things that are plucked at the moment of freshness. I mean, literally, we were in the garden and she's plucking things that she brings up to the kitchen and starts cooking moments later. Maybe she serves them raw, maybe she cooks them in these bamboo tubes. And then other things are vegan and are products of nature, but are products of time.

So there are things that are extremely fresh of the moment. And other things like a soy sauce or gochujang or bean paste, donjang, that could be 10 years old, 30 years old, even 100 years old. The people in the monastery are sort of custodians of these sauces for generations. And they have such depth of flavor and stuff. And to me, obviously, everyone should know by now that vegan cooking can be incredibly delicious and creative. I mean, that's a given now. We know all about cashew butters and all the different ways you can use different fats. But these aged sauces in Korea up the ante. I mean, there's nothing more flavorful than that. There's nothing

richer in a way than some of these sauces. And she'd just kind of brush a grilled vegetable with this, a mushroom, wrap it in a leaf and brush it with one of these sauces. And your eyes would roll back in your head. It was like the most delicious thing. Eric repair from the Bernadine, he and I went together. And at the end of a few days, we were like, I've never felt better in my life. You know, so. But just also on top of that, the incredible kind of patience and mindfulness and artistry and care that this woman like puts into every meal that she makes. Everything that she does,

there's this intention behind it that is sort of brought forth in the flavor and the presentation of her food. People talk about such and such chef putting love into the food, and it's kind of a cliche in the food world, but she does intentionally pour love and bodhicitta, like good vibes and good intentions into each dish, into each ingredient

with prayers. I mean, she actually prays over the food and she thinks about who's going to be eating it. And she offers it up as a gift to them and a way of communicating. I mean, it's very moving. Yeah. And it does make you wonder if it has an effect, not just on the deliciousness, but how you feel. And we were also, I mean, I've actually spent a lot of time with the Dharma. I spent many years in meditation and studying the Dharma and stuff. So I have some background in it and always find myself drawn back to it. Similar to with vegetarian or vegan eating, it's funny.

I think if some day comes, and I'm not just saying this to flatter you. Are you patronizing me in the audience? I'm not just trying to win fans on the show. I've said this to many people that like, if the time comes when I'm no longer officially working as a food writer and having to eat everything, I have to eat everything for my job. Yeah, you go to these restaurants, you order everything. I have to. I sort of nibble it and

sip it. I can't possibly drink all the drinks I post on Instagram. I would be in deep trouble. But I would love to go vegan and give it a go. I really would, because I have had weeks at a time when I did, and I feel extraordinarily better. And so- I think I heard you say when you were doing the story on us and the kind of movement, the vegan movement, that you didn't write about it, but that you actually were, you did go vegan for that period of time. Yeah, I did for another story involving Kathy Freston and- Oh, and Dan.

Yeah, and well, that's actually a different one, the Dan Buettner one. I did an earlier one about veganism gaining in popularity at restaurants and even restaurants that serve meat and stuff would have vegan options in Los Angeles because so many customers expected it, right? And Tal Ronan at Crossroads, of course, I interviewed. And so, I decided it's only right to go vegan for a week, go fully plant-based. I mean, at least from that,

within that framework of a week or 10 days, it's kind of undeniable that you feel better. I don't know if that's true after months. I've never gone that long. I'm at 12 years. I still feel good. 12 years. Yeah. Yeah. And you look 22, so. Not quite, man. I grew the beard out. It's pretty white, man. I know. The beard is the tail. We're all going to die, dude. The beard is the tail, you know? Like, that's the thing. I keep growing my whiskers out. It's

not even a beard. And you're like, oh, I'm Santa Claus. Right. Well, you, we're like the same age. You grew up in San Marino, right? Yeah, I tried to hide. Where'd you go to high school? San Marino High School. Did you? Yeah.

And I was on the swim team. Were you? Yeah, man. We could have swum against each other. Holy shit, did we talk about this? We did briefly. But you like were in the Olympics or something. No, no, no.

I wasn't that good. Did you know Kirk Crochet? Very well. You're kidding me. Did we talk about this? A little bit. He went to Stanford, right? Yeah, he's one of my best friends from school. Yeah, he wasn't that good. Did you know Kirk Crochet? Very well. You're kidding me. Did we talk about this? A little bit, he went to Stanford, right? Yeah, he's one of my best friends from school. Yeah, he was on my team.

Yeah, because San Marino High School was one of the great swim dynasties in California. You know, it's funny because I live in New York, that means nothing to anyone. Right. Sorry, I'm bumping the mic, I'm getting so excited. But you know, no one ever asked me about swimming. It's like, I describe it to people.

It's like being in Texas and playing football. Like it was a huge deal in my school to be on the swimming and the water polo team. Right. And, you know, Mission Viejo, everybody thinks about. But San Marino was a powerhouse. Yeah, it was. We had Burt Kanner and Tom Schmidt as our coaches. Tom Schmidt was, whoo, he was nuts.

He was intense. We used to have these board drills. Do you ever do that that do you water polo too no i never played i grew up east coast i'm from washington dc so i didn't grow up in a swimming my accent is getting californian as i talk about this but like we on water polo in water polo season which was tom schmidt at san marino if you made a mistake in practice you had to do a board drill which meant you had to climb up to the top, the highest diving board, you know, of course, in your Speedo, which is totally humiliating in and of itself, and jump off. Well, everybody on the team threw a water polo ball at you.

Just abusive. Yeah, just getting pegged on the way down. Yeah, one, Jason Rothbard broke his nose one time. Like, it was brutal, you know? And I made a lot of mistakes. I wasn't that coordinated. So, I mean, at one point with swimming, I don't know what happened with you, but with you're swimming now, I swam at Princeton to-

Oh, you did? Yeah. For Rob. Yeah, for Rob Orr, who's retiring now. I've thought about going there. Amazing. I like Rob a lot. Yeah, yeah. He's a great guy. Yeah. One day I went into Rob. Yeah, for Rob Orr, who's retiring now. I've thought about going there. Amazing. I like Rob a lot. He's a great guy.

Yeah. One day I went into Rob. Of course, I trudged through the snow to Jadwin Gym or wherever, whatever the gym was where our pool was. And for some reason, I was being stridently Californian. I refused to wear snow boots, so I was wearing like vans in the snow, you know. And I'm freezing. It's 530 in the morning. You know, morning workout. Right. It's 5.30 in the morning, you know,

morning workout. Right. Get there, smell the chlorine and something clicked. And I was like, Rob, I'm out. Yeah. He's like, what, you don't feel good? I was like, I can't do this anymore. I've been doing this since I was seven years old. The chlorine, I can't take it. I can't go back and forth in this pool anymore. I'm losing my mind. I've never had a beer. This is crazy. I'm in college. I've never partied. I mean, I just, what is my life? He's like, okay, relax. Relax. I wasn't that important to the team. So this was not an emergency. I was like the third sprinter. I was not a crucial cog on the team, but he's a good guy. He was like, just relax. It'll be, but I never went

back. I actually never went back. I couldn't do it anymore. I did start running and stuff, but I recently tried to swim in a pool in a hotel in Detroit when I was there to check out restaurants. It was painful. That was not good. Oh my God. 16 laps, I about wanted to conk out. So you were in, then you would know Dan Veach and Jim Tuckler? Veach was on my team at Princeton. Yeah. Yeah, Veach I remember vividly.

I grew up with those guys. I've known those guys my whole life. Yeah. Veach is a class act. Great guy. I'm still in touch with him. I talk to him from time to time. Yeah.

I couldn't talk to him because he was lapping me all the time. He was moving so quickly. He's a brilliant talent. He went to the Olympics. He's incredible. And when we were kids at summer league swim meets, he was the guy who at age all of 15 or 14 or whatever

would be going up to every, where the parents are the timers and it's like summer league or whatever, introducing himself to every parent, shaking their hand. Like I was like, this guy's gonna be president. Yeah. You could tell them, like he's a big banker now in San Francisco. Is that what he does?

And Jim Tuckler lives in Chicago and still does masters and like breaks all these masters world. He still looks like he's 21. You know who really wants me to start swimming again? Who's that? My wife. Yeah. She's like, I'm just putting it out there. I really like a swim he's 21. You know who really wants me to start swimming again? Who's that? My wife. Yeah. She's like, I'm just putting it out there. I really like a swimmer's body.

I mean, to me, that's the ideal. I was like, as opposed to a food writer's body, you're saying? You know, like, what's the difference? I am- Well, you could keep these things in balance that way. Balance. One of these days, I'm gonna get to balance. There's a scene in Hungry, my book, that's about the workout that Rene Redzepi does every morning.

Yeah, I read about that. It sounds pretty intense. It was awful. And I'm so out of shape now and I barely do anything. I just walk really, if even that. And it involves a lot of burpees. And it's kind of like his cooking is new Nordic. It's like radical naturalism.

And his workout is radical naturalism too. It's almost primitive. It's like just run back and forth really quickly. Now scuttle around like a crab. Now climb up this tree. Now try to slap the other guy's knee. And if he slaps your knee first, you have to do 10 burpees.

I mean, I do one burpee and I thought I was having a stroke. So it was really hard. Yeah, there's a parallel between his hyper-local cuisine and his interest in sustainability and all of these things with his, he's not going to a gym or putting on a GPS watch. Like he's using what he finds in his backyard.

Yeah, I mean, I would travel through Mexico with them and him and Thomas Frabel in particular, one of the members of his team is in wicked shape and everything. Like they would just put a rope over a tree branch and start like doing pull-ups on it. They would just do that for the hell of it. I was like, I will never do that.

Have you ever heard of the happy pair? Here's a story for you. Yeah. You know these guys? I could pretend. They're twins, they're these twins. They're identical twins. They're like the most identical of identical twins. They have their DNA tested, like the most identical.

They're the same person. Yeah, basically they are. They finish each other's sentences literally. And they live in Greystones, Ireland, which is like an hour south of Dublin. And they started this veg shop that became a plant-based cafe. And now they're really the face of kind of healthy living

and eating in Ireland. And it's quickly kind of spreading out across the world. They were kind of adopted by Jamie Oliver. And he sort of introduced them to the world through his YouTube channel. Now they have like three or four cookbooks. They're all number one bestsellers in the UK. And they've got YouTube and all this kind.

I've had them on the podcast a bunch. And I visited them in Greystones a couple of times and they kind of visit us on our retreats in Italy. We were just with them a couple of weeks ago. And they've created this movement where now people migrate to this little village in Ireland in Greystones to just catch a glimpse of them and eat a meal at their cafe.

And they do this thing every morning called swim rise where at the crack of fuck, you know, whenever the sun comes up. Oh, we can swear on this podcast. Yeah, yeah. As soon as the sun comes up, they go jump in the Irish sea, 365 degree days a year,

every day, January, February, whenever. And it started with just them and a couple other friends. And now literally hundreds of people show up every morning and they drive or they fly to just have this experience with them. Wow. And it's pretty cool what they've created. Like they really have created this movement that's very populist and inclusive

around healthy eating and living. And they also work out in the same way that Red Zeppi does. Like they just use what's around them to kind of, and they're doing it like throughout the day. Hey, I have 10 minutes, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do some handstands or whatever it is. And they're just constantly super high energy dudes. Amazing. Yeah.

You should check these guys out. I would like to. You know, it's funny with Rene Redzepi, a lot of his menus is foraged ingredients, you know, from the wild or herbs and beach grasses and whatnot you didn't even know were edible and, in fact, are often highly nutritious. And his workout and the foraging are similar in the sense that they're free. Right. I mean, it's just there. It's just there. You don't have to pay a store for it.

You don't have to pay a gym. I think that his philosophy is inspiring and is influential, but it's also cheap. Right. Unless you're eating it at Noma. Well, he's getting extremely high-end ingredients that are flown in from Norway and the Faroe Islands and everything.

But a lot of his other ingredients are either fermented things that they just make on their own that take years and things that are foraged. And he's very different. One of the things I'm trying to communicate to people who've heard about this book is when they hear about chefs, they tend to think about excess. They tend to think about truffles and caviar and that kind of champagne. Indulgences. Indulgences. A meal at Noma is really not about that. There's a sense of luxury in that you're being taken care of. There are bites that are extraordinarily delicious, but it's very much a break from that fatty, excessive kind of cooking. And in fact, the menu that's about to drop at the end of this month, at the end of, over the summer, is the Plant Kingdom menu.

So they have three main menus at Noma in the sort of winter, the colder months, it's a seafood menu. And in the fall, it's sort of a wild game menu. But the main menu for the sort of middle of the year is Plant Kingdom. And it's all vegetables and fruits and herbs and roots and things like that that are offered in just an exceptionally delicious way. I showed you a picture before. Yeah, right beforehand,

you showed me this image on Instagram of one of the dishes, a plate. And it was the most beautiful presentation of food I've ever seen. Yeah. Yeah, right beforehand, you showed me this image on Instagram of one of the dishes, a plate, and it was the most beautiful presentation of food I've ever seen. Yeah, and not cliched, not those swoops and dashes and little ant hills of powder, like just these vegetables and herbs and flowers presented as they are in their natural beauty,

probably brushed with some beautiful fermented sauce. But you can leave Noma feeling quite light, you know, and feeling quite healthy. And it's not some five-hour endurance test either. I mean, it tends to go pretty quickly and they just make you feel good and the food makes you feel good. Right. It's part of why I've kept going back. I've now eaten there six times. It'll be my seventh time in a few weeks. It's because it's always different. And they kind of just blow up the menu every few months and create something entirely new. Well, let's contextualize this

whole thing a little bit. No, sorry, I went back in. Yeah, yeah. No, it's cool. I'm not trying to force it. You've got this book, Hungry, and it's essentially part memoir, part adventure story, part memoir, part adventure story. Yeah. Seen through the lens of Rene Redzepi, who's heralded as the greatest chef in the world as a result of this restaurant Noma that he has in Copenhagen.

And he's known for his, like we said earlier, like, you know, being hyper-local and this network of foragers that bring him these amazing ingredients. And he has this genius touch when it comes to creating new and different kinds of flavors. And this restaurant Noma became this crazy phenomenon. But what drew you to this guy as a story?

Like why write a book about Rene Redzepi? Like how did this whole thing come together? I love that leaves of grass is right in front of me. I'm just going to point that out. Yeah. You want to read it? We can read excerpts from that. Your audience doesn't want that. No, I would do it.

Well, you are a poet. No, I write about poems. Five years ago, almost exactly five years ago, I met Rene Redzepi. I was in a dark period in my own life. I was extremely depressed. I was in the middle of a marital separation, and I had just moved into a crummy little bachelor apartment. No matter how you slice it, divorce is brutal.

It was a sad time. There were a lot of tears. There was a lot of gnawing on the past and guilt. And into this moment, I checked my email and it was about a week later, maybe 10 days later, into this moment, Rene Redzepi appears through an operative at Phaidon, who was a publishing house that was putting out some of his books. They were like, you know, Rene's going to be in New York. He wants to meet you. The greatest chef in the world wants to meet you, Rich. So I'm

like, no, I'm good. I'm busy. I don't want to hear this guy. I don't want to sit down and have him prattle onto me about his manifesto. And like, the thing about the new Nordic movement is we believe, I was just like, I don't have the bandwidth. I just want to go home, you know? It makes no sense from a journalistic standpoint. But the deadlines at the New York Times are crushing. You're always, always dead. When I was working on a piece about you, I was probably working on 10 other pieces at the same time. And in fact, I had just come back from Korea for junk. So I was exhausted.

But I said yes anyway because we'll see. Whatever. Curiosity. Why do you think that he sought you out? I'm not sure. That question keeps coming up. And you'd written some semi-critical things about him prior to that. Yeah, I think he liked my writing maybe,

but also I had written a piece for the New York Times sort of mocking the New Nordic movement in New York, its manifestations in New York. And I think he has a way of identifying obstructions and reaching out to those obstructions and perhaps pulling them into his orbit. I met a guy in Detroit who had worked at Noma Mexico, one of the Noma pop-ups. And I said, do you ever get the sense that Rene Redzepi is kind of like a benevolent cult leader? And this guy hit the floor laughing. He's like,

you just fucking nailed it. That is it. He's like a cult leader. Like you can't resist. He's extremely charismatic and he has this extreme sense of mission. It's a little like Tom Cruise, we were talking about before. He's focused on you. He has so many profound things to say about nature and food and the environment and his own life story. And you're just kind of captivated. Not everyone has that degree of focus and communication and that kind of weird energy. I felt like I was meeting David Bowie in the 70s

or Bob Dylan in the 60s or Steve Jobs in the 80s or Beyonce now. Like I felt like I was meeting somebody absolutely catalytic in the culture. Or David Byrne. Absolutely, David Byrne who's a reference in the culture. Or David Byrne. Absolutely. David Byrne, who's a reference in the book. Actually, all the chapters are named after Talking Heads songs.

So I was like, wow, this guy, I see why he's the best chef in the world. I mean, he's completely catalytic leader. And he was like, oh, you know, you're an LA guy. Because I grew up out here, you know? And he's like, you know, you like tacos? I was like, what the fuck?, you're an LA guy because I grew up out here, you know, and he's like, you know, you like tacos? I was like, what the fuck? You talk, of course I like, you're from Denmark? You're going to talk to me about tacos?

You're going to talk to me about tacos? I concede. I am not from Mexico, but let me tell you something. I grew up with a Yucatecan restaurant down the street. I could have told you about Cochinita Pibil when I was 15. You know, like, yeah, let's talk tacos, Mr. Copenhagen. But guess what? He was like, yeah, you know, tacos, Mr. Copenhagen. But guess what? He was like, yeah, that's awesome. You and I should go through Mexico on a taco trip. And I was like,

what? Sure. I mean, that's not going to happen. What are you talking about? Right. Just throwing that out there. Sorry, I keep hitting the mic. Sorry, listeners. But I was like, there's no budget for that. And so it turns out that he's very persuasive in that cult leader way. He's very persistent. And he would text me. He would email me. How's the Mexico trip coming along?

I was like, there is no Mexico trip, Rene. Let it go, you know? But he'd keep, oh, come on. We should go. It'll be fun. One time, it's a true story. This is not in the book. But I was in an elevator with Whitney Vargas, who is a former editor of mine at Details Magazine.

Great person, great editor. And she said, what are you working on? I said, Whit, you know, I'm not working on the best story ever. I'm supposed to go through Mexico with Rene Redzepi. She's like, the Noma guy, the great chef in the world guy? I was like, yeah. He's like obsessed with Mexico. He wants to go on a, like a travel piece, taco quest. She's like, the Noma guy, the great chef in the world guy? I was like, yeah, he's obsessed with Mexico. He wants to go on a travel piece, taco quest. She's like,

we'll do it. You can do it for T Magazine. I was like, what? Yeah. She's like, we'll send you an agreement or something. And I was like, okay. Elevator gets off. There's the elevator pitch. So I get off of the sixth floor, walk back down to the fourth floor where I worked, texted Renee. I was like, looks like we're going to Mexico. And he's like, I know. He's like, I knew this would happen. That's how he is. Like, he won't take no for an answer. And, you know, you have that, you feel like you're being coaxed, you know, but in a good way. And so then after a while, I mean, I did that piece, but then after a while, I just went to NOMO on my own, spent my own money. And after a while, I mean, I did that piece. But then after a while, I just went to Noma on my own, spent my own money.

I went with Lauren, who's now my wife. I went with my friend Ian. I would just, you know, they would just, a little blurp would happen on my text or my emails. Like, you have a reservation at Noma. Take it or leave it. At a certain point, I was like, I do not have the money for this. I do not have the time for this. I do not have the emotional bandwidth for this.

Let's do it. Let's just for this. Let's do it. Right. Let's just say, yes, let's go to Sydney. Let's go to Copenhagen again. And it started to become intoxicating. It was like I was self-medicating with Noma, you know? Right, this is a way, like in many ways, the book is about, I mean, it sounds trite to say midlife crisis,

but it's about- Oh, I'm expecting that. It's about like, how do you navigate a difficult time? It's about reinvention. It's about not being afraid to face difficult challenges and embracing like the unknown, which is happening in your own life and is mirrored in the experience that Red Zeppi is having

with trying to continually reinvent himself. Yeah, what dovetailed nicely was that my life was in flux and I was adrift and his life, not so much in flux, but he was sort of blowing it up. He had this restaurant, Noma, which seemed almost unanimously as the most influential restaurant in the world. So he decided to close it.

Right. And tear it down and build a brand new Noma on what looked like an abandoned junk heap in Chernobyl. I mean, I can't tell you how unlikely. It's like Dylan going electric. Dude, thank you. It is like, that's what it's supposed to be. Like, I think Dylan, the Dylan documentary, Don't Look Back, was in some ways a model for what I wanted to do. The one with D.A. Pennebaker made, When We Were Kings with Muhammad Ali. These documentaries that capture a pivotal figure in culture at a pivotal moment in his or her path, right? And I thought, I have that path. I have it. I have access. He's closing the original

Noma, building a new one. It's an impossible task. It's like something out of a Werner Herzog movie. Meanwhile, he's doing this pop-up in the jungle. He's doing a pop-up in Australia. He's got this whole wild food initiative in Denmark. He's got three children. His life is nuts. Yeah. And it's like Dylan in the 60s. I mean, like at a certain point,

this period's gonna end. There'll be like the motorcycle accident or whatever. It'll come to an end. So like, I wanna, that was sort of my pitch to him. Right, if Werner Herzog's not gonna make a movie about it, we are going into the void. Werner Herzog would have been. Then you're the guy. You're going to have to be, it's going to fall onto you to chronicle this. I thought I have to do it. But I also thought it'd be fun. And I thought readers would enjoy getting the contact tie from Rene that I do. But you know

what? You've totally blown my mind though, because I actually did the audio book myself because I thought, you know, it's my story. I should do it. Turns out I should not have put all those Danish and Spanish words in there. They're like, did I have to name every Chile ever? Because I'm sitting there like Chile, like I was like, no, do it again. Do it again.

They made these Danish words. You did the accent on every single one of these. Oh my God. But now I realize it should have been Werner Herzog. That would have been genius. Oh my God. Whatever now I realize it should have been Werner Herzog. That would have been genius. Oh my God. Whatever you would have had to pay that guy to do it. I wake up on a beach, sand in my eyes.

Oh, that would have been so good. You know, the midlife crisis thing, I tried to just kind of go straight at that. Obviously that's a longstanding cliche. Yeah. It does happen though. It happens to everyone, men, women, all different ages. Right.

And the reason it begins super pretentiously with Dante's Divine Comedy. Yeah, I was just opening to that right now. You give the nod to it immediately. Yeah, the reason is because I don't know how much you know about Dante's Divine Comedy. I did a whole class in college just about Dante's Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova, this other piece,

this other work about Beatrice from Dante. Anyway, it can be read as a political metaphor, a theological tract, just a work of poetry. It can also very easily be read as a metaphor for a midlife crisis because the opening lines of Dante's Divine Comedy are essentially, they kind of loosely translate, in the middle of the way of my life, I found myself in a dark jungle and I didn't know the way out. Right. So I wasn't just being pretentious, although I'm really good at being pretentious when I need to be. But I was kind of winking at that because then as you turn the page, I'm lying there passed out next to a sea turtle sanctuary on a beach, pretty much in the same state that Dante was when he met Virgil. Literally adrift. Yeah. Just like, where am I going? I was also just

exhausted from our somehow visiting four cities in one day with Rene. But I thought, the book doesn't have an introduction on purpose. Like, I could have done the whole introduction about like, let me introduce you to Renee Redzepi. And I hate that. To me, that's like a Berlin Wall between you and the reader. Like, just start the damn thing. Just start the book. I've talked to a lot of people, like in food writing, for instance, people who are like, I don't know, man, I'm a little weary of Noma. I don talked to a lot of people, like in food writing, for instance, people who are like, I don't know, man, I'm a little weary of Noma. I don't know if I need to read about Rene Redzepi anymore. And, you know, this kind of hero worship, they read like three or four pages and they

seem to get sucked in. And a lot of people are like, wait, this is a very different book than I anticipated. Because it's not supposed to be just bros, you know, and I'm just like endlessly raising a toast to the excellence of Rene Redzepi. I admire the man considerably. I do think he has many heroic elements, but he's also human. And his flaws come through, I think, his temper, the difficulty of bringing Noma Mexico together toward the end, you'll see he kind of has, Difficulty of bringing Noma Mexico together toward the end, you'll see he kind of has, you know, a near breakdown. So I think it ended up being a little more complex than that. And I didn't want to put myself in the book originally, but my reinvention, my passages toward different modes of understanding or whatever were actually important to why I wanted to do it.

He reinvented his restaurant. He reinvented himself. He reinvented the whole way Noma cooks. I suspect there's a lot of folks in Silicon Valley who are interested in disruption and creative destruction and those themes that probably find themselves drawn to this narrative because Rene does that sort of thing himself with the restaurant. That's why it remains vital. But I was doing the same thing with my own life and just trying to figure out where I was going to go. But you, like me, these reinventions usually are forged in the crucible of pain. Like we have some, something destructive happens in our lives that forces us to confront ourselves

in an uncomfortable way. Oh, that's right. We have no real choice, but to try to find a new way forward. But then you have someone like Red Zeppi, who's like at the peak of their powers, who's like, I'm gonna cast this away. I'm gonna reinvent myself now when all the pressure

and all the energy is around maintaining what's already been created. And that takes a very unique level of vision and courage to blaze a path like that. But it's interesting if we think about these people I've brought up as potential comparisons, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Beyonce. This is what, Beyonce, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Ali changed his name. And we're talking about people who change their identity, change their practice, change their whole creative vision

all the time. And we're still talking about them. They're still vital in the culture. The people who do one thing consistently, I raise a toast to them. They're still vital in the culture. The people who do one thing consistently, I raise a toast to them. But oftentimes, we grow bored with it, and the conversation doesn't continue. So I found that intoxicating to be around. And I thought that his whole, like, he's tied to nature. The food he cooks is tied to nature, foraging, fermenting, and all that. But also his philosophy. His philosophy is essentially everything changes all the time.

It's like some George Harrison shit. Like we are always in flux. Well, that's nature as well. Like it's nature happens in cycles. My chin keeps hitting the mic. But I get so pumped about this because it's exactly right. The cycles of nature are woven into the way the whole enterprise of Noma works. The last lines of the book, as readers will see, are it can change,

it can change, it can change. He's talking about the new Noma that he's finally succeeded in building. But even that he sees as being in an eternal state of metamorphosis. Like the menu changes and the staff changes and they'll suddenly have a completely different vision. I mean, there are a lot of people in the book who float in and out. Danny Bowen from Mission Chinese Food.

Right, that guy's a character. Yeah, and he's very vulnerable and honest as people see Enrico Alvera, Kylie Kwong, Jessica Koslow makes an appearance. Dave Chang appears toward the end. And one note from my editor early on was, these people kind of appear, but then they vanish. And I was like, uh-huh. That's what it is to be in the skies at orbit. Exactly. And that's the truth. That's the natural truth, too, is people float in and out of our. Exactly. And that's the truth. That's the natural truth too. It's like people float in and out of our lives. It was almost to me a little like the Canterbury Tales.

Like we're kind of walking down the road and we meet interesting people along the way. And sometimes they circle back and sometimes they don't. The book originally, I'll tell you something that I haven't talked about with anyone is that the book originally had a section about my own depression that was much, much darker. Like, it went there. And I think it was a spectacular piece of writing, actually,

about how, you know, how dark it got for me. And my editors, to their credit, and I respect their viewpoint on this, just felt it tonally did not fit with the rest of the book. It was like suddenly it took such a dark turn that it was almost off-putting and confusing. I may use that as a separate piece on its own someday. But I think the only downside of that not being present is some people are like, I don't really understand the degree of stuckness or drift. Yeah, it punctuates the journey to have that dark moment in there. Yeah, now it's a little more vague. People are like, I don't quite know what you're talking about.

I mean, I was really down, you know, Tony Bourdain down. Wow. And a lot of people struggle with that, you know, Tony Bourdain down. Wow. And a lot of people struggle with that, you know? Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things I'm grappling with, it's a little bit of a shift, but my predecessor at Esquire Magazine, Joshua Ozerski, incredible talent, incredible food writer, very provocative, a lot of hot takes, pissed off a lot of people. I disagreed with him furiously all the time, but he was a tremendous talent. He died. He died in Chicago in 2015, I believe, while being in Chicago for the James Beard Awards.

He had some health issues, I gather, and had a seizure. Anthony Bourdain is gone. Jonathan Gold is gone. Anthony, A.A. Gill, this incredible British food writer, he's actually, he's mentioned in the book, he essentially dies in the book. He was one of Rene's friends. Also an incredible talent. Somewhat problematic writer, but from a prose standpoint, exhilarating. But from a pro standpoint, exhilarating. Different reasons behind each of the passings and different factors altogether. But as somebody who's a professional food writer, you got to be crazy if you don't think I'm thinking this through.

Yeah, and all of those people were super influential on you throughout your career. Absolutely, especially Jonathan Gold, to be honest. I mean, when I was growing up in LA and I was at late teens is when Ruth Reichel took over food writing and editing at the Los Angeles Times. And Jonathan Gold started writing counterintelligence. I don't remember the precise moment if I was still in high school or it was in college. Obviously, this pre-internet, so I'd come back from college. But I thought they were just revolutionary figures, Jonathan and Ruth. And both of them changed how I thought about Los Angeles, changed how I thought about food, changed how I thought about writing. I grew up in a very conservative environment in San Marino. And so poetry, punk rock, and food in some ways open my consciousness. But I have babies. I have two one-year-olds, Jasper and Wesley, and I have two teenagers. I want to keep ticking for a while.

I want to be around. So I'm trying to learn how to do this line of work with some degree of moderation and common sense. I have trouble with a big bowl of deliciousness. I have a lot of trouble saying no. I still remember. I think that's a common thing that we struggle with. Yeah, I know. But I mean, I think people drawn to food writing often have it to an acute degree. They're almost like alcoholics who become booze writers, You know, like we're drawn right to the flame.

And I remember talking to you about your dietary changes, and you used to eat a lot of junk food and stuff, right? And I remember you talking about dairy being the hardest thing to shake. That was almost like heroin or something, like getting off dairy. I hope I'm not misremembering this. Yeah, no, that's correct. And I find that to be, that haunts me. You're saying that. I think about it a lot because I also have foods that I react poorly to. I don't seem to react well to dairy. I get these like spot, you know, being honest with you. And I don't feel as healthy. And yet I have to try everything on menus and have to do my due diligence and respect the chefs,

the pastry chefs, et cetera, but I'm grappling with it. Yeah, that puts you in a precarious situation, having to do all that. But I look at you as somebody who is not in the world that you're in because you have some sort of, you know, gluttonous impulse. Like you approach food from a perspective of culture. It's interesting to hear that the seeds of your intrigue

with food and cuisine were planted so early because being a food and drinks writer was not the original path for you. Like you were in music and you were in movies and you did a lot of things in journalism, literature and writing before, you know, kind of the epiphany like brought you back to food. You have an interesting story around that,

that I'd like to have you tell, but your lens is not through taste and flavor, it's through cultural import and impact, right? Yeah. Like when you made that transition from writing about bands and music into food, it was because there was a cultural shift in how we perceived that world that kind of displaced music for you. Oh yeah, absolutely. You're such a good interviewer. I'm sorry to be flattered, but that is so true. I mean, there are writers historically like A.J. Liebling or even Jim Harrison, the poet and novelist, also was a food columnist at Esquire.

Jim Harrison was one of my predecessors at Esquire. That guy's a giant. I know. It's crazy. I have a book of his poetry in my bag in the car here. Those guys were very much about excess. And then we went to the restaurant. We ordered an entire roast lamb and a roast chicken

and all the foie gras. And, you know, I'm not that kind of food writer. I'm not drawn to that. I don't like the romanticization of that. I'm mostly interested in the cultural conversation and the people. And what it struck me as, there used to be a time when the musicians that you liked were emblematic of something about your belief system.

They were emblems of your identity. You know, like I liked Elvis Costello and the Jam and Grandmaster Flash and the Beastie Boys, whatever. This is emblematic generationally and maybe of, you know, where you are in the marketplace or the culture of ideas. That's still true. I have a 16-year-old daughter who's a songwriter, and bands are incredibly important to her, and we go to shows all the time. But it did shift for me, and I think it shifted for a lot of people in American culture, and suddenly it was about what David Chang is saying

and Dan Barber at Blue Hill at Stone Bars and Rene Redzepi and Dominique Crenn and Amanda Cohen and Mashama Bailey and all these different figures over the last 15, 20 years became avatars of the cultural conversation in the way that Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan used to be, or for our generation, you know, REM and talking heads used to be. And food dovetails so perfectly with environmental concerns, political issues, cultural conversations about backstories and roots, family roots, your grandmother's story and everything. There's so much in food.

Everyone eats no matter what their system of eating. And so, yeah, I was aging out of being a music writer. I would be like, oh, you know, I love all the new bands. I love Arcade Fire. And people would be like, you know, they're like 15 years old. And I was like, oh, they're not a new band? Like White Stripes? They're new, right? No, they're not. They're like a quarter century old. I can't tell you how much I relate to that. I do love them. We're like the exact same age. So for me, yeah, Elvis Costello.

I mean, R.E.M. was like everything to me. Anything that IRS was putting out. What's interesting is, yeah, The Clash, like that whole era. And I vividly remember, this is interesting, because San Marino is such a conservative town, it seemed to kind of produce a generation of counterculture kids from our specific era.

Very perceptive. Like, Kurt Crochet was one of those people, like comes out of San Marino high. He's a swimmer. He's very, there's a lot of traditional aspects to his upbringing, very conservative parents. And yet he was like a cipher for me for new music. Like he, his sister was super punk rock.

I don't know if you knew her in high school. I do. Introduced me to all these bands. And, you know, then it was English beat and, you know, and it just went on and on from there. But I learned a lot from that guy alone coming from San Marino. It's one of the few upsides.

And I'm stuck there. Like I can listen to Reckoning again and again and again and again and again. And I have such a difficult time connecting with anything that's relevant now. Dude, this is an amazing conversation. Thank you. So yeah, you know the San Marino context.

And I try to tell this to some people and they don't really believe. It's hard for them to understand in New York how conservative a town like this is, you know? Like, I mean, we had members of Reagan's cabinet across the streets. Like the John Birch Society. Literally lived across the street, okay? So, yeah, it forms—one of the few upsides is it forms a very strong countercultural element in the kids who just don't want any part of that, right? And so there were

all sorts of people in my school, particularly when I was a freshman, Eric Varner, Teresa Marshall, Grant Minor, some folks who were gay and out in a very conservative school, which is a powerful statement at that point, particularly when I was going to like four Bible studies a week and stuff. People were, Grant was a punk rocker in Penelope Spheeris movies and stuff and in a band with Flea. And, you know, and these were like mentors to me. I mean, Eric Varner is now, I think, a professor of classics at Emory. But I knew him as this guy who, like, introduced me to Bowie and introduced me to Iggy Pop and then X and Fear and all these bands. I mean, X was pivotal.

X was big. Yeah. I mean, particularly here in Southern California, you know, and, you know, my life was, it was changed when a bunch of these folks took me to see The Clash at the Hollywood Palladium. I saw The Clash, I think on the Sandinista tour, maybe. I was 14.

English Beat Open. How do you know that? Because I know my shit with this stuff, dude. The English beat open. Yeah. How insane is that? It was the most like iridescent moment of my life. I was completely levitated.

I had never felt anything like this. It was like, oh no, this is church. This is church. I was lifted off the ground because the crowd had packed in so high that we were. But, like, when I left, my shirt was so sweaty that I remember actually wringing it like a dish towel, you know. And the beat was out of control. Frankie Rogers recently passed away, which is crushing. I saw that.

But, like, The Clash, you know, you're a 14-year-old kid. You're susceptible to this. The Clash, you know, you're a 14-year-old kid. You're susceptible to this. But they had, like, the Union Jack roll down, and they started playing Toccata and Feud by Bach, like the organ thing. It's like the Dracula music. And then they come out and just burst into London Calling, as I remember it.

It may have been something else. I'm so bored with the USA or something. But I saw the light. It was like, oh, my God. I don't know what they were talking about politically. I never quite unraveled that. I mean, I gather they were from the left or, but it, it wasn't that it was the sense of liberation. It was a sense of thinking for yourself. That was so much about punk, so much what punk rock was about.

Right. about punk, so much what punk rock was about, right? But exactly as you're saying, like, that was because I bonded with kids on campus who were the thinkers and, you know, the progressives and the people challenging the status quo. And they're still to this day, my friends. I mean, I saw Grant Minor last summer in Laguna Beach, and we hung out a little bit. And I don't think I would have been a writer had that not happened. I mean, also going up to Roman's bookstore in Pasadena and randomly buying Howl by Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara poems and Lawrence Verlinghetti, all the beat stuff. Obviously, when you're a kid, that's really mesmerizing. Electric Kool-Aid acid test. Totally. Yeah, Tom Wolfe was a big influence on my life. And I think part of what I wanted to do

with Hungry, actually, is write a book that won't be assigned at school. You'd go into a used book store and you'd find an old Tom Wolfe paperback, the right stuff, or Radical Chic or something, and it just seemed fun to read. Yeah. And you're like, they're not teaching, they're signing the scarlet letter and all that. I want a book that I hope, like people in their teens and 20s just pick up for fun.

Right. And they could read it in a day. Well, you can, it's only like 200 pages. Yeah, it's supposed to have the energy. There's an electric Kool-loric acid test quote in the book about the whole Ken Kesey gang and the bus because we were about to go. You're kind of on this bus.

I was on a similar bus going through Mexico with the consciousness expanding crew of NOMA. So I thought, let's make the reference explicit because I'm not aping Tom Wolfe there, but he was a clear influence. Right. And I think it's, but that's, I just thought this, please let this not be boring. You know, like I just hate boring books.

It's definitely not. It moves quickly. I'm not done with it yet. Maybe it gets boring, but I don't know. No, it doesn't get boring. It gets better. And there is a, you know, there's a lyrical poetry in your writing. I mean, I know that you study poetry

and that's a big interest of you. You're an avid consumer of poetry, but there's like, there's a lyricism to the prose, but it's always very accessible. Like you have a very kind of pure, clean way of writing. You don't get caught up in your own ego about how to turn a catchy phrase. I hope not.

I hope that's a little bit of a by-product of experience. Yeah. I think that I remember- That's the journalist. Yeah, I remember reading somebody like Wallace Stegner years ago saying that when you're starting out, you wanna be, you're sort of like a walking thesaurus. You wanna show off your words. Like big words, look at out, you want to be, you're sort of like a walking thesaurus. You want to show off your words. You've got big words. Look at me. And I remember thinking, yeah,

you just can't do that, man. I could deliver the fireworks. Watch. The arrogance of youth. But a lot of writers, a lot, seem to talk about the beauty of simplicity, clarity, and minimalism as they get older. I'm 52. I get it now. I really see why there's delight in that. And it's harder to do. They're both hard, but there's something very satisfying about direct, clear sentences. And also, when you factor in reality that most people are just inundated with distractions, they don't have a lot of time to read. You're really grabbing people by the neck and saying, please read this. That's the truth. So it has to be captivating for them. Otherwise, you're giving them homework. That's the thing. I don't want it to be homework.

That's come up. I've had a couple authors be homework. So- That's come up a couple, I've had a couple authors in here recently and they've all kind of echo the same sentiment. Like when you're asking somebody to read your book, like now today in this culture, in the age of distraction, it's a big ask. You're saying, I need you to set aside whatever it is that you're doing.

And in an undistracted way, sit down with these pages that I've written. And, you know, you better deliver the goods if you're gonna make that request on someone. Yeah, they better have some sort of takeaway too. So when you're a kid and you're seeing The Clash and English Beat and- Yeah, REM, The Dream Syndicate, The Three O'Clock.

The whole like Paisley Underground scene was happening. So I was really into that stuff. Right. Particularly The particularly the three o'clock i saw a bunch of times x um yeah it was just like you know it's dirty it's raw it's alive in a way that seemed uh like an antidote to what was antiseptic about uh sanino culture or whatever. I mean, I could paint that town with a broad brush and be just critical. But of course, that's not fair. I mean, I have a lot of friends from San Marino. I have friends on the conservative side of the aisle who are still friends. And we just disagree.

We disagree pretty aggressively on Facebook and whatever. But I mean, pretty, we dropped a few, a few didn't make the cut after a while. But some, I mean, I can meet them for breakfast and we laugh, we have a good time. So did you have a sense that you wanted to be a writer at that age? Yeah.

You did. Which is ridiculous. I don't know why, I don't know why. You know, I think some people are drawn to writing because they have a pulsing, gnawing need to tell a specific story. Right. Could be a story of pain from their youth, of abuse. It could be an immigrant story that involves a lot of challenges and uphill battles. I mean, speaking candidly, I'm not coming from that place. I was drawn to books because I loved language.

I just loved stories. I loved sentences. I found them exhilarating. Like the Lawrence Ferlinghetti book or Frank O'Hara book. I liked that the words were jumping all over the page. I liked that they were breaking the rules of punctuation and grammar. That seemed fun. That seemed kind of punk rock. Like, you know, and I just, I started to see, you know, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, John McPhee, who was a teacher of mine in college. They would do these incredible pieces for

magazines, sometimes profiles of stars, but sometimes more reported essays about cultural movements or whatever. I thought, wow, that's one hell of a job. I mean, it's basically subsidized adventure. Like you get to weigh in on the culture, you get to move the needle, you get to meet all these captivating people and somebody else pays you.

Let's do that. There was a golden era where magazines really, you know, led the way in terms of those kinds of think pieces from, you know, yeah, like Joan Didion, Gore Vidal and- Norman Mailer. Exactly, Norman Mailer. Nora Ephron, James Baldwin wrote for Esquire. I mean, powerhouses.

Yeah, Esquire was really the tip of the spear when it came to that. I mean, Vanity Fair was like that for a while. And forquire, yeah, Esquire was really the tip of the spear when it came to that. I mean, Vanity Fair was like that for a while. And for whatever reason, Esquire has sort of survived the collapse of the magazine industry. I mean, I can't imagine how difficult it is to remain relevant in this culture as a magazine.

Like it's a dying thing. And yet Esquire seemed to have figured out a way to survive and still maintain some foothold in that, you know, in an era in which that's being disintegrated. We hope, knock on wood. You know, it's funny. I mean, is it the same? Is there a sense of like,

we're responsible for shepherding this legacy? There's definitely a sense of responsibility regarding the heritage of the magazine and all the incredible bylines that have been in it and dispatches from Vietnam and Nora Ephron's original column, everything from very dark, disturbing, investigative pieces to some of the best light, entertaining reading ever. Budgets are tight.

I'm not going to lie. There's the money that there used to be. I have to really make my case any time I'm visiting a city for Esquire Best New Restaurants research or something. We find ways to make it work. Speaking candidly, when I went to New Orleans, Pablo Johnson, a friend of mine, I slept on his couch. When I went to San Francisco, Omar Mamoun lent me his apartment. I mean- If it was 1978- They wouldn't put me up at the Ritz. I would have been up at Knob Hill at the Fairmount or whatever,

the top of the mark. I mean, in fact, I even experienced that in the 90s. It was pretty profligate. I stayed at the best hotels in the world. They would just send me to them. that in the 90s. It was pretty profligate. I stayed at the best hotels in the world. They would just send me to them. So, hey, you don't need that. To me, what's important is the work. And I'll tell you, this is interesting. I should have brought one. But the recent issue that's out, the summer issue, has Brad Pitt, Leo DiCaprio, and Quentin Tarantino on the cover. Has our best bars issue. It has just one page after another, no filler, really good stuff. And I'll give this issue to people and they'll say,

my God, this is a blast to spend time with. Like, I really enjoy it. I'm like, yes, it's called a magazine. Here's how you operate it. You turn to the table of contents and that tells you where the, you know, my Barada rant is in there. And it has a kind of throwback aesthetic to it. Like there's a vintage kind of architecture to the design. Yeah. Which looks beautiful. I, I'm, I don't know how that plays in the marketplace. I think they're still trying to figure that out. You know, there's a way in which you can be

almost too backwards looking, but we'll, we'll see if that works out. I mean, I- The idea that I get out of it is we may not have the budgets to put you up at top of the mark or the Ritz, but if you want to write long form and you want to appreciate, if you appreciate and love reading long form, like we're the place for that. Yeah. And yeah, and the New Yorker. I mean, so I'm not in it for the luxury. I'm really not. I'm in it to do this work as long as they'll let me until they kick me off the bus. I really am. I'm just running out the clock. Okay, I'm 52. I figure I'm going to do this as far as I can because it brings me joy, and I stay young, to be honest.

I mean, I'm always learning. The coolest thing about it is I'm always learning. I'm always meeting people. I go to new restaurants. I meet the chefs. I meet cultural figures and I learn from them. I go to a new city all the time. You know, there's that talking head song, cities, find me a new city to live in.

Like I find that it's so exciting to just drop into Seoul, Korea, or Buenos Aires, or Modena, Italy, or Memphis, or Phoenix, or Chicago, maybe a city I haven't spent any time in. Minneapolis, I went to. I've never been there before last year. The replacements, Prince, Bob Dylan from Minnesota. And to absorb the energy of that city and learn what makes it tick, learn some history. I'll give you an example.

I went to Minneapolis and my wife was like, you should reach out to Andrew Zimmern, you know, the bizarre foods guy from TV. And I was like, really? I mean, he's like a celebrity. Why would he want to hang with me? But he was so nice. He emailed back like, yeah, let's get dinner. So I sat down for dinner in Minneapolis.

He lives there. He lives in Minneapolis. He sat down with, as I let's get dinner. So I sat down for dinner in Minneapolis. He lives there. He lives in Minneapolis. He sat down with, as I think Dan Buettner does. Dan Buettner does. You went to his place there, didn't you? Did you visit him there? No, I hung out with him in New York. Oh, you did.

He's awesome. He's the best. I mean, the Blue Zones books are pivotal. Dan's the greatest. Yeah, he's a good guy. But Zimmerman was like, oh, do you know all about this element of Minneapolis history and this element? And he was like a storehouse of information. That's the luxury.

That's actually luxury. It's not some fancy hotel. It's somebody teaching you something. I'm sort of like a perpetual student. That's why it was exciting to meet you and come here, like to learn about your life. It's just, I find other people's lives instantly fascinating. And when I did something, you were asking about being a writer. I mean, when I started, I went to college and I wrote some poems, but I started writing short stories.

And I even won some fiction prize, whatever. And you got to study with Russell Banks. Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, yeah. But my fiction was fine, but I think the tank was already running empty. I didn't have a lot to say. My life had been pretty copacetic, pretty mellow, actually. And when I took a class with John McPhee from The New Yorker, it turned my head around because he's a nonfiction master. And he opened my eyes to the simplicity of you can write about other people. You're good at listening to people.

You're good at hearing their stories and asking them questions in a very, I think, unannoying, unobtrusive way. And if you have an appetite for that, the sky's the limit because there's always new people to meet and talk about. So that's really what set me on the path. I mean, like I was so into music and it was like, wait, I can meet them and write about them.

Like, I mean, I met David Bowie twice. I interviewed him, Willie Nelson. I went on the bus with him and yes, we did smoke. Van Morrison, who was odious. Yeah. I heard you tell a story about that. Did I tell you that? Just sounded horrible. He was a nightmare. Green Day, Janet Jackson, all sorts of people. I don't do selfies with them. I'm not like, well, cool. I'm hanging with Willie Nelson. It's not like that. You know, I- You must have pinch me moments.

Like I can't believe I'm having this almost famous, you know, sort of experience. Yeah. Getting to live vicariously, you know, through the lives of these people that you get to pop in and out of, you know, at will almost. Yeah, pinch me is a good description for it

because like people have asked me, don't you have any, actually my publishing house, you must have selfies with Renee. And I was like, no, in five years, I've never done a selfie with Rene. I'm not like that. But Willie Nelson, for instance, partly the bus was absolutely befogged with pot smoke. So my mind was working in a weird way. But I was like, whoa, that face is Willie Nelson's face.

And it's looking at me and it's talking in that distinctive Willie Nelson voice. Is this real? What is happening? It's a little like Quantum Leap, that show where the guy would just be like suddenly beamed into the French Revolution or like beamed into like the Boston Tea Party or something. Like I would sit there like, how did I get here? How did I get here? Back to a David Byrne.

Is this occurring or am I dreaming? It has happened many times. Happened with Tom Cruise at the Japanese restaurant. That guy looks like Tom Cruise. Yeah, he looks remarkably similar to Tom Cruise. But you must have had experiences, they say never meet your heroes, where it's disappointing.

I guess the Van Morrison thing is probably emblematic of that. That was disappointing. But David Bowie was, you know, we can be heroes just for one day. He really, both times, absolute gentleman. Really. And you know what's interesting? Both times he was early. As you might have noticed, I'm often early.

I couldn't believe it. Like, I walk into the room, studio or something, where I was going to interview Bowie the second time, and he was already there. He's like, hey, Jeff, how are you? And I'm like, oh, my God. That was a joint interview with Moby because they were doing some collaborations or something, and they were for the cover of Entertainment Weekly. I'm proud to say. Oh, yeah, I remember that. I'm proud to say we got Bowie on the cover

because I felt he deserved it. And we were always going for the younger audience. But he's like, well, we really shouldn't start the interview until Moby shows up. But why don't you and I just talk? Just talk to David Bowie? To me? Just, okay, well, tell me about Fripp's guitar sound on Heroes.

I'm going to fanboy like, man, dude, you don't want this? You don't want me to just talk to you because I'll lose my shit. I'm obsessed. We have David Bowie portrait in our house. We actually bought one in Copenhagen, Lauren and I. We are a Bowie household. A shrine to Bowie. A little bit.

We have Bowie household. A shrine. A little bit. We have Bowie fridge magnets, you know. We're into the guy. But yeah, there were some people, you know, a lot of times it was the younger crowd coming up. Like, I remember Green Day being a little aggro with the interview. And it's like a certain, I mean i i really like them and admire them now and they were quite like oh you're you're entertainment weekly like we're we're too edgy for that yeah man you're perceptive i think that's what it was a little bit of friction you know

before it became a broadway show yeah someday soon billy joe i have something to tell you you're gonna be on broadway so don so don't give me any attitude. No, I mean, I like them quite a bit, actually. But they were really young, and they were breaking through, and there was so much stress when Dookie was becoming this huge. And at a certain point, Billy Joe was kind of lecturing me about the Ramones, and I was like, yeah, so I'm going to turn off the tape recorder for a second. Let me just tell you a little bit about myself. Because I was like, I know, I know,

I look very square. But I was into the Ramones when you were a baby. Like, don't. It was fine. But you know what's an interesting story? My daughter is into a band called Swimmers, S-W-M-R-S. We have seen them three times. They are rad. They're a punk rock band from Oakland. The first time we saw them, Providence, Rhode Island, all ages show. Margo was probably 13. I drove her up to Providence just to see his band. There's probably 20 people in the audience. The guy from the band came down from the stage, just meet everybody. It was like so low key.

Now they're becoming big stars. The drummer of Swimmers is Billy Joe Armstrong's son. Wow. That's how old we are. Yeah, now I'm really feeling old. Green Day's kids have bands. After this is over, we're gonna have to go listen to some Pavement or something,

just to reset our equilibrium. I follow your girlfriend. Yeah, so they are now the next generation, the children of Green Day. Like I was like, wow, okay, we gotta face facts now. But this is a weird twist. Max Becker, one of the guys in Swimmers, started posting on his Instagram story little frame grabs of my pieces from Esquire. Because it turns out that the guys in Swimmers are obsessed with food.

And then he was like, oh, this column is so cool, and I want to make this recipe. And I was like, this is amazing. So I DMed him. I was like, hey know, oh, this column is so cool. And I want to make this recipe. And I was like, this is amazing. So I DM'd him. I was like, hey, that's so nice. And he's like, oh, that's, yeah, I'm a big fan of your writing. I couldn't believe this. Wow. Yeah.

And I was like, well, you're not going to believe this, dude. But I have seen Swimmers three times. Because he was like, I'm in a band called Swimmers. I was like, yeah, I know. I've seen you. And he was so shocked. He was like, you've seen Swimmers? I was like, yeah, my daughter's like,

like actually your first man. And we have seen you three times. And now I like text with Max all the time. Like he's looking for a restaurant to eat at and stuff like that. So I was thinking about bringing him to Noma. That's a cool, that would be a cool story. I think it really just validates this full circle thing

that we were talking about originally, this intersection, you know, in terms of cultural significance between music and food. It's interesting to me that the guys in the band are more, in the bands are more interested in chefs now. You know, it's fascinating to me. It's a strange thing. It's strange.

Like the guy, Franz Ferdinand, like one of those guys had a food blog for a while. I was in- Do you know Grizzly Bear? Oh yeah. So Chris from Grizzly Bear, who's a friend of ours, has a cookbook. That's right.

That's right. Yeah. I mean- Super into food. It's all one now. What's up, Chris? Listen to the podcast. What's up, Chris? Listen to the podcast. What's up, Chris? So I was in Copenhagen eating with Rene Redzepi and his family at Sanchez,

which is Rocio Sanchez's Mexican restaurant. Some of the best Mexican food in the world is in Copenhagen because of Rocio. And Rene and his family often get Sunday brunch there. And I was visiting to visit the new Noma with Toby, my 13-year-old, then 12. But some guy from a band, I think it was that band St. Paul and the Broken Bones, like one of these kind of neo-soul bands coming up. He came over to the table just like, oh, my God, are you Rene Redzepi? I can't believe it. Wow. He's like, we're touring, we're playing tonight.

You want tickets? Like he was so freaked out that he was seeing Rene, you know? And I was like, that is fascinating. So what do you make of that? I think it's indicative of where the cultural energy went. You know, there's a lot of great music coming out. I actually, I'm a weirdo. I still buy CDs.

I'm obsessed with Aldous Harding. She's the singer from New Zealand. I will just play her CD on sort of a loop for days. And I, you know, I know through my daughter and I know through my own willful experiments in finding newness that there's still great stuff being made. But I think it's difficult after so many decades of pop music in its form, in its recorded form. It's difficult not to say, yeah, this is cool. It's just like Pavement.

Yeah. Which was just like the Velvet Underground. Or like, this is a lot like the Pixies. Or, yeah, this is cool. It reminds me quite a bit of Erykah Badu. Or after absorbing decades of musical information, it's hard sometimes to confront originality, just to locate originality.

And I think with food, even though there are centuries of tradition and culture informing it sometimes things seem radically new and they bring you that sort of receptivity and excitement that you used to feel with music i mean that's what happened to me the first time i ate noma was i was adrift and sad depressed and um i was kind of at the point where I'd drive around, play Rolling Stone, play Exile on Main Street. That always used to work. Loving Cup always used to work. I mean, if you talk about self-medication, Loving Cup always did the trick.

And it wouldn't. I didn't get nothing out of it. It just didn't lift me. It didn't rouse me. It didn't transform me. And I was getting worried. I was like, I'm so down that music does nothing for me. You know, Cat Power, the greatest greatest that album is so important to me and it would just made me

disengage i was like i don't know what's happening and for some reason when i went to noma it was like oh my god this is like seeing the clash when i was 14 like i'm completely alive to this um i met a guy recently who you should have on the show. You probably get it all the time. It's really annoying. Diego Zambrano. He's from Working Company. He's one of the most influential designers in the world.

And he's from Brazil originally, but he now lives in Brooklyn. I met this guy at a dinner and I didn't know who he was. So I was just talking to him and he's a cool guy. I didn't know who he was. And so I was just talking to him. He's a cool guy. He told me that he, this is very much in line with what you explore on the cast, but he went to Noma, Mexico.

He's not a food guy or anything. He's a designer. He's from that, I think they designed the Apple stores. So that's pretty big. Yeah. That's what he said. That's a good gig. So that's a good one. But he went to Noma, Mexico, and it changed his life in every way.

It changed his approach to creativity. It changed his approach to eating. He's lost like 60 pounds. He changed his whole diet. He has now been to Noma seven times in Copenhagen. He has almost like a standing table there. And he was like, he didn't know me. I said, well, you're going to like my book. He's like, what's your book? And I said,

my book's called Hungry. It's all about Rene Redzepi. And he's like, oh, I pre-ordered that. But he feels that Rene Redzepi is one of the great artists alive. So to answer long-windedly your question, that's the thing, is that we're confronting people like Massimo Battura and Dominique Crenn and Rene Redzepi, Virgilio Martinez in Peru who are artists. That's a controversial thing. Some people will say that's bogus. They're just cooking. Okay. You go to Noma and you tell me that's not art.

I love that. I mean, that's it, man. The idea that this person who is fully expressed in their creativity can go to have an experience at a restaurant that is so impactful that it changes how they see the world. It sounds like an extravagant lie. I don't think it was. How could that possibly be the case? He showed me pictures.

He started working out and stuff. He showed me pictures. He was obese out and stuff. He showed me pictures. He was obese. I mean, he's quite fat. He'd like lost. Wow. I was like, we have to do a panel together because the fact that Noma changed your life

in this way, at least this transformative lightning rod moment is kind of what I'm talking about too. And it's hard to convey the difficulty, like a challenge with this book, for instance, like if I was talking about a record or a band that changed my life, you can go listen to them.

Talking about a film, you can go watch the film. Right. And not everyone can just hop on a plane and go to Noma. Yeah, and this is the thing, like we're, you know, let's just check our, you know, white male privilege at the door right now. We're talking about a restaurant that is in Copenhagen

that's impossible to get into. And even when you can, it's gonna cost you a fortune. Yeah, it's expensive. Right? And so, you know, let's just kind of walk through that, you know, elitist landmine for a minute, because I think- That's always fun. Well, I think what I'm getting at is-

I mean, I have to use the restroom. You could walk through the elitist landmine instead. No, well, let's take a bathroom break. No, I don't actually. You don't? I'm just at is- I mean, I have to use the restroom. You could walk through the elitist landmine instead. No, well, let's take a bathroom break. No, I don't actually. You don't? I'm just joking. We can. Because the reason, my intention behind this is that when you fully understand who Red Zeppi is,

you have a very different- Yes. You have a very different concept, a different lens on this whole thing than what I originally projected onto it, which was like, oh, this, you know, some fancy chef. And it's like, this is inaccessible. You know, how can I make this conversation around fancy food relatable to the average person? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think

that's probably my main obstacle to get over here, because I don't actually think you have to be that interested in food or high-end tasting menu dining to like this book. But to get you to pick it up, I have to persuade you of that. And it's important to know that Rene's own story is an immigrant story. His father was a Muslim, Albanian, ethnically Albanian guy who was in Macedonia as part of the Albanian diaspora. So he came to Copenhagen at a certain point in his life, you know, for a better life and met a Danish woman, got married, had Rene and Kenneth, who's his twin brother. And Rene grew up having the Koran read to him as his bedside reading. And he grew up encountering a lot of bigotry and being seen as an outsider, dealing with basically a lot of flat-out racism toward his family and toward himself. He has a

name that's quite unusual in Denmark. And a lot of people don't know this about Rene. They assume these are just these fancy pants Vikings, you know, and if you go to the Noma Kitchen, which I'd love you to do someday, it's a fascinating experience because you go in there and it's like, it's a small world at Disney. I mean, there's people from all over the world. There's people from every continent, men and women of all different backgrounds. It's really not a Scandinavian restaurant at all. It's actually a global kitchen. And all those perspectives are brought to bear on the cooking. So, you know, he's seen as the godfather of the new Nordic movement. But as I say in the book, it's really more about new as opposed to Nordic. He was sort of like, what if we hit reset?

What if we just tabula rasa-ed the whole thing? We get rid of traditional Danish cooking and think about what the landscape produces. What does it generate? Herbs, vegetables, seafood, et cetera. What can we create that's kind of a new manifestation of the spirit of this region? That's kind of a new manifestation of the spirit of this region. So he's also, you know, it's a highly democratic enterprise. Like, I know this sounds crazy when it's very expensive, but there are tables set aside for students that are offered at a discount all the time. Like, that's a regular, I think every single night, you know, there are students who can get a much cheaper rate and eat there.

And it's not the white tablecloth, you know, prime rib cart, the candelabras, like foie gras. It's not that at all. It feels very different than that. It's not like a restaurant. Here's how I was saying to somebody, and I think it's a generational shift. There are some of the older chefs, very talented individuals, whom I do believe at the heart of it were cooking for rich people. I mean, that's what the restaurant was about. It was basically an enterprise to provide luxury to wealthy patrons. Rich people do indeed eat at Noma as they eat at Blanca in Brooklyn and Momofuku Ko, David Chang's place.

But those enterprises were not built for rich people. They were built, I really believe this, with a more democratic spirit. And they're meant to be accessible to anyone. You don't have to get dressed up. There's not all that kind of off-putting formality and haughtiness. I get in some trouble sometimes because I say this to people, but and for a kid who grew up in San Marino, in a way, I have no right to say it. I concede that. I grew

up, you know, pretty cozy. But I don't care how much a meal costs. It actually doesn't matter to me at all. What matters to me is if it's worth it. And if it's worth it, it's just like tickets to Hamilton. You know, I know people who spent $800 on tickets to Hamilton and they couldn't afford it. I couldn't afford it either. And then they went and it changed their life. It was transformative. They're like, it's one of the great memories of my life.

I believe that's true about Noma. I think that that's why I went into credit card debt and started spending money. You underwrote all these adventures going to Norway. The last third of the book is paid for by the book advance, essentially all the trips to Maridon, Oaxaca and Norway and stuff. But like a lot of the early trips, Sydney, essentially, Lauren and I just paid for that on our own. We bought our own flights, stayed at the old Claire Hotel, spent too much. But when you get the rush, the contact high of that, that clarity, that sense of mission of eating at Noma

or other restaurants I can name that are like that, you realize it's worth it, okay? It's not, by the way, it's not like $1,000 a person. I don't actually know what the current price is. I have to figure out because I'm going soon. But it's, I think like, are vacations worth it? Like the Rolling Stones are 20. Well, it's, look, what it is, is the difference

between somebody who values experience over, you know, material accumulation, like where, where you prioritize what to do with whatever disposable income you have. Some people have a lot of that. Some people have a little of that or not much of all, you know, much of it at all. But are you thinking about like, you know, upgrading your car or are you thinking about like some experience that you're going to go on or take your family on or something that will enrich you in a different way that's ephemeral? Bingo. So to me, experience is what's worth the money if it delivers. Yeah. Well, you wouldn't be a journeyman journalist if that wasn't your priority.

That's what gets me high. I don't even buy new clothes, as my wife would tell you. I don't even wash my clothes, so I apologize if I'm stinking up the studio. But I don't care about those luxury things in any way. I care about new vantage points on life And that sense of rush in your head that's like, I'm really alive right now. That can come through a poem for me. It can come through a song. It can come through time with my children. It's true for so many of us. It can come on a long walk.

I love a good walk, you know. And those things are free. I just happen to, or cheap, to buy a book of poetry or whatever, but I feel that Noma is worth it. And I know this, I sound like an advertisement for him and that's not what I want to do. You know, Pete Wells is a good friend of mine at the New York Times. He's their critic. He makes fun of me because he said that I sound like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now, because Dennis Hopperper lives up river where Marlon Brando's character lives.

And he's like, you gotta meet the man. He's a God. You don't understand, man. He's a God. You gotta taste the food. You've drunk the Kool-Aid. You gotta go to Noma. You won't believe it.

And there's some truth to that. I did get a little over amped, shall we say. But I wouldn't say if I didn't believe it. So- But what do you extract from the experience that is something that someone who's listening to this, who might never have the opportunity to go to Noma can kind of take home and incorporate into their own life?

Like what about, you know, his philosophy on food or life that you find so infectious and so, you know, effervescent and invigorating, you know, what can we bottle and repurpose for ourselves? If life is not working out for you, change it. That's not a brand new statement. We hear that from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and we hear that from spiritual figures, but there's truth to it. You know, it may be your relationship,

it may be your line of work, it may be your health, as you know, change it. Do that, do the work, say yes to that. That was really what Renee shook me up. Yeah, the book is about saying yes. And it is about that courage of challenging whatever status quo or rut that you find yourself in. Totally. Get out of the rut, do the work to say yes to that. And also, can I say something that's very interesting? I talk about in the book that when I first got a seat at NOMoma, I got a table for two.

And I had all these friends, when they knew that I'd met Rene and wrote about him in Mexico, they were like, okay, listen to me, dude, seriously. I will move fucking mountains. You ever get a table at Noma? Text me. I will buy a ticket immediately. I was like, you sure? Yes. All of those people, some of whom have unlimited resources, which I do not. Some people with a lot of money that was like, I got a table at Noma. Join me. No, can't do it. I got to rake the leaves, man. I'm supposed to get a haircut. I'm not kidding. People said shit like this. I was like, listen, you told me you'd move mountains. I mean, it was really interesting to me how many people for absolutely sensible reasons, do not say yes to the greatest experiences in life. So I just think that I could not afford this.

It was, I mean, it looks like I'm just, I really couldn't do it, but I found that I needed to. I needed to say yes to it. And I realize it's an extraordinary set of circumstances that I happen to meet Rene and everything. But I do think that these opportunities come about all the time. And it could be a group of old friends from college, a group of swimmers from the team. We want to finally get together. I mean, this is true. Friends of mine are dying. I mean, starting to lose people in my life, or they're getting sick. It's like, let's get together. Let's go for a hike. Let's have a weekend together. Say yes to that. You know, I'm not, I'm not trying to make some snotty argument, like everyone should eat in Denmark. I mean, it's, it's, it's about like, you are here now,

make the most of it and change what's not working. You know that for your, from your own life, you know, you had to make that change. And I think it's crucial. Like I'm a much happier person now. Yeah. I think that's a powerful lesson for everybody. And it's something I'm trying to do better at. Like I had that very example has come up. Like old swimmer friend of mine called me up. Hey, I wanna get everyone back together.

I wanna go on a little trip. Yeah. And I immediately go to all the reasons why I can't do it. And I'm like, this is never gonna happen again. I have to find on a little trip. And I immediately go to all the reasons why I can't do it. And I'm like, this is never going to happen again. I have to find a way to say yes to this. And that's maybe on the more extreme examples, but I think all of us every day, not every day, but periodically throughout our lives are visited with little tiny little opportunities to say yes to that we just don't, because it's so easy to just default to, you know, whatever has to get done the next week.

I mean, I started this week in Santa Barbara. I landed in Burbank. I'm a big proponent of the Burbank and Long Beach airports. Burbank airport is where it's at, man. That's Californians know that. It's like living 1950, you know? You pull right up to the door. It's rad.

Like Long Beach, even better, man. It's like, it's so, but you pulled right up to the door. Strat, like Long Beach even better, man. It's like, so, but I drove straight up to Santa Barbara. One of my closest friends took his own life there a few weeks ago. I saw your Instagram post. Yeah, and I didn't make it to the memorial service for the same reasons we're talking about. But I mean, I absolutely bonafide excuses

for children, all in my care, deadlines. I mean, it just couldn't happen, unfortunately. But I knew I wanted to go back at least privately and pay my respects. True story, weird thing. Soon as I was going into Santa Barbara, Elton John's Funeral for a Friend was playing on the radio. Isn't that weird? Wow. Yeah.

That's weird. the radio. Isn't that weird? Wow. Yeah. That's weird. But I just found that even taking this time in a context that is otherwise useless, it certainly can't be monetized. There's no payoff. But just going to Santa Barbara, standing on the beach, thinking of Russ. going to Santa Barbara, standing on the beach, thinking of Russ. I'm a dork, so I read a few poems out loud. I just sort of sent up thoughts to him. It was worth it. It was worth saying yes to that. If you went on Instagram, it looked like I was just getting a burger and a martini, which I did do as well. Actually actually a guy from the Santa Barbara Independent, terrific, Alternative Weekly up there wanted to write about the book. So I said to him, you know, I'll come on up. He's like, wait, you're coming to Santa Barbara? It's like, yeah. But really,

it was to pay tribute to Russ. So, but you know, that moment happened. He had a lot of demons. He, he was struggling with a mental illness and, um, the surfer filmmaker. Yeah. I mean, an extraordinary filmmaker and he's a great writer. Um, surfed almost every morning. He seemed to like, you know, one of these people that on the surface seemed to have the perfect life, you know, and, and, um, he made a beautiful film about a local barbershop. He made a beautiful film about, at one point- It's a piano, right? Yeah, man, you do your work. It's like they put pianos out on State Street just so people could play them at random.

He made this very tone poem-like film just capturing people playing the pianos in the middle of the night. Some of them drunk, some of them in love, some old people, some of them in love, some old people, some of them super, you know, little kids. It was just the most beautiful thing. He had so much spirit. But he had a lot of, you know, you would get these crazy calls. It was like the movie Beautiful Mind. You know, it was like he would see things and hear voices and think that the government was after him and stuff.

And those of us who were close to him, he didn't know how to fix that. I mean, it's very difficult to. It's like people like that whose light shines bright, but it's not meant long for the world. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, if you have friends, I mean, I saw a friend just recently who's really struggling with depression and stuff. I, you know, take the time, meet, talk, maybe read this, call me anytime. There's things you can say. With other kinds of mental illnesses, very difficult.

It's so distressing and so confusing that at times Russ seemed very stable and normal. In fact, the last time I saw him in person, he said, man, everything's good. I'm in a good place. But then it would come back. I don't know why. I'm sorry I'm babbling down this track. But as I get older, I'm realizing that some of these people I love, they're not going to be with us forever, obviously. And I need to start saying yes to these moments, even when it means putting work aside

and spending money that I don't have. And that's the essence of life. And you, as a writer, you need, that's, it's imperative that you live your life and embrace the world. Otherwise you don't have, you know, a tableau to write from. Experience is the juice from, you know,

which everything else springs. And, you know, part of this conversation sort of been like a walk down Gen X memory lane. Yeah. And you wrote a book about Gen X. I did. That came out like 10 years ago, right? 11 years ago, yeah.

So I'm interested in like your thoughts on like, how do you feel about Gen X now versus how you felt about when you wrote that book? You know, the New York Times did this big Gen X package recently and Alex Williams wrote one of the pieces of it, kindly approached me. Gen X will save us. Was it that? I read something.

Some big package. And he said, do you want to talk? Can I interview you? And I did the dumbest thing that an author can do. I declined. You didn't say yes. I didn't say yes. I was like, you know, I really left that Gen X thing behind. I felt very liberated by no in this particular case. I said, I really appreciate you approaching me. And he did actually mention the book in the

piece, but I was like, you know, I don't want to get down that lane anymore. I don't know. All that demographic stuff just seemed kind of meaningless after a while. There's a point at which you keep talking about a book so much that it almost dislodges from reality. And you're not even sure. Like this, I've been very honest and this is a nice way of talking, but sometimes I feel like I just go into autopilot. And some of the Gen X points, I have nothing left to say. I don't mean it as some snobby way. I just didn't even want to contribute to it. And I will tell you this. If you ever have a temptation to write some sort of Gen X manifesto, don't.

Don't. It totally bombed. Dude, it totally bombed. Here's the thing. Like, I mean, Nick Hornby liked it. A couple of people he wrote about in The Believer. There were some nice reviews. I mean, that's cool.

You'll always have that. Seriously, that's my takeaway. It's like Nick Hornby, Doug Rushkoff, I got to be friends with, some really great authors and thinkers who did like the book somehow. The book was written really quickly, like four months. And people say, it's not really thought through. It's kind of ramshackle. I was like, you are absolutely correct. Anything written that quickly. But boomers, baby boomers, they love to read about boomers. If Tom Brokaw is doing another special about baby boomers on TV, guess what my in-laws are going to watch? The Boomers Show. Millennials, they just want to talk about being a millennial all the time.

Gen Xers rather read a book about some obscure snail in Tasmania. It's like we are so ornery and contrarian. And again, that's a crazy generalization, of course. But I have sensed it so often, people our age, I just sense it. Conversation goes into the most obscure bands and films and cultural moments that we share that are cherished in part because of their distance from the mainstream. You know, that's exactly what we love about it. So the last thing Gen Xers want to do is read a book about Generation X. They actually have, they don't have any interest. I tried, believe me. So let's keep our secret little fetishes in the dark. Yeah, our little group, as Kurt Cobain said,

like, you know, every now and then somebody would be like, I liked your book. I liked the Mission of Burma reference. And I'll be like, awesome. You got the Mission of Burma reference? Okay, this is a good day. Like my work is done. Speaking of references,

like you did Brian Koppelman's podcast, right? I did, yeah. I'm sure, do you watch Billions? Yeah, we're big. So I'm obsessed with Taylor and I'm obsessed with Wags. It's so good, right? Those characters to me, I mean, the writing of the characters is so impressive.

It's incredible. Yeah. And Brian also being our age is like the king of dropping obscure Gen X impressive. It's incredible. Yeah. And Brian, also being our age, is like the king of dropping obscure Gen X, you know, references throughout that show. Like the more obscure, the better. Yeah. And I don't even, I don't get all of them, you know,

but every once in a while I'm like, oh yeah, you know. Well, and you know, he has, the reason I got to know Brian is because I wrote a thing for Esquire's website about how Billions was essentially the best food show on TV. And- Huge foodie.

Restaurants are character in the show. Yeah, he is very intelligent about the place that these restaurants occupy in the consciousness of New York. So they are chosen very smartly. Like suddenly Dave Chang appears or suddenly Wiley Dufresne appears in the order long scene. And you think, bingo, that was so well done.

Like he knows. It's character specific and consistent. Koppelman knows that the cultural conversation has shifted. He knows where wags would eat. And he knows where Chuck would eat, for instance. And those are very different places. They're very different places. And maybe one of the best food scenes of all time

is when Wags wigs out at Sushi Nakazawa because of the douche bro at the end of the counter who's talking on his phone and dunking everything in tons of soy sauce. That was a sublime piece of writing. It's weird and amazing how a restaurant can evoke not just a specific memory, but like a setting and a time and a place.

Like if you say to me, Cafe Odeon or Balthazar or Nell's, like these are all iconic, you know, New York establishments. All Keith McNally places. Yeah, exactly, right? They all conjure up something very specific in my mind as somebody who lived there during, you know, various periods of time when those things were important.

Yeah, it's funny you say that. I just wrote a piece for the issue previous to this one about Pastis coming back. Pastis was one of the Keith McNally successes. It was really the follow-up to Balthazar and the meatpacking district, which at that time was still pretty scuzzy. It was gnarly.

The only thing there was Florent. Yeah, Florent, that's right. And Hogs and Heifers was nearby, but it was like very marginal neighborhood. And Pastis essentially catalyzed the gentrification that forced it out eventually. Yeah, it became a victim of its own success. Exactly. And now the meatpacking district is like a tourist mall. And they brought Pastis back. And so I wrote a piece about that. And to what extent do we need it back? Will it be the same

thing? The neighborhood is different. The feeling is going to be different. It can't be. It won't be. It can't be. And also, in the food world, the conversation has very much moved away from that sort of Eurocentric white male dining. I mean, we've really moved toward, you know, so many exciting restaurants that are about the African diaspora. They're about, you know, Mumbai in Oakland, California was Cambodian food. I mean, HiHi in Minneapolis, Celeste in Boston, El Jardin in San

Diego. I could name hundreds of places that are really where the conversation has moved and probably should have long ago, long overdue diversity in the conversation about food in America and all these stories, Middle Eastern food, et cetera. And where does pastis fit in that? Because we're talking about a steak frites place, basically. We're talking about a place that is in itself a gesture of nostalgia for a France that never even existed. And then so rebooting it is nostalgia for the nostalgia for France in New York. And a time and a place pre-Instagram where it wasn't necessarily about the food,

but it was more of this mise-en-scene and to be seen and to see others. And not stare at your phone. You remember when you'd go to a bar or a restaurant and you didn't have phones? Guess what you do? You talk to people. You'd mingle, talk to people, flirt, joke around, argue a little bit. It's fun. I mean, I have gotten to where lately, this has nothing to do with our conversation, but I just lately have thought I want to get a giant fly swatter, like a really big cartoonish fly swatter, foam, like it won't hurt

anybody. And I just want to walk down the streets of New York and swap phones out of people's hands. Because there's times you're going down Broadway or Fifth Avenue, Seventh Avenue, you can't believe it. It just looks like an ant farm. Everybody's got their heads down and they're actually banging into each other. I mean, can it wait? I mean, this isn't even a new fresh observation, but lately it has seemed so overwhelming that for miles, for miles, you don't see a single person not on his or her phone. Like we're doomed.

We're doomed. I know. Turn it off. I don't know what it's going to be. And part of that is like, you know, the old man howling at the moon. Maybe all you know, the old man howling at the moon. Maybe all of that is the old man howling at the moon. But I wonder also like,

where is the relevance of New York City now versus, I mean, it just, it doesn't feel like it did in the 80s and the 70s, the early 90s. And now we have a, our 15-year-old daughter goes to high school downtown, which is like a two-hour drive from here. So we run at a loft in downtown, in the arts district in downtown LA.

Wow. And Julie and I split the week staying down there. So I live in the arts district half the week. I didn't know that. And I'm feeling like a sense of energy and urgency and vitality and vibrancy in that little neighborhood that reminds me of, you know, when I was 21 and living in New York,

like there's something happening down there. And I think it's happening not just with art, but with food. I saw it from your Instagram. You, it looked like you were down there a couple days ago. Yeah, Gorilla Tacos, I went to it. Yeah, there's some, our place is literally across the street from Gorilla Tacos. or something like that. Yeah, Gorilla Tacos, I went to it. Yeah, our place is literally across the street from Gorilla Tacos. Oh. Yeah.

I mean, Gorilla Tacos is- It's cool. Transformed. Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting things happening down there. Absolutely. And I see like the epicenter of a lot of these, kind of the cultural genesis happening

out of little pockets like this. I feel like there will never be another band like Sonic Youth out of New York City. There will never be another Velvet Underground out of New York City. Forget it, it's over. Yeah. I mean, the strokes were maybe-

So where is that happening? Pittsburgh. Where is that moment happening? Denver, Dallas. Detroit maybe. Detroit, I was just in Detroit, is happening. It's crazy. It's so exciting.

If I was like an artist in 20 years old right now- Move to Detroit, maybe. Detroit. I was just in Detroit. It's happening. It's crazy. It's so exciting. If I was like an artist and 20 years old right now. Move to Detroit. Yeah. I mean, and you know, my friend Davida Davison runs Food Lab Detroit in that city. very active in making sure that a sort of sweeping gentrification doesn't change the character of the city too much and doesn't take away ownership and influence and voices from black owners, Mexican owners. Like, I mean, she's there to foster business, business building and creativity and entrepreneurship for people who live there, who are part of the communities. And it's a beautiful thing to see. I think she's, she deserves a prize, you know, and because the dangerous aspect of these cities having a kind of

hipster infusion, you know, is that the character of the city is drained away and the fortitude of the people who live there, you know, doesn't always go recognized, you know? And so what I loved about my trip to Detroit recently is that it seems Detroit driven. A lot of what I saw is local people expressing themselves through food, through music. I'm babbling. But I think that it's very simple why some of these cities are vortices of dynamism creatively right now. You can afford to live there and you can afford to be creative. I went to Dallas for Esquire magazine and people see on Instagram you've landed. I post something from the airport and they start bombarding me with recommendations.

And a lot of people said, you got to go to Petra. Petra, yeah. Yeah, you know this? I know, I've heard of this place. Yeah, okay, so somebody, I don't know who it was, somebody on Instagram said, you got to go to Petra in the Beast.

Seriously, make time for this. I Googled it, it looked really interesting. So I made the trip. Seriously, make time for this. I Googled it. It looked really interesting. So I made the trip. I was the only customer at like three in the afternoon. Misty Norris is the chef there. It was Misty and a guy. That was the whole kitchen. I basically ordered the whole menu, which is usually a tell. Did she know who you were? Probably. I mean, I don't, I eventually usually just introduce myself after I've gotten going or, you know, I don't use a fake name or anything. So – because my role is not that of like an anonymous critic.

And also I do a lot of reporting with these folks. I interview them too. So, you know, after a while – and also I like to do pictures and it looks weird if you don't explain the context. It looks creepy. So this food was revolutionary. It was – you really sensed a voice and a vision. The restaurant was built in like a converted gas station. It looks like something from Grapes of Wrath.

She's cranking music. She's got like anime and cow skulls and all these things on the walls, like her own decor. And, but the food was vivid and, um, funky with fermented flavors and lots of things. She does kind of Francis Malman-ish way with fire. Um, I had never tasted anything like it. I thought that it was like hearing Cat Power for the first time or hearing, I don't know, a band, NWA, somebody where you hear it and you're like, I've never heard anything like this.

This is a vital new voice. And so I included Petra and the Beast in Best New Restaurants. But I also felt, to answer your question, sorry I'm long-winded, but Petra and the Beast could not happen in New York City at this point. It would not survive. Her rent would be extortionate. It's in, she converted like a gas station, right? Yeah.

I mean, she couldn't have this space. I went to Otonio, a Spanish restaurant in Highland Park last night. Loved it. And Teresa, the chef, introduced herself when I was leaving. And I said, you know, in New York City, this space would be like $3 million a month. It's gigantic and got beautiful high ceilings, beautiful kind of murals on the walls. Even here in Los Angeles, obviously a major American city, I don't think you could do what Otonio does in New York. The economy has become untenable in New York for a lot of creative

people. There are still excellent restaurants. There's still art happening, but it doesn't have that scuzzy vitality, you know, that it used to. That's required, that like tension to create something great. I mean,

we have obviously talking heads, Patti Smith, the Ramones. I mean, CBGB couldn't happen now. None of those people could afford to live in New York. They couldn't live in New York now Ramones. I mean, CBGB couldn't happen now. None of those people could afford to live in New York. They couldn't live in New York now. No, I mean, you know, so that's actually an exciting element of my job at Esquire is going to all these cities because I feel that creative energy.

I really felt it in Minneapolis, Philadelphia. A lot happened in there. Creativity will happen. It's like it will out no matter what. It is powerful. And the corporate forces of gentrification will try as they might, but we will always find other places to pop out

and make things. Yeah. So, yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you like, this has been an amazing conversation and there's so much more going on here than food. Like, you're almost like a Chuck Klosterman type person. Oh, that's nice.

I like Chuck. Yeah, I mean, you have the same- I don't think he likes me, but I like him. Oh, really? I don't know. But like, you have a take and a perspective on like culture, you know, that's much more than just, you know, food or I ate at this restaurant.

Yeah. I mean, I started as a political writer years ago. Then for most of my career, I was a music writer. Then I was music and film. Then I was at T-Tails writing about guys, you know, who fix broken sex dolls and stuff. And then I was a food writer at the New York Times for six years. And now I'm seen as a food writer, but I actually don't think of myself as a food writer. I just think of myself as somebody interested in people. And I could absolutely change gears any minute now. I have done it many times, much to the consternation of people in my

life. And the last lines of this book are, it can change, it can change, it can change. And that is on my mind, partly because I'm concerned about health. But also, I found myself drawn to other subjects more and more. So we'll see. I don't actually drink much, for instance. I do write about drinks as well, and I definitely savor a martini, a good natural wine, whatever. But I'm not like, I've never been a big boozer. whatever, but I'm not, I'm not like, I've never been a big boozer, you know? So like that element,

like we discussed of indulgence and a kind of obliteration doesn't appeal to me. Well, now that you live here at our house, down in the teepee, we're gonna sort all that stuff out for you. I put my backpack in there. We set it up for you. All right, man, I gotta let you go, but final question. Okay. Where's the best burrito in LA? Oh my gosh. Or at least a burrito that I can veganize. I think you've stumped me. Really, how is that possible? I know, that's crazy, I tend to be a taco guy.

Well, wherever the best taco is is probably where the best burrito is. I love gorilla tacos. I'm more of a burrito guy. Gorilla tacos is good. See, the thing, okay, I'll tell you, I'm a corn tortilla guy. Oh, see, I'm ailla Tacos. I'm more of a burrito guy. Really? Gorilla Tacos is good. See, the thing is, okay, I'll tell you, I'm a corn tortilla guy. Oh, see, I'm a flour. Oh.

Yeah. This is, we can't make this the last question. It's just a terrible note to end on that you're a flour tortilla guy. That's the thing. I've learned everything I thought about you. Corn tortillas are the spirit of Mexico. Now, I don't, I'm not one of those authenticity fetishists. I'm with Gustavo Arellano on this.

I mean, to me, a flour tortilla is – I don't know who that is. He's a great writer for the LA Times and stuff, and he's a brilliant dude. He wrote a whole book called Taco USA. And he argues against that enshrinement of certain things as authentic Mexican food and other things as not. says like Tex-Mex and burritos or San Diego fish tacos, things that are a little bit of a hybrid and a little bit of appropriation even are as authentic an expression of Mexican cuisine as anything else. I appreciate that. That said, the kind of- You're a traditionalist.

I like the chew of a corn tortilla. I like that, particularly when it's a really well-made one. So, I mean, I went to Gorilla Tac with my friend Franz and we ordered probably 10 tacos, like 10 different types. And, um, I guess I didn't, I had a breakfast burrito this morning. I will tell you, but, um, that's, that's all I'm going to say about it. I wasn't that into it, but God, let's see. You know, there was a, I feel I'm so embarrassed. I mean, I'm looking for like the kind of hole in the wall. Yeah, burritos, it's all about the mission in San Francisco. Yeah, of course.

I know that in San Francisco. Yeah, because then they griddle them. That's the other thing. Like a lot of- And they're massive. Yeah, but I don't need them to be massive. I like them to have that sear from the grill. So they fold it all in and then crisp it up on the grill and have all the things melt and merge inside.

That's what makes it work. So it's sometimes just about technique. I also like panuchos and sopes and all the different kind of forms of tortillas and stuff like that. But, oh, man. I guess I'll – there was a place in, like, Rosemead, California. This is typical of my high school years that we found some really great burrito place that was just far enough away that we could get there during our lunch break at school, order a burrito and race back and make it to class in like a minute.

And we would do it because these burritos were so good. And I cannot remember the name of the place. Wow. That's embarrassing. Shame on you. I know. It's really embarrassing. I mean, it was like 16 years old.

But my best buddy in high school, Rich, became a chef for a while. He was a chef in Paris and in London. I'm not in London, excuse me, in Los Angeles. I don't know why I said London. In Pasadena. And he eventually, it's hard being a chef. It's hard working online and everything.

He eventually went to business school and worked at Williams-Sonoma. But we were really into food. I mean, we were like the proto foods as teenagers. We didn't call it that, obviously. We didn't know what it was. It's so interesting that you had that and you kind of moved away from that

and found your way back to it. Yeah. I loved restaurants when I was a kid though, because you know, some kids are like theater geeks. They love theater. They're just entranced by it, you know, which is a beautiful thing. For me, restaurants were like theater.

I would love, like, I remember the Mandarin in San Francisco, Cecilia Chang, Chinese restaurant. My parents would, we'd go up to San Francisco from LA and just almost explicitly to go there. Like my family was really into Chinese food, still is. And, you know, Spago. I mean, you know, at a certain point, my dad was doing pretty well. I remember going to the original Spago and just thinking it was magic. And not because of celebrities and stuff, but because it was up on the hill and it was just the most – to me, it was just sexy and elegant. I've kind of an addiction to that. And it's all different types of restaurants.

I mean, Escobar Best New Restaurants included a carnitas place in San Antonio where you can get out of there for $10. But other places are really fancy. To me, it's just like, how does it make you feel when you walk in? Which is me dodging the burrito question. I know, I'm still like, this is a 20 minute answer, no place to go for my burrito.

I'm so embarrassed. Jonathan Gold is mocking me from now on. You're gonna think about it, and then I'm gonna put it in the show notes. Yeah, I'll think about it. Does Guisados have burritos in the show notes. Yeah, I'll think about it. Does Guisados have burritos? See, I always get tacos there, but anyway, you wouldn't go there,

because that's meats and stuff, sorry. Yeah, I mean, I'll go to like, I like Holy Guacamole on Main Street, just to dive, but I think the food there is great, you know? I like little places like that. Yeah. And actually, Trejo's Tacos is not bad. Oh, yeah.

It's pretty good. Do they have some vegetable options? Yeah. They have like a jackfruit taco. You can get there. And jackfruit burritos. I'm all about jackfruit. Yeah. I really am. I've become a convert. I made a vegan jackfruit bibimbap from, I know nothing about sports. Who's the quarterback of the Patriots? Tom Brady. Wow, you really don't know anything. No, I really don't. No, I know like LeBron James and Tiger Woods and then like nobody. So like Tom Brady had a meal kit. He may still have it that's vegan with Purple Carrot, perhaps? Yeah, Purple Carrot, one of the meal delivery companies.

And I did an Esquire article on meal kits, and they got this bibimbap one with jackfruit, and you had to roast the jackfruit. Dude, it was delicious. It's good, right? It was great. Nice. I mean, I hate anything from Boston,

so I don't want to celebrate this, but I must say it was a very delicious bibimbap, and I felt very good. So anyway. Shout out to Purple Carrot. I can't, I'm ending, I was gonna end on this burrito, I don't know. And now I'm ending on a Tom Brady reference.

What's happening to me? I don't know. We better end it now. All right, man. We gotta, I gotta let you go. Okay. Thanks for having me. That was great, man.

That was super fun. No, I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. You feel good? Oh yeah. Yeah. Just take out all the dumb things I said. We're not editing any of this.

Oh shit. The book is hungry. Jeff's easy to find on the internet. Too easy. Instagram and I mean, you can do, you can just go down the rabbit hole on, you can find all the articles he's written on the New York Times, Esquire, all that.

I know there's a lot of stuff in your garage, but there's a lot of stuff online too. So check them out, enjoy it, and pick up the book, man. I'm digging it. Thanks, Rich. Thanks a lot. Thanks for the time.

Come back and talk to me again. Okay, tomorrow, since I live here. Yeah, that's right. Peace. Bye, Hans. How great was that? It was great, right? That was one of the most fun, funnest, most fun, funnest conversations I've had in a long while.

Thank you for bringing your A game to the table, Jeff Gordoneer. It takes two to tango. Just please get back to me on my burrito stumper question. You still haven't answered that for me, my brother. Let Jeff know what you thought of today's conversation. Hit him up on Twitter at Jeff Gordoneer and he is at the Gordoneer on Instagram. He's got some great picks as well

from our Noma adventure on his Instagram. So please check those out. Don't forget to pick up a copy of Hungry, his new book. And please, as always, check out the show notes on the episode page on my website to do a deep dive on Jeff's world and all of his incredible writing. Don't forget to pick up a copy of his new book, Hungry, and please check out the show notes on the episode page on my website. You can do a deep dive there on Jeff's world. And I've got links to a lot of amazing pieces that Jeff has written over the years. Not the least of which is our Vegans Go Glam piece. You should check that out if you

haven't seen it yet. Once again, I'm going to be doing my very first live event experience podcast extravaganza in Los Angeles, Friday, September 27th at the 1100 seat Wilshire Ebell Theater. It's a beautiful venue. I'm super excited about this. Tickets are available to the public now on my website. Click on the Appearances tab. You'll see a hyperlink there. It's gonna be rocking. Help me sell this thing out, you guys.

And speaking of being hungry, if you're struggling with your diet, your plate, your nutrition, you really wanna get this figured out, but you feel like you don't have the skills or the time or the budget, I implore you, check out our Meal Planner program. We designed this whole thing

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I appreciate my team, all the hard work that they put in to making this show a reality. I certainly do not do this alone. Jason Camiolo, thank you for your audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for additional audio engineering, who alongside Margo Lubin also videos the show and edits it and makes it look beautiful. Jessica Miranda for graphics. David Kahn for advertiser relationships.

Allie Rogers for portraits, and Team Music by Annalema. Appreciate you guys. Thank you for the love. I will see you back here in a couple days with a pretty cool conversation with boxer Mike Lee, who's getting ready for a very big fight.

Super cool conversation. Really defies everything you might think about what a boxer is. He's super cool. So until then, stay hungry, my friends. Peace. Science. Namaste. Thank you.