Chef's PSA

Leslie Brenner is the founder of Leslie Brenner Concepts, a restaurant PR and creative direction firm in Dallas, and the former restaurant critic and dining editor of The Dallas Morning News. She also writes the Substack Leslie Brenner on Restaurants. A four-star review made André Natera one of the hottest chefs in Dallas. A later

Jules Wiringa is the Dutch chef behind Jules Cooking, which publishes fine dining recipes and technique videos made for chefs. He came up in Michelin-starred kitchens, became a sous chef at a two-Michelin-star restaurant, and has been making cooking videos for 16 years, starting with a pasta dough made with a whisk at age 15.

Jess Pryles returns with more meat science. She is a live fire cook, the founder of Hardcore Carnivore, and the author of Prime Cuts, a 288 page guide to choosing, understanding, and cooking meat with more than 100 recipes built cut by cut. She holds a Graduate Certificate in Meat Science from Iowa State University

Christophe De Lellis is chef and partner at Mamani in Dallas, a French restaurant with an Italian accent that earned a Michelin star in 2025, less than two months after opening, and kept it in the 2026 guide. Before Dallas he spent 13 years at Joël Robuchon Las Vegas. He arrived in 2010 as a

Paid partnership with Toast. This episode ends with a sponsored bonus segment on menu pricing, built on data from Toast’s Menu Price Monitor and their free Menu Checker tool. Check your menu against the market → https://biz.toasttab.com/us1XN Sarah McIntosh is the chef-owner of epicerie in Austin, open on Hancock Drive since 2012 and running 450

Abraham Salum has one rule he wishes every restaurant would adopt. A friend of his makes everyone pile their phones in the middle of the table before dinner starts. First person to reach for theirs pays the bill. Nobody ever touches their phone. That same instinct for reading a room runs through the whole conversation.

Nick Walker is an FSR 40 Under 40 chef who oversaw the James Beard nominated Meridian and now leads 11 Whiskey Cake locations across Texas and Florida. He started in a kitchen at 15, under the table, and cut his thumb open on his first real shift when a slamming office door caught his hand

Tim Laielli will not call himself a chef. He is clear about it every time someone assumes otherwise, including his own father, who is one. Eighteen months after posting his first cooking video, Tim was on set cooking against professional chefs for Gordon Ramsay on Next Level Chef. He built Bare Food Tim, over a

Matt Lambert earned a Michelin star at The Musket Room in New York in four months, a goal he’d given himself three years to hit. He describes what followed as treating the star like a religion, the Church of Michelin, and says he’s never felt that emotional high again, chasing it in different forms for

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,