472 episodes listed below
New England dining, told table-side.
Food For Thought With Billy & Jenny moves through New England’s restaurant world with an easy, talk-radio rhythm. Recent episodes mix chef interviews, local openings, fitness-minded food, Boston media projects, and personal banter that keeps the meal moving.
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Food For Thought With Billy & Jenny is a long-running New England food and hospitality show with a strong local pulse. It treats restaurants as stories, not just places to book. Recent episodes move from AC Kitchen’s healthy meal delivery and NUDA pasta to Drive Custom Fit, Wahlburgers, Love Farms, Moona, Piantedosi Baking Co, Tuscan Brands, Swingers Back Bay, Post 1917, and Meet Boston. The rhythm is conversational and brisk. A guest brings the subject, and the show follows the thread through menus, neighborhoods, family memories, business plans, and whatever event is coming up next. It can be playful. It can also be practical, especially when the talk turns to where a restaurant is located, what is on the menu, or what a listener might experience there. The local geography matters: Inman Square, Central Square, Hingham, Woburn, Salem, Tuscan Village, Newburyport, Cape Cod, Boston, and New York all appear as part of the show’s working map. Food is often tied to lifestyle. Alan Campbell connects cooking, performance, and wellness through AC Kitchen and NUDA. Chef Kevin Horton talks through greenhouse ingredients, storage crops, local sourcing, and the difference freshness makes. Mohammed’s Moona conversation uses Cambridge neighborhood history to explain why a small space can shape a whole restaurant concept. The Meet Boston episode widens the frame into local storytelling, influencers, television, and the city’s changing media culture. The Ayurveda and panchakarma episode stretches the show beyond restaurants into health and personal exploration. Sponsor reads and live-radio resets are frequent, so the show feels more like an on-air visit than a tightly edited documentary. That informality is part of the appeal. It suits listeners who want local recommendations with personality, not polished restaurant criticism from a distance.
Made for: Best for listeners who follow New England restaurants, local chefs, food events, hospitality stories, and wellness-adjacent eating. It also suits people who like upbeat broadcast-style conversation with practical recommendations.
What sets it apart: The show blends restaurant coverage with local media, fitness, wellness, family business, and neighborhood identity. Its strength is access: guests explain what they are building while the conversation stays casual and rooted in real places.
For more than 15 years, the dining duo of Billy Costa and Jenny Johnson has been eating their way through New England, mixing it up with top chefs, jumping behind the line of the hottest restaurants, and giving you the inside scoop on where to wine, dine and spend your time. So, get ready - it's Food For Thought, giving you something to chew on.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Local interviews turn restaurant talk into a practical view of hospitality, regional food, wellness, and community life.
Food For Thought With Billy & Jenny treats dining as a way into the people and practical decisions behind New England hospitality. Billy Costa and Jenny Johnson favor conversational interviews, moving from restaurant recommendations and local sourcing to tipping practices,…
A Cape Cod fried chicken sandwich and an iPad tip screen: your dinner brain has found its people.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical local conversation where accessible fitness meets smarter everyday fueling.
Fitness and food circle the same practical idea in this PlayNext episode: good intentions work better when people have a place to move and something useful to eat.
A brisk, locally grounded turn from Wahlburgers fundraising details to Hassan's first radio appearance for Dover Rug and Home.
Food for Thought finds a clean angle in Paul Wahlberg's benefit event at the original Wahlburgers in Hingham, where a burger-combo promotion, early free T-shirts, a DJ, giveaways, and takeout all point back to support for the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester.
A practical winter farm-to-menu visit with one standout mustard green.
Food For Thought visits Love Farms on the Cape for a grounded look at how local food stays on the menu during a New England winter. Chef Kevin Horton lays out the farm's emphasis on sourcing from New England and New York, then connects that philosophy to the storage crops and…
A warm, local-minded look at the people behind Billy and Jenny's Boston television world.
Meet Boston Season 3 steers Food for Thought toward the people and relationships behind Billy and Jenny's television work. Their 22-year partnership, from TV Diner to Dining Playbook and the newer Meet Boston, gives the conversation an easy sense of local hospitality, while…
Mohammed's story makes Muna's Cambridge locations feel central to how diners understand the restaurant.
Muna's story starts with a room that simply made sense. Mohammed recalls walking into the former Rosie's Bakery space in Inman Square and seeing a small, workable restaurant with landlords who understood hospitality.
A clear tipping gripe rolls into Kowloon raffle details and a practical boxcenter.org ticket plug.
The episode is strongest when it sits with the uneasy new manners around tipping. Joe questions restaurant tablet prompts for 20, 25, and 30 percent, then carries the point into convenience stores, where even a bag of Fritos can trigger a tip screen.
Food For Thought turns its expanded format toward a plainspoken conversation about mental illness and public openness.
Food For Thought's wider brief gives this episode a clear path beyond dining, placing mental illness beside celebrity culture, school pressure, and Suicide Prevention Month.
Bourbon talk, barrel stories, messy good pours.
Bourbon reviews with memory, candor, and community.
Everyday life, thought through together.
Billy Costa co-hosts with Joe Piantadosi and welcomes Bobby Wong from Kowloon restaurant and Casey from the Boch Center Wang Theater.
Billy Costa hosts mental health advocate Irene Bouchine to discuss Suicide Prevention Month in September.
Billy Costa interviews Jimmy Lang about Fuji Restaurants and the new Mason's Steakhouse, and previews a segment on Warren Tavern.
Jenny celebrates Women's History Month by interviewing female chefs and restaurateurs in New England, starting with Erin Miller of Urban Hearth.
Billy and Jenny discuss the Boch Center's 100th anniversary and the resurgence of live theater post-COVID with guests Ernie Bock and Casey Sword.
Billy Costa interviews Peter and Brienne of Samuels & Associates about 25 years of development in Boston's Fenway neighborhood, including the renovated 1928 Sears building.
Justin says Drive Custom Fit looked like a 'chick gym' until a circuit class on the turf left him wrecked, and Jake Bossy explains why the 25,000-square-foot Tuscan Village club is built around four pillars.
Paul Wahlberg says Wahlburgers now has 56 locations, including a Sarasota airport site, while still selling burger, meatball, and meatloaf blends through grocery stores.
Kevin Curtin says Love Farms in West Dennis, Cape Cod, grew out of a 2020 purchase of the old Hummingbird Garden Center site on Route 28, where the property now holds about 100 chickens, six coony coony pigs, and three goats.
Billy Costa interviews Alan Campbell, aka AC Kitchen, about his background as a chef and nutrition strategist, including his work with Tom Brady and his food delivery service.
Billy Costa and Joe Piantedosi discuss Valentine's Day plans and preview upcoming segments on Piantedosi Baking Co, Tuscan Brands, Swingers, and Post 1917.
Food for Thought hosts Jenny interviews producer Alyssa Hoffman, returning hubster Key (Wannabe Stay-at-Home Dad), and new hubster Sophie Madison to preview Season 3 of Meet Boston with Billy and Jenny, a television program airing on Nessun.
Food for Thought hosts Jenny and Billy interview Mohamed El-Zain, owner of two Muna restaurants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the occasion of his second location opening in Central Square.
An interview with Dr.
Jenny celebrates Women's History Month by interviewing female chefs and restaurateurs in New England, starting with Erin Miller of Urban Hearth.