Chef Ben Randall
500 episodes listed below
Hospitality talk with dirt under its nails.
In The Weeds with Ben Randall moves like a kitchen-table check-in that keeps finding its way back to restaurants, food, and the people who make both work. Ben Randall and Stephen Cadwell trade stories about menus, travel food, gardens, work stress, and industry messes with warm impatience and a lot of lived-in detail.
PRESS PLAY
In The Weeds with Ben Randall is a long-form conversation about food, work, health, and the strange mental clutter that collects around a life in hospitality. It is loose by design. Ben Randall and Stephen Cadwell often begin with whatever is actually happening that morning: not enough coffee, a cold, bad weather, construction noise, a half-finished garden plan, or the annoying fact that a computer camera has met too much flour. Then the show drifts toward its real territory. Restaurants sit at the center, but not as glamour. They appear as jobs, systems, habits, bosses, staff meetings, menu deadlines, food waste, owners, cooks, guests, and places where people learn by doing because the doors are already open. The comedy is practical. A riff about homemade caffeine-and-fiber pills can sit beside a riff about candy family names, local Kit Kats, beef stew, or the logic of watching street-food shows late at night. The show likes those side roads. They are not filler so much as how the argument arrives. When it gets serious, it gets very serious. Recent episodes spend time on medication changing motivation, the unsettling loss of a familiar creative drive, layoffs and fear in the Michigan food scene, and the question of what restaurant owners know when abuse is happening around them. The Warlord discussion is especially blunt, using the reporting around Fleming, Lupton, and Krasick to ask what responsibility looks like inside a kitchen partnership. There is also a gentler curiosity. Jennifer Bosch's episode opens into questions about business models, markets, culinary-school culture, and how a local food business survives when customers are anxious and the season is rough. Through it all, Ben Randall sounds drawn to usable conclusions. Stephen Cadwell often fills, pushes, jokes, and steadies the conversation. The result is not a polished food show about trends. It is a working conversation about appetite, labor, frustration, memory, and the thousand small things that make hospitality feel both absurd and worth arguing about.
Made for: For listeners who like food and restaurant talk that includes the messy parts: menu work, owners, travel meals, gardening, family noise, health stress, and blunt industry judgment. It fits people who enjoy conversational podcasts that wander before making a real point.
What sets it apart: The show treats hospitality as lived experience, not polished food culture. Its best moments come from turning ordinary anecdotes into practical, opinionated reflections on work, creativity, responsibility, and appetite.
I began cooking when I was 14 years old and I never looked back. Enjoy the pirate ship.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Food, work and wellbeing meet in candid conversations shaped by kitchen experience, home experiments and an alert eye for hospitality culture.
Ben Randall and Stephen Cadwell treat food as work, craft, appetite and ordinary life, moving easily between professional kitchens and whatever is baking or growing at home.
A bread experiment can become workplace ethics before you remember you came for food.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Used coffee, Street Food cravings, and a tomato trade drive a loose, lively backyard-and-kitchen chat.
The episode drifts from used coffee grounds and homemade fiber pills to HB Reese speculation, a Street Food-fueled hunger spiral, and a tomato trade with a new neighbor.
A funny, uneasy check in on a drug, motivation, and restaurant life.
Ben Randall turns a restaurant world check in into a candid look at what the drug does to a working mind. The talk lands in a strange middle space: funny, uneasy, and oddly practical.
A loose, funny run through workplace AI, road-trip detours, and the value of talking less.
Episode 480 opens with a wary take on AI note-takers slipping into meetings, then settles into a plain lesson that feels older than the software: discretion still counts more than tools.
A loose restaurant conversation that lands on accountability, debt, and what people in the same kitchen may ignore.
The episode opens in familiar territory, with software that ships before it feels finished, restaurant openings that still need chairs, and the old advice to get on stage before feeling ready.
A loose restaurant talk that settles into school culture and a hard local business stretch.
It opens on a loose, lived-in note, with dead headphones, a foggy camera, and flour on the keyboard, then settles into a sharper look at restaurant life.
A loose, funny coffee-and-work chat that keeps finding the useful detail.
Ben Randall and Stephen Cadwell start with a laugh and let it spill into work, memory, and the small bodily mishaps that build up over years in restaurants.
A loose, kitchen-rooted chat about work, bread, and the appeal of a genuinely slow day.
The episode settles into a slower workday, with parent-teacher conferences thinning the room, a few staff members out, and just enough slack to clean, prep for next week, and cook outside the usual routine.
Reported stories of responsibility and its consequences.
Researchers, doctors and coaches, translated into everyday health stakes.
It opens with coffee trouble.
Ben Randall and Stephen Cadwell discuss gardening updates, then delve into Ben's experience with shingles and the nerve pain medication gabapentin, which is altering his personality and creativity.
Hosts Ben Randall and Stephen Cadwell discuss AI security risks in meetings, share travel stories from West Virginia and Colorado, and explore food authenticity, gatekeeping, and a raw milk cheese outbreak.
Ben Randall and Stephen Cadwell start with a complaint about software that ships too soon.
Ben Randall opens in kitchen chaos.
This episode features a free-form conversation with Jennifer Bosch about her business model concerns and career journey in restaurants, sparked by a Threads post.
The hosts discuss cold weather experiences in Michigan, Chicago, and the East Coast, with a personal anecdote about early career advice in the restaurant industry.
The host reflects on memoir writing and ghostwriting, shares a humorous anecdote about early career advice to keep quiet, and complains about noisy construction from new neighbors affecting his recording.
A person discusses their ongoing acupuncture treatments to avoid shoulder surgery, comparing their experience with their wife's emotional reactions to acupuncture and reflecting on faith-based aspects of medicine.
Chicago personal chef Ben Randall and guest Steve open episode 473 of In The Weeds by discussing Ben's search through the newly released Epstein documents for celebrity chefs, identifying author Nathan Mervold of the $500 Modernist Cuisine book as appearing in the files with a self-implicating email.
A chef discusses the challenges of balancing creative freedom with organizational meetings in the restaurant industry, sharing personal anecdotes and advice.
Chef Ben hosts an interview with author Sarah Allen Benton about her book 'Parents in Recovery', discussing navigating a sober family lifestyle.
The hosts discuss cheese powder ingredients, personal cooking experiments, and share anecdotes about early restaurant jobs and advice from a boss.
Lewiston, Maine kept its local restaurant inspections after a unanimous city council vote.