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Director/EP/Showrunner. @chefstablenetflix AMANDA KNOX, TRIAL BY MEDIA, more! Partner: @supperclubstudios @starterculture.eu
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@studiomut
FRANCO PEPE: PIZZA CHEF — available now
please support your local bookstore ♥️🍕
26 Nov 2025
Copenhagen is known for fine dining, but this July after a few days in Italy (and a visit to 👑@magnusfaviken at Furuhem…), our short return to CPH was all about easy food, biking, coffee, cocktails, and generally, no reservations.
A couple newbies but mostly standby stops:
1. Morning buns at Juno (@juno_the_bakery) were the best they’ve ever been — crusty now instead of chewy like they used to be. And eight trillion tins of oat butter cookies secured.
2. The famous Juno Sugar Crows were out in full force.
3. And more buns, this time drowning in seeds at old standby the great Hart Bageri (@hartbageri one bien cuit please; miss you, @richardhartbaker).
4. Cocktails at Bird (@bird.cph) which my friends and I would love to open in Los Angeles, if anyone’s asking, listening, or is from Bird itself and wants to have a chat.
5. Bar Vitrine (@bar_vitrine) was closed (tears), so we hit Cabin (@cabincph), their Indian-inflected breakfast spot, with @timwendelboe coffee.
6. The cabin-like interior; get it?
7. Hot dogs, obviously, at John’s Hotdog Deli…
8. …and DØP.
9. Martin and Jesper’s famous chicken sandwich from The Bear at Poulette (@poulettecph)
10. Lunch at the delightful Auren’s Deli (@aurensdeli) where I had some truly wild apricot juice from La Ferme de Sept Lunes in France. Going through these photos reminded me, and now I’m hunting for a way to buy a case. Anyone have any leads?
11. A sweet pup outside Macrame after a three-coffee visit to @aprilcoffeecph and @iohanorum ❤️🙏☕️.
I wanted to pop into Kadeau to beg @nicolai_kadeau, @kyuminhahn and @pachambote for a quick bowl of the hot/cold smoked salmon (one of the most delicious dishes in the world), but that’ll have to wait for next time.
12. Ended with a sunset beer at Mikkeller looking out over the water, which is about as good as it gets.
Copenhagen in summer: nothing but a dream and an Uber Lime graveyard…
07 Nov 2026
A few years ago, my friend and Spanish food icon @patriciamateo and I joined forces to launch Starter Culture, a company dedicated to helping our favorite chefs, entrepreneurs and restaurateurs reach larger audiences.
This week, we have the delight of officially opening our debut project, @ultramarinosmarinmadrid.
My first meal at Ultramarinos in Barcelona will always be a favorite memory — an incredible lunch with Patricia and friend/food world legend @mdgoulding, tasting our way through UM’s whole menu. Right away, it became one of my favorite places to eat in the world, and it’s since become my most visited restaurant in Spain.
@bor_jamon_iberico and the Ultramarinos family (including @gonzaloguz, now the head chef in Madrid) have done away with pretense and ego, while simultaneously making some of the most deceptively simple and craveable food anywhere on the planet. The joy of eating at a delicious restaurant with no bullshit!
So it made sense that when we kicked off work with Starter Culture, Ultramarinos was one of our fantasy partners.
Then, earlier this year, the opportunity arose; Patricia and I were thrilled. What a privilege to be part of helping Borja grow Ultramarinos through Starter Culture and our operations and finance company, Picnic Ops (with our wonderful partners @ifernandezsa and @mereazpe).
As Borja says, “EL LUJO HA MUERTO.
EL ÚNICO LUJO HOY ES LO ARTESANO.”
LUXURY IS DEAD.
THE ONLY LUXURY TODAY IS THE HANDMADE.
That’s at the heart of everything Ultramarinos has always stood for; in 2026, it’s not a throwback — it’s the avant-garde.
Come see us at @ultramarinosmarinmadrid. Can’t wait to feed you the good stuff.
06 Nov 2026
How much do you know about balsamic vinegar? I knew nothing before I visited…
ACETAIA SAN GIACOMO
Novellara, Emilia-Romagna
Andrea Bezzecchi is dedicated to “balsamico fermentato, non miscelato.” Fermented, not blended.
Why? Because most of what we know as balsamic vinegar (like the quite glamorous sounding “Aceto Balsamico di Modena IGP”) is made fast in mass quantities (dare I say… industrial?), usually by blending cooked grape must, inexpensive wine vinegar and caramel (for color, texture, and sweetness). It’s a bit of a trompe-l’œil: the LOOK of age, in only 60 days. Maybe trompe-la-bouche is the better term: the cheaper bottle buys you a shortcut, and less flavor. Roughly 95 million liters of IGP are made a year, versus about 10-15K of the old fashioned stuff.
What you actually want, when you’re searching out some sexy balsamic to drizzle over freshly churned gelato, as all humans enjoying life should do (am I revealing my privilege? Is this my Alice Waters egg spoon on 60 Minutes moment?), is properly fermented, long-aged grape goodness, with at LEAST 12 years in barrels. That’s a must (sorry, pun intended). The name: Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena/Reggio Emilia DOP. As the Consorteria dell’Aceto Balsamico Naturale describes it:
Its COLOR is a deep, glossy dark brown, and its DENSITY shows in a proper, flowing syrupiness.
Its AROMA is complex and penetrating, with a clear but harmonious acidity.
Its FLAVOR is inimitable, a well-balanced sweet and sour.
Andrea is a maniacal, devoted protector of the traditional method. He’s built a real business on micro production, working with many of Italy’s great chefs (@diegorossichef, @sarahcicolini and @nikoromito, to name a few). He’s also bent his own rules to create a few non-industrial, affordable products. His saba, cooked must that’s not fermented, is a standout. Andrea sent me to @ostreriafratellipavesi to try both over panna cotta; somehow, the simpler saba was the ticket.
Over a rapid-fire tour and an espresso with Andrea, the lights went on. I thought, I GET BALSAMIC VINEGAR. Now, I hope you do too.
Go track down some @acetaiasangiacomo. In 🇺🇸, it’s at @gustiamo. You won’t regret it.
28 Oct 2026
I went in search of more of Piacenza’s iconic tortelli con la coda and met another gelato fundamentalist.
IL POGGIO
Travo, Piacenza
I found @vinodelpoggio through an Instagram story from my boy Giacomo at Fratelli Pavesi: an agriturismo and winery above Piacenza from Andrea Cervini, one of the pioneers of Piacenza’s natural wine scene.
The restaurant has recently evolved from farmhouse cooking to something more, thanks to a group of young chefs, including one of Andrea’s daughters, Carolina (on pasta, from her grandmother’s recipes), and Emanuele Roda, who cooked at Pavesi (of course) and abroad. My new friend Francesco Barbieri runs the room.
In classic fashion, I showed up early and sat awkwardly on the patio, reading in the heat with my M11 on the table, hoping to intrude on the tortelli making for a few pictures. I lasted about 20 minutes before overheating and retreating to my room. The pasta, I later found out, had already been made.
Dinner started with an omelette of wild herbs, then Carolina’s tortelli, and a delicious, clever spaghetti in parmesan-miso sauce (Noma’s fermentation book sits next to an antique meat slicer here, tradition and technique in tandem). After perfectly cooked duck, I moved back to the patio for an outstanding gelato. Francesco got me the simple and pure recipe, and Emanuele offered a warning: I could add vanilla and lemon if I wanted to ruin it. Francesco said “Emanuele is a fundamentalist.”
After dessert, Francesco and I got to chatting more and soon he brought out a slab of INSANE pecorino from the late, legendary cheesemaker @gregoriorotolo: aged, funky and crazily delicious, with cherry mostarda that had real mustard heat. Then grappa and sbrisolona, crumbly cookies packed with hazelnuts and almonds that I can’t wait to make back in LA.
This is crazily inexpensive, high quality cooking from talented young chefs who’ll eventually open their own places and become far more famous. For now, it’s there for anyone who chooses to seek it out.
Oh, and on my way to the airport, Francesco kindly sent me process shots of Carolina making tortelli… 💪
Grazie Francesco, Carolina, Emanuele and the whole Il Poggio squadra.
27 Oct 2026
KOMAL
Los Angeles, CA
Komal is one of the first places I take visitors when I want to explain what’s great about eating in Los Angeles. Not only is it freaking delicious, but I love the uncompromising, hardworking yet egoless ethos of what Fátima and Conrado and their kitchen of badass Guatemalan women are building here in LA: first as masa and tortilla suppliers to a number of the best Mexican restaurants in town; then, in 2024, opening Komal in Mercado La Paloma; this year, adding Komal Molino next door, where they sell masa, salsas and excellent quesillo to take home. And now, as of this month, a tasting menu on Monday nights.
The tasting menu takes what Fátima does at Komal during the day, cooking with heirloom corn varietals from all over Mexico, and pushes it past masa. There are corn drinks, corn desserts, puffed corn, roasted baby corn and, at the end of the meal, a show-and-tell where Fátima and Conrado bring over a jewelry case holding dozens of corn varietals. If Komal wasn’t already a hub of culinary corn exploration, it has now gone full cob.
The menu also gives a permanent home to Fátima’s elegant cochinita pibil, which crowns a tamal drowned in fermented habanero and charred plantain salsa. I can’t wait to see what F and C and the whole Komal team do next — they’re a big part of makes LA’s food scene special in 2026.
1. Cochinita Pibil tamal with fermented habanero and charred plantain salsa.
2. Aguachile Negro.
3. Enchilada Verde.
4. Nicuatole, cochineal, berry sauce, cacao, and corn shortbread crumble.
5. Petit Fours including a delicious tiny concha.
6. The Komal Heirloom Corn Jewelry Box.
23 Oct 2026
Hanging with Giacomo Pavesi after a leisurely lunch at Ostreria Fratelli Pavesi, I picked his brain for where else I should eat. He ran through a few spots across the country he thought I might like, then got excited. I had to go see a legend, right away... Gianni D’Amato.
D’AMATO OSTERIA
Arceto, Emilia-Romagna
Giacomo told me the story: Gianni had 2 Michelin stars at his restaurant Il Rigoletto, before tragedy struck in 2012 — the Emilia earthquakes destroyed the villa that housed it. Rigoletto closed, and the D’Amato family had to start over. Itinerant years followed — pop-ups, a spot along the Ligurian/Tuscan coast near where Gianni grew up, another restaurant in E-R — before, in 2024, Gianni opened a casual spot with his wife Fulvia and son Federico: @damatosteria.
Giacomo called Gianni and made me a booking. Then he said actually, he’d come with me for lunch.
We had a feast. I think we ran the whole menu and then some (a twist on erbazzone made with filo dough, gnoc frit with culaccia, tagliatelle al ragù with pasta made from 40 yolks), had a bottle of amazing Jura that Giacomo brought, and hung with the family. I dipped in and out of the kitchen taking photos (on this hot summer day, it was easily 120 degrees in there), and Fulvia filled me in on the epic father/son battles over the menu (she brings headphones so she can zone out and watch Netflix when things get heated).
A few days later, on my way out of Italy, I bumped into the D’Amatos at lunch (once again at OFP) and dug deeper into the father/son dynamic. I asked each of the men their favorite dish the other made. Federico answered immediately: his dad’s bollito. Gianni took a moment, named something of Federico’s, then corrected himself, a twinkle in his eye: “actually though, that’s my idea...” Both men laughed, Federico rolling his eyes at me as if to say, “You see what I’m dealing with?”
As the family writes on their website, D’Amato is a new beginning, a place to share their love for cooking, which “isn’t just a legacy passed down from Gianni and Fulvia to Federico, but also where they’ve shared precious moments, grown together, and faced life’s challenges.” Amen.
18 Oct 2026
Revisited some of my favorite restaurants in Italy this summer, and I’d like you to visit them too. As always, most of everything I do in 🇮🇹 is because the great @faithwilli told me to.
ANTICHI SAPORI
Montegrosso, Puglia
Chef @pietrozito_antichisapori serves a delicious, affordable (about €50pp for a wild feast) exploration of Puglian peasant food traditions sourced mostly from his next-door kitchen garden. The orecchiette is one of my favorite pasta dishes in Italy, this visit served with a sauce of zucchini stems and leaves and accompanied by shavings of ricotta salata and a dab of tomato.
VILLA ROSA DI NONNA ROSA
Vico Equense, Campania
@peppeguidachef, the king of dried pasta, rules at his summer home at Villa Rosa in the hills above the Sorrento coast. Peppe knows I’m one of the only psychos who can handle as much pasta as he can put out, so when I visit our tradition is to go deep on primi. The best (as I’ve droned on about previously) is the spaghettini all’acqua di limone e provolone del Monaco, which is cooked in a single pan, the pasta barely covered with lemon water, starch slowly emulsifying until the liquid and pasta become one. I love Peppe, Rossella and the whole Guida family.
PEPE IN GRANI
Caiazzo, Campania
I’ve said all I need to say about my friend @francopepeingrani and this temple of pizza that’s worth a journey from any corner of the globe. As always, so happy to return to Franco’s world.
OSTRERIA FRATELLI PAVESI
Piacenza, Emilia-Romagna
Giacomo Pavesi runs my newest obsession in Emilia-Romagna, @ostreriafratellipavesi, which combines my favorite kind of hospitality (unpretentious and fucking passionate), delicious pastas (don’t skip the tagliolini with local sturgeon), on-point meat cookery (rare in Italy), and a great wine cellar full of modestly priced gems. Giacomo’s passion for food makes mine seem like child’s play.
LA BRINCA
Ne, Liguria
The Circella family has been cooking classic Ligurian dishes at @la_brinca, up a valley above Chiavari since 1987, and it’s got one of Italy’s greatest wine cellars. This visit, their famous hand-pounded pesto was served over mandilli, rippling handkerchiefs of fresh pasta.
16 Oct 2026
PSA: for maximum gelato happiness, always check your Instagram DM requests.
MOKAMBO GELATERIA
Ruvo di Puglia
After landing in the fiery pits of hell (aka Puglia in July), the only thing that could cool me off was gelato.
I opened my Italy Google Map, an unwieldy behemoth of 700-odd pins, and boom: I’d saved @mokambogelateria, in the tiny town of Ruvo di Puglia. Only one problem: they were closed.
On a lark, I checked their Instagram, and there it was: a DM they’d sent me three years earlier. OH, SHIT! I apologized and asked if, somehow, they were working today... 15 minutes later, Vincenzo, one of the owners, was unlocking the shop. What a world 🙏⚡️❤️💪!
Over a full tasting, V told us the Mokambo story: in 1840, a gelato was created for King Ferdinand II by his pastry chef. The recipe was passed down, eventually making its way to Vincenzo’s great-great-uncle Luigi, who built the original Mokambo around it. Crema del Re. But everyone soon fell for colorful, industrial junk, and Mokambo closed in 1998. 18 years later, a new generation of the family — Giuliana, then a law student, and Vincenzo, a consultant in Rome — decided gelato would be their life and, with their Uncle Franco’s help, brought Mokambo back to life. And they went ALL IN.
Every gelato is laser focused on purity of flavor. Blame the psychotic sourcing, with no stabilizers used or shortcuts taken. Pastured milk from the Alta Murgia, eggs (their own label), and the only vaguely industrial product in the shop, organic sugar. Six vanillas of various origins are used depending on what flavor they’re making. Plus bean-to-chocolate done in house from some 30 cacao varieties. My favorite flavors were the elite, soulful nut gelatos made from hazelnuts from Piedmont, pistachios from Bronte, and local Ruvo almonds.
Vincenzo describes their mission as “to share the pleasure of real gelato, spoon by spoon.” Franco, on the other hand, laughingly says they make “ice cream for assholes, because only an asshole would make this much fuss over an ice cream.”
Obsessives making gelato for assholes, from a recipe that seduced a King. 🍨
#gelato #puglia #ruvodipuglia
08 Oct 2026
My friend @aithor_zabala says I love Italy too much (classic Spaniard). So you can imagine my delight when I had the luck of sitting down to dinner at Somni only to find a GLORIOUS, GLORIOUS pizza. Well, sort of a pizza… a pizza made out of meringue.
SOMNI (***) West Hollywood, CA
Like everything at @somnirestaurant, what’s behind the tongue-in-cheek “pizza” is a ton of TIME — like, decades of work.
Twenty years ago, Aitor was running the kitchen at Alkimia in Barcelona when he decided to take a demotion to learn from Ferran Adrià at the now-iconic, then-revolutionary El Bulli in Roses.
He stayed at EB for four years, but the relevant part of those years here is the six months he spent making, by his own telling, basically nothing but meringues. Not meringues for a dish — meringues as creative exploration. Meringues with egg whites, without egg whites, meringues made with gelatins, combined with other proteins, with and without emulsifiers, and so on — half a year exploring what the hell meringues could be. That’s what it takes for mastery.
So of course Aitor, now, 20 years later, one of the leading voices in American food and one of only two chefs with three Michelin stars in LA, has a pizza made of meringue on the menu. Meringues are always on the menu.
What makes me winkingly scrunch up my nose, as an Italian obsessive, is that Aitor doesn’t even freaking like pizza. He’ll eat one if he has to, but he doesn’t CRAVE it (he needs to go see @francopepeingrani, right? Collab alert?). He just knows the rest of the world loves pizza, so he made one that isn’t one, which feels like something in between an attack and a devoted, delicious homage. Tomato water, Ibérico (of course), caviar and two decades of hard ass work.
Jokes aside, we’re in the middle of an exhausting debate about fine dining that misses the point. When you go to a place like Somni, you’re not ticking a box, celebrating its three stars, or judging its place on a silly list. You’re eating to understand what someone’s life experience has been, translated into creativity, pleasure, and, of course, a meringue pizza.
It’s a dream. Even if Aitor’s wrong about my obsession with Italy.
04 Oct 2026
This is the last week of David Wilcox’s @tworosela. Will miss having David and the crew in the neighborhood.
I first became friends with DW way back in 2017, when he opened Journeymen in Atwater Village. That spot was criminally underappreciated from the jump, mixing great vegetable cooking with serious sourdough. Even though it got one of @the_thejgold last raves (“old-school Julia Child-style [cooking]”), it wasn’t enough to make it work.
In classic Wilcox-ian problem-solving fashion, DW flipped Journeymen into Hail Mary Pizza, and it saved the business. He then somehow survived the pandemic, launched one of the elite brunch programs in the country (though no one was ever there for it — shame on you, Atwater Village), and kept baking the best bread in LA. But gradually, he started to fall out of love with the work.
So David sold Hail Mary, and took his curiosity on the road, biking across the country and wandering through Europe and Morocco visiting friends and taking on odd jobs. There wasn’t an end goal in mind. David’s a seeker — in search of something ephemeral, whether it be in nature or food or books, that would unlock another part of what the hell our purpose is. He’s also at home living in the moment; I’m jealous. Eventually, though, it was time to go back to work. To my great delight and gentle bemusement, David violated every promise he’d made when he sold HMP and returned to LA to open Two Rose and bake bread.
Two Rose gradually caught on, then seemingly overnight became a sensation, with lines down the block for breads, @demonicahh’s psychotically large and delicious pastries, and the non-bullshit-y sense of community David cultivates naturally. Suddenly, he was on the cutting edge of the “whole grain revolution.” 🤣 I do think it’s worth saying how idiotic it is that it took him saying he was going to close for lines to really go crazy, but at the same time, it was awesome to see the world finally recognize his skills and craft.
This Sunday is the last service before David closes the doors to Two Rose and heads off on another adventure, but, if the past is any indication, there’s no need to say a permanent goodbye just yet…
21 Aug 2026
It’s the PM of day three in Chengdu, and I’ve been put to work scooping beans onto drying trays at a soy sauce factory. I’m feigning real commitment while six Chinese gentlemen film me on their phones — TV director turned master scooper. Am I a fool, a tourist dropping in on agricultural work for a photo op, or does my presence somehow contribute to keeping a traditional craft alive?
On Chef’s Table, we’ve often told the story of a chef translating an old tradition through a modern lens. To capture the origin of that process, we ignore today’s industry and go in search of craftspeople still doing things the traditional way. That exposure has grown my fascination with how things worked before our world got so damn fast.
Thankfully, Qinou and his friends are plugged into the budding artisanal craft world in Chengdu, and arranged a few side trips for me.
Master Ke Yang runs an old-school sauce operation. He hand-mixes with jiàngqū, ages the mash in clay jars out in a field, and opens and cement-mixes (proper comp) the mixture over months. Eventually, umami is born. After the tour (self-awarded gold star), we took a group photo at the cutout.
The tofu spot shares DNA: local soybeans, traditional stone mill, lǔshuǐ to set the curd instead of industrial lye. The father-son team and their soy-bloated kittens ran me through it, then the humans cooked a wood-fired chicken stew for lunch. Turns out I was the dress rehearsal for the tourist visits they’re about to start. A+, thumbs up, I raved. Then I asked Dad to pose with a glass of steaming soy milk.
Later, I pinged @stcavish to ask if China is headed the direction we’ve gone — shitty pizza labeled “artisan” to sell a few more pies. Not yet, he said. In China, fetishization of artisanal production is still quaint; it wasn’t long ago everything was artisanal out of necessity. Today the priority is progress and growth. As Chris put it, “China can be very nostalgic and extremely unsentimental at the same time. The pace of change breeds nostalgia, but the force of change doesn’t let anyone wallow in it.”
Ironically then, transforming craft into tourism may be a form of preservation. I guess it’s okay playing the fool.
13 Aug 2026
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