Southern food stories with patience and place.
The Southern Fork is a place-rich food interview show built around the American South’s tables, kitchens, farms, bars, breweries, and waterways. Its best moments move from a single ingredient or dish into craft, identity, history, hospitality, and the relationships that keep local foodways alive.
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The Southern Fork is a thoughtful food interview show centered on the culinary South. It has the feel of sitting down across a table from someone who knows their craft and is ready to explain why it matters. Stephanie Burt keeps the conversations warm, direct, and patient. She gives guests room to describe process, but she also translates the details into a larger story about place, hospitality, culture, and memory. Recent episodes move through Charleston bars, breweries, restaurants, nutrition programs, oyster farms, food festivals, and conversations about Southern food history. A discussion with James Bolt turns cocktail service into a question of welcome, education, and how culinary thinking can shape a drink. A Munkle Brewing conversation with Palmer Quimby balances old-world beer traditions with local seasonal ingredients, money, cans, partners, and the teamwork behind a brewery. With Bintou N'Daw, the show listens closely to belonging, migration, Charleston, Senegal, African foodways, and the desire to tell history with different eyes. The GroceryRx episode brings food access into the center of the table, following Olivia Meyer’s work around nutrition, health, practical cooking, and long-term relationships with patients. Andrew Zimmern’s appearance gives the show a wider lens on blue food, sustainability, and the world’s waters. Trey McMillan’s oyster episode is rooted in marsh, tide, craft, storm damage, and the cultural difference between Lowcountry clusters and polished raw-bar singles. The show also makes space for food media and culinary history through conversations like the one with Deborah Freeman about Edna Lewis and Virginia foodways. Its pace is unrushed. Its interests are precise. It cares about ingredients, but rarely stops at taste alone. Food becomes a way to talk about labor, land, water, health, heritage, identity, and care. The Southern Fork is best for listeners who like their food coverage intimate, observant, and grounded in the people making the meal possible.
Made for: For listeners who care about Southern food beyond recipes: restaurants, farms, bars, breweries, waterways, history, and the people behind them. It especially suits curious home cooks, culinary travelers, food writers, and anyone drawn to warm, detailed conversations about place.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by treating food as lived culture rather than lifestyle decoration. It moves easily from technique and ingredients into memory, access, business realities, hospitality, sustainability, and regional identity.
Host Stephanie Burt travels the Southern United States (with a fork!) and chats with some of the most interesting voices in the culinary South. From chefs to farmers, bakers to brewers, and pitmasters to fishermen, they all have a story. Listen and learn more behind some of your favorite foods.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Stephanie Burt connects Southern food and drink to the craft, costs, histories, and personal choices behind what reaches the table.
The Southern Fork lets Stephanie Burt follow food and drink from finished plate or glass back to the people, decisions, and conditions behind it.
A sausage recipe reaches the hundredth of a pound, and suddenly you are rooting for precision.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A focused bar conversation about celery, hospitality, and cocktail craft.
A busy bar conversation sharpens around a small but useful question: what does a bar owe someone who just wants a drink? The answer sits in the balance between welcome and standards.
A grounded Charleston brewery conversation about old-world-style beer, local ingredients when possible, and the team behind the vision.
The Southern Fork spends time with Palmer Quimby, founder and co-owner of Munkle Brewing Co. in Charleston, South Carolina, where the draw is old-world-style beer made with local seasonal ingredients when possible.
A grounded Charleston food conversation about belonging, African perspective, and shared history.
Bintu's conversation starts with a plain business problem: a takeaway setup had people gathering outside, customers began asking for reservations, and a small room became the opening for a fuller restaurant.
A grounded account of how food access, cooking knowledge, and steady relationships can support lasting nutrition change.
GroceryRx approaches better nutrition through access, cooking knowledge, and steady personal support. Registered dietitian Olivia Meyer describes how the Charleston program connects participants with nutrient-dense local food and helps them build changes they can live with over…
Trey McMillan shows how a market oyster carries the Lowcountry from marsh water to raw bar.
An oyster can look almost effortless on the raw bar, but The Southern Fork follows Trey McMillan's work to show the craft behind that ease. Stephanie Burt joins the Lowcountry Oyster Company waterman in the Ace Basin, where seed becomes market oyster over about a year.
A grounded Charleston brewery conversation about traditional beer, seasonal ingredients, costs, and aligned partners.
Munkle Brewing Co. comes through as a Charleston brewery shaped by old-world beer styles, seasonal local ingredients when they make sense, and the less romantic math of keeping a brewery open.
A family sausage recipe becomes a grounded story of craft, memory, and place.
The sausage story traces a family recipe from a grandmother's instinctive pinches to ingredients weighed with exacting care. Rhoten explains why natural casing matters, why preservatives are left out, and how whole-animal thinking shapes the work.
Bourbon talk, barrel stories, messy good pours.
Bourbon reviews with memory, candor, and community.
Everyday life, thought through together.
Host Stephanie Burt visits Wesley Rhoten at Rhoten's Country Store in Lexington, South Carolina, to explore the story behind his family's onion sausage.
Host Stephanie Burt visits Munkle Brewing Co.
The Southern Fork episode with Stephanie Burt follows James Bolt of The Gin Joint in Charleston through cocktail-building, clear ice, and the ideas behind South Carolina Cocktails.
Stephanie Burt talks with Palmer Quimby, founder and owner of Munkle Brewing Co.
Chef Bintu Nadal describes building Bintü Atelier in Charleston after leaving catering work, starting with takeaway, a tent, and a tiny room that could not support outside reservations.
Stephanie Burt's The Southern Fork sits down with Olivia Meyer in Charleston, South Carolina, to discuss GroceryRx, a Low Country Street Grocery program built around food-as-medicine.
Stephanie Burt interviews Andrew Zimmern about his new book 'The Blue Food Cookbook' and explores sustainability and cultural understanding through food.
Stephanie Burt recaps her favorite episodes and travels from 2025, offering planning inspiration for 2026.
Stephanie Burt and Trey McMillan center The Southern Fork episode on the Ace Basin watershed, Lowcountry Oyster Company, and the trademarked Lowcountry Cup oyster.
Stephanie Burt interviews Deb Freeman about Edna Lewis and Virginia foodways on the Southern Fork podcast.
Stephanie Burt interviews Alyssa Maute Smith about the Charleston Wine + Food festival and the culinary scene in Charleston, SC.
Stephanie Burt introduces a conversation with James Beard award-winning chef Scott Peacock, an authority on Southern cuisine known for his work at Watershed Restaurant and partnership with Edna Lewis.
Host Stephanie Burt introduces a conversation about scallop diving in Crystal River, Florida, with Captain Katie Jo Davis of KD Outdoors Fishing Charters.