What's Cooking

What's Cooking is a food podcast with a map attached. Hadass Kuznets reports for KYW Newsradio, and the territory is Philadelphia and the surrounding towns. The format is simple and it holds up across hundreds of episodes: go to the place, find the owner or the chef, ask what they are making and why. Recordings happen on site, so the guests sound like they are standing in their own dining rooms. Menus get described in detail. A Bryn Mawr gastropub owner walks through Roman-style pizzas, including one topped with roasted potatoes and spicy Calabrese sausage with rosemary, and another layered with burrata, arugula, cherry tomatoes and prosciutto. Elsewhere, a celebrity chef opening a Jewish deli in Newtown talks about egg creams as family inheritance, describing how his great-grandfather worked in the trade and how he was trained as a small child to get the proportions right. Milk, chocolate syrup, seltzer. Three ingredients, and easy to ruin. Festivals get the same treatment. In Port Richmond, the co-owner of the malt house hosting Pierogi Fest explains the event's stop-and-start history and drifts into a wider thought about how nearly every culture has its own dough filled with something good. Business coverage runs alongside the eating. A Main Line restaurant announces a renovation and the conversation turns to neighborhood buzz and why regulars want to see a longtime staple refreshed. A holiday episode leaves the kitchen for the wine list, with a sommelier and restaurant owner making the case for sparkling alternatives when Champagne supply is short, and getting particular about coupes versus flutes. Then there are episodes with real stakes attached. Coverage of the Philly Pheast fundraiser describes surprise scholarship awards, some full tuition to culinary schools, some cash into education savings plans, and the guest is direct that for certain students this is the line between staying home and leaving for a dream school. Kuznets keeps herself mostly out of the way. The questions are short, the guests do the talking, and the tone stays warm without tipping into hype. There is no ranking, no takedown, no star system. What is here is a running record of a food city, kept by a reporter who keeps showing up. Listeners are pointed toward the show's Instagram for extra tidbits and invited to send food tips. For anyone eating their way through the region, it works as both a listening habit and a to-do list.