Restaurant people, with the context left in.
Andrew Talks to Chefs follows Andrew Friedman through long-form conversations with chefs, restaurateurs, editors, and restaurant-world figures. It favors context, career paths, menu decisions, and the practical realities behind kitchens over quick celebrity chat.
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Andrew Talks to Chefs is a restaurant-world interview show hosted by Andrew Friedman. It sits close to the people who cook, own, edit, remember, and rebuild the industry. The pacing is unhurried. Episodes often open with sponsor material, acknowledgments, and a careful setup that tells the audience why the guest belongs at the table. That setup matters here, because the show is strongest when it connects one career story to the larger life of restaurants. Scott Conant’s appearance turns from vocational-school beginnings to individualism, ambition, and the responsibility to pursue an idea that will not leave him alone. Tom Colicchio’s return becomes a practical conversation about Craft, post-pandemic dining behavior, composed plates, menu pricing, staffing losses, and the hard work of changing a restaurant. The tribute to Tom Valenti gives the show a more somber register, using an unaired conversation to mark a loss felt inside the restaurant community. Paul Feinstein brings a media-side view through Fine Dining Lovers, awards talk, neighborhood restaurants, and stray Noma threads. Josh Sharkey’s episode bridges old kitchen life and newer restaurant technology, with meez framed through his background as a former New York City chef and restaurateur. Jordan Frosolone’s Borgo conversation stays close to the plate, asking what dishes can or cannot represent a chef at a given moment. Armond Joseph’s story has the plain appeal of someone bringing a knife roll to the dish tank until opportunity appears. Alexia Duchêne’s episode turns on ambition, gendered expectations, Michelin-stage training, and the feeling of finding a better fit in New York. The show is not built for speed. It is built for listeners who like context, career detail, and the small operational truths that make restaurant stories feel credible. There is polish, but not a press-release sheen. There is warmth, but not gush. The recurring pleasure is hearing restaurant people talk about choices that look simple from the dining room and complicated from the kitchen.
Made for: Best for restaurant obsessives, working cooks, culinary media followers, and food listeners who want more than dish descriptions. It especially suits people interested in chef careers, menu decisions, kitchen operations, and industry memory.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge is Andrew Friedman’s patient, insider framing: guests arrive with context, not just credentials. It treats restaurants as businesses, workplaces, and personal histories as much as places to eat.
Our top chefs, as you’ve never heard them before. Author Andrew Friedman, one of the nation's chief chroniclers of professional kitchen life, interviews a diverse cross-section of the best and biggest names in the business, bringing his personal relationships and industry knowledge to bear in coaxing personal and professional revelations from his guests.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Andrew Friedman turns chef interviews into clear accounts of kitchen careers, restaurant economics, ambition, and the difficult choices behind professional cooking.
Andrew Friedman follows chef careers through the decisions that shaped them, asking precise follow-ups about work, ambition, and restaurant life. With Tom Colicchio, he examines a menu's post-pandemic shift and the difficulty of rebuilding an inexperienced kitchen crew.
A knife roll in the dish tank: if that's your kind of origin story, pull up a stool.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Craft's menu change becomes a grounded look at post-pandemic dining habits, pricing, and the work of rebuilding a kitchen.
Craft's menu change lands as a practical way into a larger question: what pricing, portion size, and hospitality start to mean when dining habits shift.
A dishwasher's knife roll becomes the quiet engine of a chef's live-fire origin story.
A firing by his father moves a future chef out of his parents' hair salon and into the restaurant next door, where dishwashing becomes the first real step toward cooking.
A young chef recalls how ambition shaped her early kitchens and drew her from Paris to New York.
The chef speaks plainly about ambition: she sees it as healthy, and New York made her drive feel ordinary rather than out of place. That conviction gains weight in her story of leaving Paris, where journalists treated her as too ambitious for both a woman and a young person.
A measured chef interview about law school, family tension, restaurant ownership, money, and cooking for customers.
Oscar Lorenzi's visit to Andrew Talks to Chefs traces a career that passed through law school in Peru before finding its center in restaurants.
A restaurant rent fight turns PPP, payroll, and empty space into a sharp COVID-era business story.
This single-episode review keeps a restaurant rent fight focused on the practical collision between PPP money, payroll, and commercial rent during COVID.
A clear-eyed look at kitchen pressure, earned confidence, and the life beyond service.
Chef Andrew Turner frames kitchen life through the pressure it puts on bodies, relationships, and the private idea of what balance might look like.
Food careers, products, and supply chains explained.
Seafood explained from plate to policy.
Nilay Patel presses tech and media CEOs on how they actually run their companies.
Physician Shoshana Ungerleider pairs TED talks with interviews on aging, drug prices, and menopause.
Andrew Friedman interviews Chef Andrew Turner, proprietor of Valley Wine Merchants in Newberg, Oregon, about his decision to leave the culinary industry after working under giants like Alain Ducasse and Joachim Splichal.
Chef Mark Forgione joins Andrew Friedman to discuss relocating his eponymous restaurant after 17 years due to a $15,000 monthly rent hike.
Andrew interviews chef Samaya Boueri Ziade about her restaurant Sawa in Brooklyn and her approach to cooking.
Anne McBride discusses the James Beard Foundation's 2025 Independent Restaurant Industry Report, highlighting increasing pressures on chefs and strategies for solutions.
Chef Scott Conant discusses his early career choice in plumbing and his philosophy of individualism inspired by Ayn Rand.
Andrew Friedman presents an unfinished 2020 interview with Tom Valenti after Valenti’s sudden death in New Jersey, adding personal memories from Cascabel, cookbook collaborations, and New York restaurants.
Andrew Friedman and Fine Dining Lovers managing editor Paul Feinstein open by discussing the Noma allegations pushed publicly by former fermentation team member Jason Ignacio White.
Andrew Friedman interviews Josh Sharkey, founder of meez and former NYC chef-owner, about his culinary background and the creation of his recipe operating system.
Chef Jordan Frosolone discusses his cooking at Borgo restaurant in NYC, avoiding picking a favorite dish.
Tom Colicchio marks Craft’s 25th anniversary by tracing how the restaurant turned a steakhouse model into a fine-dining format built around a la carte service and large plates.
Armand Joseph, chef at Léon 1909 on Shelter Island, traces his cooking style to a Detroit childhood in a hair salon, Palestinian home cooking, and years of working with his hands.
Andrew Friedman interviews Alexia Duchêne, chef and owner of Le Chien in New York City’s West Village, about moving from Paris toward a broader culinary identity.
Oscar Lorenzi describes New Yores on 13th Street in Manhattan as "this land for New York and South America," with Peruvian DNA in the food and spirits from Peru, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Venezuela.
Chef Andrew Turner discusses his decision to leave the restaurant industry and open a wine shop, citing physical and mental stress as key factors.
A previously unaired 2016 interview with the late chef André Soltner is shared as a tribute on Andrew Talks to Chefs.
Laurie Woolever discusses her memoir 'Care and Feeding', focusing on honesty, her own mistakes, and reckoning with difficult figures like Mario Batali.