Chef's PSA

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera makes the case that the food on your plate needs a story to reach its full potential. A dish can be technically perfect and still fail to connect with a guest if there is nothing behind it that the guest can understand, feel, or remember. The best […]

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera addresses the gap between what chefs say about using local products and what actually shows up on their plates. The word “local” has become a marketing fixture in the restaurant industry, appearing on menus and in chef interviews with a frequency that has outpaced the actual practice

Episode Overview In this Q&A episode, André Natera answers listener questions covering a range of topics from his own hiring standards to his perspective on the future of the culinary industry and the role of music in a professional kitchen environment. These are the kinds of questions that reveal how an experienced executive chef actually

Episode Overview In this Q&A episode, André Natera answers listener questions in the third installment of the Chef’s PSA Q&A series, tackling questions about getting promoted, developing speed on the line, and pushing through the obstacles that slow most culinary careers down. These are among the most practically useful questions in the series, because every

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera covers one of the most overlooked decisions in restaurant design: selecting the right plates. Most operators treat plateware as a purchasing decision rather than a culinary one, and the result is food that fights its vessel instead of being elevated by it. The right plate for your

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera walks through how to survive and navigate your first days and weeks in a new kitchen. Every new kitchen is a different ecosystem with its own culture, hierarchy, unwritten rules, and personalities, and walking in blind is one of the most reliable ways to undermine yourself before

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera explores the world of chef and cooking competitions, from the most prestigious international stages to the television formats that have brought competitive cooking to mainstream audiences. Competitions occupy a complicated place in culinary culture: they can accelerate careers, build skills under extreme pressure, and create visibility that

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera takes an early and direct look at how artificial intelligence will change the culinary industry, using his own experience experimenting with OpenAI and ChatGPT as the starting point. He used the technology to write 100 recipes and documents his honest assessment of what it produced, what it

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera talks about the mental blocks that show up in a culinary career and what actually moves them. Creativity blocks, confidence blocks, the kind of paralysis that hits when you are not performing at your best and cannot identify why, these are not unique to chefs but they

Episode Overview In this solo episode, André Natera takes on one of the most debated questions in professional cooking: can a chef succeed without using recipes, and will they fail if they do not use them? He takes a steel man approach, building the strongest possible case for both sides rather than defaulting to the