Communal Table

Hello beautiful people! Welcome to Food & Wine Pro's weekly Communal Table podcast. Chefs and restaurant workers take great care of everyone else, but often they need a little help themselves. Each week, Food & Wine’s senior editor Kat Kinsman talks with hospitality pros about how they manage their business, brain, and body for the long haul. Some of our very special guests include Samin Nosrat, Angie Mar, Seamus Mullen, David Chang, Pete Wells, and more. Subscribe now.

Episodes

Communal Table Presents: Tinfoil Swans from Food & Wine

July 7, 2023 • 1 min

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made them who they are today. Each week, you'll he...

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Nigella Lawson Talks Solitude, Imperfect Housekeeping, Squishy White Bread, and Listening to Your Food

April 16, 2021 • 89 mins

Like many of us, Nigella Lawson has spent the last 13 months hunkered at home, in an endless cycle of cooking, eating, washing up (reluctantly), and doing it all again just hours later. Unlike the rest of us, she's adapted her practices into a glorious cookbook—called Cook, Eat, Repeat—that celebrates and elevates this cycle into something contemplative and pleasurable. The renowned author and TV star joined Communal Table for an i...

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Preeti Mistry Is Hanging Out with Puppets, Planning a More Inclusive Food Future

April 15, 2021 • 114 mins

We're living in a golden age of Preeti Mistry and the world is so much more delicious for it. The Juhu Beach Club chef, cookbook author, speaker, and podcaster (among other things) can currently be seen teaching kids and puppets alike about the marvelous universe of herbs and spices on the Netflix show Waffles and Mochi; heard on their new podcast Loading Dock Talks in conversation with food and justice activists; read on their sup...

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Sam Fore Talks Feeding Restaurant Workers in Need, Therapy, and Tomato Pie

April 2, 2021 • 70 mins

When chef Sam Fore sees something she can fix, she jumps in to help. As the restaurant industry was devastated by COVID-19, she joined The LEE Initiative to help make sure that workers were being fed—and help create a system where the whole community could benefit in the long term. That's just who she is as a person, but it wasn't until recently that she offered that kind of care to herself, in the form of starting therapy. In part...

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Sam Fore Will Not Stay Silent, and That's a Very Good Thing

March 19, 2021 • 56 mins

When it comes to calling out cruddy behavior, chef Sam Fore has never been afraid to speak her mind. Growing up as a first-generation Sri Lankan American in North Carolina, she had a supportive community (and a mom who always warned her about how her mouth would get her in trouble—not that she listened) but outside of it, she began to question why the rules and standards were different for her than for her white peers. Fore's sense...

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Pinky Cole Talks About Entrepreneurship, Intentions, and Setting People Up for Success

March 12, 2021 • 61 mins

Pinky Cole has always known that she would lead an extraordinary life. As a girl growing up in East Baltimore, she wasn't sure what form that would take, but when her friends were outside playing, she was setting goals for herself, like "earn my first million by age 30." Which she did. Next goal—a billion by 40. She's got time. The restaurateur and philanthropist joined Communal Table from her secondary office in Atlanta—a.k.a. her...

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Adrian Lipscombe Talks Black Land Ownership, Texas Tribulations, and Studying Sake

March 5, 2021 • 81 mins

When city planner and architect Adrian Lipscombe visited a cafe in La Crosse, Wisconsin for a business meeting, little did she know she'd end up moving her family up all the way from Austin, Texas, running the cafe herself, and revitalizing a whole section of the city. And if running a restaurant during a pandemic isn't a full-time-plus job, Lipscombe also developed an initiative—40 Acres and a Mule—to preserve, research and celebr...

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Matt Jennings Talks Sobriety, Pivots, Flextaurants, and How Chefs Can Evolve

February 26, 2021 • 77 mins

The day Matt Jennings woke up on his bathroom floor, he knew something had to change, or else he'd die. Five years later, the chef and cookbook author is sober, happy, healthy, and on a mission to help other people in the industry find their way forward—even if it looks nothing like they'd imagined. Jennings joined Communal Table to talk about the obsessions that drove him, what "chef" means now, his hopes for the future of restaur...

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Vinny Eng Talks Mutual Aid, Empathy, and the Art of Hugging Trees

February 20, 2021 • 94 mins

The day after Vinny Eng was named as one of Food & Wine's 2019 Somms of the Year, he said his thank yous for the accolade, then promptly announced that he was stepping away from the industry for a while to work on a political campaign. For those who know Vinny, this wasn't a surprise, because the industry veteran has always made it his business to act with intention, infusing every act of hospitality with an eye toward making the w...

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Anita Lo Talks Solo Cooking, Throwing Butter, and Constant Reinvention

February 10, 2021 • 60 mins

Little did she know at the time she was writing it, but Anita Lo's Solo: A Modern Cookbook for a Party of One became, for many, the ideal guide for this time in history. The 2001 Food & Wine Best New Chef and much-lauded chef, author, and TV personality joined Communal Table from her home on Long Island to talk about the ever-changing role of chefs, cooking for pleasure, coping in a tough kitchen, and the free online cooking classe...

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Claudette Zepeda Talks Cutting Through White Noise and Becoming the Leader She Needed to See

February 5, 2021 • 76 mins

When Claudette Zepeda was at her most stressed-out, as she puts it, "my neck went away." Her shoulders were in a permanent state of hunch and she'd been advised at a new job to bring her "knives and anti-anxiety medication." But she learned along the way to advocate for herself, for people who'd always been marginalized in the world of food, and for the Mexican dishes that generations of her family held dear. The Top Chef alum and ...

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Norma Listman and Saqib Keval Talk Mole, Valuing Mexican Food, and What Restaurant Family Means

January 29, 2021 • 83 mins

It's hard to open a restaurant. It's indescribably stressful to have to open your restaurant four separate times, for reasons (earthquake, local government corruption, pandemic) out of your control. But Norma Listman and Saqib Keval believe in the vision of Masala Y Maiz, their Mexico City restaurant and co-op, so fiercely that they keep on working. They joined Communal Table for a fascinating conversation about recipes as document...

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The Food & Wine Team Talks Dal and Roti, Sopping, Broiling, and Citrus

January 23, 2021 • 75 mins

January is a particularly cruel month. The days are short, the holidays past, and hey—we're still living in a freaking pandemic. But we've all got to find joy where we can, and this comes in the form of the recipes and stories we're running this month, celebrating the particular pleasure of sopping up stews and soups with bread, making perfect flank steak (and other things) under the broiler, and getting as much citrus into your li...

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Carl Sobocinski Talks About Investing in People and Closing His Restaurants to Stop the Spread

January 15, 2021 • 59 mins

Restaurateurs live their lives by the numbers, and when Carl Sobocinski saw COVID-19 case rates racking up in Greenville, SC, he knew he had to take action. Even though it wasn't mandated by local or state law, he voluntarily closed down all but one of his restaurants for a period after the holidays in an effort to keep his team and his diners safe. It was a tough decision that carried a price tag, but for him, it was the right thi...

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Kiki Aranita Talks About Closing Her Restaurant, Collective Trauma, and Selling Sauce

January 8, 2021 • 92 mins

A year ago, Kiki Aranita was in Hong Kong for a cousin's wedding when she heard the first rumblings about a virus that was highly contagious and beginning to spread. There's no way she could have known that just months later, she'd have to shut down her much-loved Philadelphia restaurant Poi Dog because of its impact. It was an agonizing decision, but the multi-talented chef, writer, and artist is finding purpose in the pivot with ...

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How to Holiday in Limbo

December 18, 2020 • 111 mins

No one on earth needs to be told that this is a holiday season unlike any other because we're all living it. If you're a listener of this podcast you are painfully aware of the kind of year it's been, and that no one quite knows the way forward. In this year, more than any other, joy, rituals, and traditions matter—especially if we can't be together to celebrate. In this episode, the Food & Wine team and friends joined forces to ta...

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Rocco DiSpirito Talks About Why Therapy Is a Lifesaver and How to Snap Back to Feeling Like a Chef

December 10, 2020 • 69 mins

In 1999, Food & Wine named Rocco DiSpirito as one of its Best New Chefs—a vote of confidence in the future of a brilliant young cook who earned the esteem of his peers as well as a rabid fanbase of diners captivated by the handsome fella who quickly became a staple of the gossip pages. Just a few years later at the height of his fame, DiSpirito walked away from the restaurant world, leaving colleagues and fans scratching their head...

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Bryan Washington Talks About Showing Up, Growing Up, and Morning-After Omelets

December 3, 2020 • 63 mins

Bryan Washington's extraordinary new novel 'Memorial' shares the story of two men in love and at a crossroads in their four-year relationship, when some family dynamics shift and they have to reevaluate who they are in the world, and to one another. There's also a ton of great food on every other page. Washington joined Communal Table on a call from Houston, TX to talk about the care and feeding of loved ones, writing a place for h...

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The Food & Wine Kitchen Team Talks About What's on the Thanksgiving Table in 2020

November 12, 2020 • 87 mins

The holidays this year will look a lot different. With COVID-19 still raging across the country, celebrations will be smaller, sometimes huddled around a Zoom screen or FaceTime, but there are still things to celebrate. In a special episode of Communal Table, Food & Wine's Senior Food Editor Mary-Frances Heck, Food Editor Josh Miller, Associate Food Editor Kelsey Youngman, and longtime (we're talking since 1982!) Test Kitchen Deity...

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Vivian Howard Talks About Southernness, Pride, Pivots, and Politics

October 29, 2020 • 59 mins

It took leaving home for Vivian Howard to appreciate where she'd come from. The chef, restaurateur, TV star, and author of the new cookbook This Will Make It Taste Good is the daughter of an Eastern North Carolina tobacco farmer, and everything she saw on TV told her that she shouldn't be especially proud of that, that southernness was somehow the butt of a joke. She moved away to New York City, started working in restaurants, and ...

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