Bryan Caswell has cooked inside three very different kinds of rooms. Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s kitchen in the early 2000s, where he learned that a quiet, organized kitchen beats a screaming one. Seventeen restaurant openings of his own, roughly half of them his own concepts, from Reef to his new restaurant Latuli in Houston. And, less known, rooms full of policy people deciding how the Gulf actually gets fished.
- Why he thinks the redfish fishery is in the best shape he’s seen in his career, and why almost nobody outside the industry knows it
- A real proposal for cutting aquaculture’s biggest cost problem in half, using something shrimp boats currently throw away for free
- The specific menu-writing rule he still uses today, learned running R&D inside one of the most systemized restaurant groups in the country: count every move a dish takes to plate
André Natera and Bryan Caswell cover what it was actually like working under Jean-Georges before he was a household name, why talent alone breaks the moment a chef has to build a kitchen from nothing instead of running an established one, the Gulf Coast bycatch program he pioneered at Reef that’s now industry standard, why he hasn’t touched red wine in a sauce in over two decades, and his return to Houston with Latuli, his first restaurant of his own since Reef closed.
It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.
Guest
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