Six Test Kitchen chef and owner joins hospitality director Matt Corella to discuss the restaurant’s shiny new Michelin star, garage dining, and the health department.
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Fourteen-year-old home cook Vincent Rodriguez shares his thoughts on pizza dough, bone-in prime rib, and banana bread.
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Niels, Bimmer, and Luke Udsen discuss Bethel Road Distillery, music, whale bones, Syrah, and more.
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Dr. David Cleveland speaks about the Santa Barbara Syndrome, food system failures, and how “local” isn’t always local.
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Ellen Burke of Cal Poly University and Claire Tuohey-Mote of Slow Money SLO talk about how the San Luis Obispo Food System Coalition brings all the players to the table to help everyone thrive: consumers, farmers, those who are food insecure, government, nonprofits and the community at large.
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Critic Stephen McConnell talks about his take on the term “wine snob,” growing up Seventh-Day Adventist, and his obsession with crows.
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A native of El Salvador, Roberto Monge sat down to chat about his backyard earthen oven, pupusas, tamales, the importance of building a village, supporting one another, and bringing what you have to the table.
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Dr. Amy Hart is a historian with California State Parks, and Tara Stephenson is Director of Development for the Foundation at Hearst Castle. We talked about William Randolph Hearst’s grazing habits, his double-vaulted wine cellar, and his favorite late-night snack, Welsh Rarebit.
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Mushroom expert Dennis Sheridan talks about how mycelium helps plants talk to each other, how he encourages people to take responsibility for catching their own edible mushrooms, and yes, quite a bit about psilocybin and microdosing - and macrodosing - magic mushrooms.
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Maggie Cameron talks about the difference between luck and hard work, pimento cheese, and the dream of becoming bicoastal.
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Michael Palmer is the owner of McConnell’s Ice Cream in Santa Barbara, along with his wife, Chef Eva Ein. They’re not the original owners though: McConnell’s started in 1949 with Gordon and Ernesteen McConnell. The brand was beloved already, but when Michael and Eva took over, the vibe and the quality hit its stride. Today, people revere McConnell’s ice cream in its several scoop shops across southern California, and in fine grocers all over the country. We talked about his background in the wine industry, which he is still a part of, the industrial food complex, and how working with something as perishable as ice cream can keep him up at night.
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For years, I’ve driven past the dive bar Whiskey & June in Atascadero and promised myself I’d visit someday. I hate to say it, but I’ve still never gone in, and after meeting its owner, Daniel Green, I want to visit more than ever. Daniel came highly recommended as a good podcast guest by Jenna Congdon, the sommelier I interviewed in Season 1. She told me he’d worked at New York’s famous Eleven Madison Park restaurant and then turned around and bought a whiskey bar in Atascadero. Turns out she was right: Daniel is an incredible interview. We talked about fine dining, early-morning drinkers, and the kind of excellent service that makes dreams come true.
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By day, Carter Hiyama is a filmmaker and commercial photographer for his production company Datsu Films, and his wife Veronika Hiyama works in marketing for hospitality properties. But when COVID hit and lockdown kept them inside, this young Santa Barbara couple decided to start a creative nano-agency, just the two of them, called Sundae Cereal, which develops brands and assets for members of the food and wine industry. Some of the folks they’ve worked with include Omsom, Bettina Pizzeria, Municipal Winemakers, and Makesmith. Carter also made a widely loved film for Bell’s in Los Alamos, about a day in the life of restaurant owners Greg and Daisy Ryan. Together, Carter and Veronika run fairly epic photo shoots out of their kitchen and tiny office on nights and weekends. They clearly have something really special with Sundae Cereal, and I wanted to capture it in its infancy.
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Arcenio J. López is a Mixteco native from a village in Oaxaca, Mexico. When he arrived in Oxnard, California in 2003, Arcenio worked as a farmworker in the strawberry fields. Three years later, Arcenio was hired as a community organizer with the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project or MICOP, whose mission is to support, organize and empower the indigenous migrant communities in California’s Central Coast. I invited Arcenio on the podcast to talk about where most of the Central Coast’s indigenous migrants work: agriculture. We discussed the challenges Mixteco natives face while harvesting the food we eat, the ways MICOP is making a difference, and the ways that those of us who are consumers can help.
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Elizabeth Poett wears many hats. She is a seventh-generation cattle rancher on Rancho San Julian near Lompoc, California, a home cook, an entrepreneur, a mother, a wife, a daughter, and the talent behind a new show called Ranch To Table on the Magnolia Network, which is owned by Chip and Joanna Gaines. Now in its first season, Ranch To Table features Elizabeth’s recipes in the kitchen of her family’s historic California ranch. We talked about having fun in the kitchen, mending fences to last, and being better busy.
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Despite never having done anything like it before, Christa Pfleeger and her husband Eric bought a homestead in Huasna, east of Arroyo Grande. She is an in-demand commercial photographer who travels the world multiple times a year for brands like Google and Roxy, and he is an artist. The two of them lived in New York and L.A. for many years before choosing to try the homesteading life, growing their own food, harvesting their own livestock, homeschooling their kids, and, lately, searching for water on their beautiful property they call the Lonely Palm Ranch.
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Beda Schmidthues owns and operates Beda’s Biergarten in San Luis Obispo with his wife Helga and their children. Beda and Helga are from Duisberg and Dusseldorf, respectively, but they’ve actually been living in the States longer than they ever lived in Germany. When they immigrated in the early 1980s, they never could have guessed at the success they’d have as a family-owned German restaurant in San Luis Obispo, California. Listen in as Beda and I talk about the effects of the COVID pandemic on the restaurant and his family, how Beda’s Biergarten rose from the ashes of the Great Recession, and about what make’s Beda’s French fries so utterly irresistible.
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Mike and Becky Hicks own Lincoln Market & Deli in San Luis Obispo, California, which is right around the corner from my house and their own house. If you’ve never been to this deli before, I’ll describe it: Lincoln is warm and cheery, an old building that’s been updated with colorful murals inside and out. There’s a long communal table in the front room, a grocery section, a bottle shop, a boutique with fun things anyone would want, a patio, and my daughter’s favorite section, the pinball and video game cave. It’s situated deeply in a residential neighborhood, and Mike and Becky saw its potential before they bought it. Listen in as they describe their journey as business owners and “sando slayers.”
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Angela-Sarah North and Sadie Rogers each had a love for wild things long before they met in San Luis Obispo. Their respect for the natural world brought them together into a mentorship relationship, with Angela teaching Sadie to become a certified herbalist. On the podcast, the two of them discuss the ancient medicine of ayurveda, how edible and medicinal plants grow right in our driveways, the significance of a near-fatal moment for Sadie in Big Sur, and the connectedness of it all.
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Kari and Will Torres are partners in San Luis Obispo’s Farmhouse Corner Market, a restaurant and specialty grocery that has won the hearts of flavor-lovers across the area. The vibe at Farmhouse is very casual and cheery, but Will’s cuisine is anything but basic. Will and Kari talk about how they got here via a decade at JUSTIN Winery in Paso Robles, how they met at a power plant, and about their fantasies for the future of Farmhouse.
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