How Long Gone · Chris Black & Jason Stewart / Talkhouse

913. - Ella Quittner

March 4, 2026·1 hr 16 min·5 clips

Ella describes an older man cutting his hair with shears in a JFK bathroom, leading to a wild 'Industry' spy theory.

Chris arrives wet, wired, and not exactly settled. He is in New York long enough to podcast, shoot at 9 a.m., train, repack, and make a 9:30 p.m. Air France flight to Paris. The game, somehow, keeps moving. The travel talk slides into airplane meals and airport sushi, with straight guy limits treated like a real culinary handicap. Ella is best when the conversation gets to cookware panic. She remembers Facebook Marketplace filling up with scratched, sad pans people were trying to dump, the kind that could barely reheat food without scorching it. Nonstick fear gets a full airing. The conversation hits PFAs, cooked coatings, and the way newer nonstick brands made ordinary kitchen anxiety look prettier, brighter, and more tasteful. Canary yellow starts to sound like a wellness claim. One riff turns Brooklyn artist branding and a painted tomato into a magic charm that makes the buyer healthier forever. Nobody stops to underline the joke, which is why it works. The cookware bit treats consumer dread as real, dumb, and very funny at the same time. Bon Appetit comes in sideways. Natural wine, sours, and test kitchen fame become shorthand for a food media era everyone is supposed to clock immediately. Chris says he never watched the Bon Appetit videos, which gives the room something fresh to play with, especially once Claire Saffitz comes up as a name that should land. The close keeps wandering in the same way. Obsessed with the Best gets plugged through LA stops like Quarter Sheets and Etra, then the talk swerves into public sightings. Five Guys becomes the line. If Ella is seen there, silence is the requested move, not fan ceremony. Even the goodbye takes detours, with Squirrel, Duck, Max, and Hallen folded in before the episode finally lets go.

As heard by us

Ella Quittner turns cookware, food media, and travel banter into sly social comedy.

How Long Gone opens with Chris Black back in rainy New York, caffeinated and already packing for a red-eye to Paris, before Ella Quittner drops into the show's usual quick, needling rhythm.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If the Bon Appetit test kitchen era left a dent in your cookware drawer, this episode knows you.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from How Long Gone