New Worlder

• Episode #108: Carolina Colque & Sergio Armella

  Carolina Colque and Sergio Armella are the owners of Ephedra Restaurant outside of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. Let me be clear when I say that this is a very unlikely restaurant. Two young, local Atacameños with no cooking experience, have opened a tasting menu restaurant in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth. It’s not even in the main town, San Pedro de Atacama, but in an ayllu, a traditional community a dozen kilometers away. I urge you to just go to their Instagram page right now and look at the food they are making and the ingredients they are working with. It will blow your mind.The Atacama Desert, in the far north of Chile, is a special place. I have been there a few times over the years. The scenery is unreal, almost lunar at times, but it is the flavors there that have always excited me. In a place with little rain, most of the plants grow slowly, into large shrubs with brittle branches that develop one-of-a-kind flavors. There are also fruit trees, leguminous pods and fragrant flowers that only come out when there is a hint of moisture in the air. This is the kind of landscape Carolina and Sergio are working with.Before starting the restaurant, Sergio’s cooking experience consisted of a Neapolitan pizza business they tried out during the pandemic, then he staged at Geranium, the 3 Michelin star restaurant in Copenhagen, which is extremely technical, for a few months. What makes Ephedra special is their will to create a distinct experience in the place they are from. These unique ecosystems, not to mention the cultures that support them, are what makes Latin American food special.Read More at New Worlder.

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• Episode #107: Bruna Fontevecchia & Max Wilson of Anchoa Magazine

  Bruna Fontevecchia and Max Wilson are the cofounders of the food magazine and platform Anchoa. The magazine, which began in Argentina, has tried to create a space for deeper stories about food in Latin America. There is little to no mention of fine dining chefs or restaurant rankings. The magazine covers anthropology and ecology with food, the things that we eat and drink and how they are made, as the connecting tissue that unites them all. Bruna is the editor and Max is the designer and as you will hear, the process in building each issue is very organic and flows with the rhythm of the region, which is in constant flux.While the magazine’s coverage began in Argentina, where Bruna is from, it has gradually spread to rest of Latin America. Plus, the last two issues, #4 and the just released #5, are bilingual, in both English and Spanish. Part of that decision is to get more people to read it, though part of it is logistical, in just getting it on the shelves of bookstores and newsstands in different parts of the world. Anchoa is part of a new wave of gastronomic journalism in the region, where small print magazines are finding life as large print publications gravitate more towards digital publishing. There’s also Chiú in Ecuador that started recently, as well as several other small publications.In the interview they describe the challenges in exposing people to these kinds of stories and are continually experimenting with new forms. They have a digital only part of the magazine and a podcast that releases sporadically. They also just released a 20-minute short film called El Sueño del Vino, about ancestral winemaking methods in northern Argentina, in Cafayate, and the battle to preserve them. Please check out what they are doing. Pick up issue #5, I even have a photo essay in it about fish in the Peruvian Amazon. Request your local bookstores with lively food sections to stock it. The more engaged the world can become with the depths of cuisine in the Americas, the better it will be for all of us.Read more at New Worlder

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• Episode #106: Sarah Thompson

  Sarah Thompson is the chef of Casa Playa in the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is a Culinary Institute of America graduate who spent many years working in New York City at restaurants like Marea and Alder, but when taking a job with Enrique Olvera and Daniela Soto-Innes at Cosme, she fell in love with Mexican cuisine. When that restaurant wanted a variation of it called Elio in Las Vegas she was tapped as the executive chef. They opened right at the same time the pandemic hit, so after months of openings and closings and instability on the Las Vegas strip it closed. However, she was able to convince the Wynn to let her take over the space and serve her form of Mexican cooking.Casa Playa serves coastal Mexican food, but it’s not attached to any specific region. She has no sentimental background with a grandmother in Michoacán or anything like that, so she doesn’t try to insinuate that she does and just lets the flavors work together as she sees fit. She even whips the masa for her tamales with coconut oil. It’s a very particular environment, running a restaurant inside of a casino. The way people dine is different. They often come in large groups. She has a late-night taco menu for those that want to stop in for a quick bite before during or after going to a club or some kind of attraction. The lighting is beyond her control at times. These unique attributes also give her an opportunity to do things a little differently. It’s a really fascinating world in Las Vegas. I know it seems like a place I wouldn’t like, but I’ve never really gone there for all of the money and excess and nightlife that it has a reputation for. I’ve always appreciated just the weirdness of Las Vegas which is everywhere, though sometimes you have to peel back what’s on the surface.Read more at New Worlder.

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• 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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