New Worlder

• Episode #105: Lotta & Per-Anders Jörgensen

  Based in Malmo, Sweden,Lotta & Per-Anders Jörgensen are the founders of the legendary food magazine Fool. Lotta is an art director and Per-Anders, or P.A. as I have come to call him, is a photographer. This is a magazine that launched in 2012 and has put out, thus far, 8 issues, very sporadically. It has been a few years since. The last issue, but as they reveal in the episode, there will be a #9.Aside of its unpredictable publishing schedule, Fool is a rare kind of magazine. In a world where everything moves so fast, where writing about food is mostly oriented towards minuscule bits of information on social media that keep coming at a rapid pace, one after the other, Fool is slow. It’s thoughtful. It’s reflective. It’s stories are about interesting humans that work in food and their ideas, regardless of how well known they are. It’s creative, with beautiful illustrations and photography, and stories that have always gone a little bit deeper than anywhere else. I had the pleasure of writing a few feature stories there and there was never any indication of what the word count should be. Just make it as long as you think it should be, they would say. That kind of collaboration is a dream for a writer or contributor of any sort. When you pick up an issue, you can read it like a book. A decade later, the stories remain relevant.Lotta and PA also create books, such as the Burnt Ends book, which we talked about with that restaurant’s chef, Dave Pynt, in the previous episode. They’ve also worked with Andoni Luis Aduriz of Mugaritz, and quite a few other truly iconic chefs. There is also a documentary series they have created that they will launch soon, or at least soonish, or when it feels right. Anyway, their work has always been a big inspiration for me so it was a pleasure to have them on.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

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• Episode #104: Dave Pynt

  Dave Pynt is the Perth, Australia born chef of the restaurant Burnt Ends in Singapore. Burnt Ends, open since 2013, which followed a pop-up in London the year before, is has been one of the restaurants driving the global conversation around modern barbecue, which, as Pynt explains, is barbecue where anything goes. It’s not attached to tradition, to history or to borders. It simply means a focus on cooking over fire and the influences are many. It doesn’t even necessarily mean cooking meat as you might assume as with the word barbecue as it is used in the United States.Pynt recently published a book about the restaurant, which is unlike almost any cookbook I’ve seen before. It’s a straightforward life story with recipes. Much of the history is written and illustrated like a graphic novel. There are interviews and thoughts about technique surrounding cooking with fire. As we discuss in the interview, he didn’t even want to include recipes, but he ultimately caved, but those recipes are written just as they are used in the restaurant, rather than trying to dumb them down for a home kitchen. He worked with mutual friends Pers-Anders and Lotta Jorgensen, who you might know from the Swedish food magazine Fool, in creating the book, which they self-published so they didn’t have to make any compromises in the style.We discuss the path he took from working around the world, the time he spent traveling in South America, how Asador Etxebarri impacted his life and the change in set up from his previously small restaurant in Singapore’s Chinatown to a much bigger spread with multiple concepts on Dempsey Hill.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

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• Episode #103: Meghan Flanigan & Mario Rosero

  Meghan Flanigan & Mario Rosero are the owners of the restaurant Prudencia in Bogotá, Colombia. Prudencia is a timeless restaurant in La Candelaria, an old building reformatted by the architect Simón Veléz. It’s only open for lunch and when you eat there it feels like you’re hanging out at a friend’s house. You are free to move around the place. To take a snack off their homemade grills in the back garden or to linger for far longer than you might anywhere else. There’s no specific style of food you can point too, other than they mostly cook over wood and use Colombian ingredients. An idea for a plate might happen anywhere, sometimes a book, and not necessarily a cookbook.You’ll hear in the interview how everything about their process seems counterintuitive about how restaurants are supposed to be run. For example, they pay their staff well above average to the point that they hardly ever leave, plus post-pandemic they raised wages and menu prices significantly while reducing the capacity. The menu is never the same, changing every single week. Prudencia is a restaurant that thinks a lot about balance. About human balance. Maintaining working relationships. The nutritional balance you feel when dining there and how your body feels afterward.Mario says, “I don’t think we can go back to what did pre-pandemic. To sell the most affordable quality at the highest volume you can do.”They talk about their future plans, which includes closing the restaurant, very soon actually, and taking a long sabbatical, taking a step back and reevaluating everything, before completely reinventing themselves. Whatever it is I’m excited for it.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER

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  1:11:54
• Episode #102: Olivier Bur

  Olivier Bur is the chef and owner of the restaurant Casarré in the city of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Casarré is unlike any other restaurant I’ve heard of in the Caribbean. It’s a fine dining restaurant, at least in the sense that it serves 7 to 10 courses and a pairing, even though it does it in a casual way. There are of course many other fine dining restaurants in the Caribbean too, but unlike everywhere, Casarré is defined by its limitations as much as it is abundance. They don’t use flour, milk or eggs and instead find alternatives within the natural environment. They don’t serve wine in the pairing, as it isn’t produced on the island, and instead make different distillations like Mamajuana and source Clairin, an unaged sugarcane rum from Haiti, which needs to be bottled in Europe for it to be legally sold in the DR. They cook on a rustic wood fire, as it is done in the countryside, shunning most modern cooking equipment. It’s a fascinating approach in a region that needs some disruption.Olivier was born and raised in Switzerland with his Swiss mother making typical Dominican foods for him every day. He still felt disconnected from Dominican food and life there, but as he became a professional cook, working in kitchens around Europe and Latin America, including Pujol and Noma Mexico, he gradually gravitated more and more to the island. After a few pop ups and research trips (which he continues to write about), he moved to Santo Domingo and began creating a network of collaborators. Not just suppliers and culinary friends, but artisan craftsmen of every sort. Casarré is a restaurant that tells the story of and immerses you in Dominican culture in a really profound way. And as you will hear in this interview, he has the right temperate and patience for it to work.Read more at New Worlder.

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  1:12:22
• Episode #101: Bryan Ford

  Bryan Ford is the author of the new book Pan Y Dulce: The Latin American Baking Book. Bryan is a baker and a very good one, and I think he’s looking at Latin American breads unlike anyone else. His first book, New World Sourdough, released right in the middle of the pandemic was a giant hit and it’s one of my most used baking books. It’s good practical advice at making better sourdough and as I mention in the conversation, his persona makes it less intimidating. At least for me. I find bread intimidating sometimes because it takes a while to make and I found it easy to mess up, especially when I first started making it. The new book, Pan Y Dulce, goes deep into the traditional breads of Latin America and I’m excited to use it. There are recipes for things like Peruvian pan chuta, pizza like fugazettas from Argentina, cassava breads, and other types of baked goods that don’t get much attention stateside. For a lot of these traditional breads that are rarely made with wild yeasts these days, he includes sourdough options. I’m especially excited to test this out as so many of these breads have so much potential made in this way.Ford was born in the Bronx to Honduran immigrants and raised in New Orleans. He was an accountant that liked baking and started to make a wholesale business out of it on the side. When he made a Honduran pan de coco, at his mother’s request, his blog Artisan Bryan suddenly exploded. He is the the host of Magnolia Network’s Baked in Tradition and The Artisan’s Kitchen, and you’ve probably seen him on some other shows on Netflix and elsewhere. Aside of the new book Pan Y Dulce, he also launched a Substack newsletter last year, also under the name Artisan Bryan. Despite his growing popularity, he’s not afraid to talk about things like slavery and colonialism, which I find refreshing. It seems like you are supposed to ignore history if you gain some mainstream traction. These things have had an obvious impact on breadmaking in Latin America, so of course he, as an Afro-Honduran acknowledges them, right in the first pages of the new book. He does it in a way that still celebrates the recipes, though some editors might be scared away by it. I personally appreciate the way he does it. It would be stranger to me if he didn’t mention these things. So, show your support and buy the book.READ MORE AT NEW WORLDER.

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