Francis Lam

Our contributor Shauna Sever is a fantastic baker who didn’t have to think for even a second when we recently asked her who she’s a super fan of. Her answer: Maida Heatter. Heatter’s cookbooks have inspired countless home bakers and pastry chefs. She was over 100 years old at the time we recorded this interview with Shauna, and sadly, Maida passed away a few weeks later. But Shauna’s love for her lives on! She talks with Francis Lam about why she was drawn to Maida’s work and her recipes, and ab…

If we were to walk around and ask random people, “Who’s your cooking hero?” we bet we wouldn’t have to go far before someone said, Melissa Clark. A star on The New York Times food page for years, author of dozens of cookbooks, and soon to be your new favorite podcaster -- more on that below -- she is a master of knowing exactly what you want to eat before you know you want to eat it. We thought it would be great to talk to her about the recipes she is a superfan of; turns out she is quite fond o…

It probably goes without saying that Houston is one of the great capitals of Mexican cooking in the U.S., and one of the finest Mexican chefs in Houston is Hugo Ortega. An immigrant from Mexico, he started his career as a dishwasher and has come to be a James Beard award-winning chef. Every time I’ve eaten at one of his restaurants, which he owns with wife Tracy Vaught, I’ve been blown away by the thoughtfulness of the cooking, and the depth of his flavors. And so we were thrilled to be invited…

We began this year’s Thanksgiving evening, Discovering Thanksgiving with Four American Chefs, with Ann Kim, the chef-owner of Young Joni, Pizzeria Lola, and Hello Pizza in Minneapolis. I mean, if a Korean immigrant becoming a James Beard award-winning pizza chef in the midwest isn’t an American story, you tell me what is. I sat down with Ann to talk about her first Thanksgiving after coming to America and how the sacrifices of her family has shaped the chef she’s become. She also shared recipe f…

For years, the Indian-born chef Maneet Chauhan ran the kitchen of an absolutely delicious restaurant in New York called Vermilion. It eventually closed, I missed her food, and for years I watched her as a judge on the show Chopped, and I figured she might have left restaurants for a life in media. And then I learned that she’d actually moved to Nashville, and built a whole collection of restaurants there, marrying flavors from India and inspiration from the South and around the world. And I’d he…

There are tons of phenomenal Mexican restaurants in Los Angeles, but you might guess that one of the greatest is in Koreatown. It’s called Guelaguetza, and it was opened as a place for the Oaxacan community to find a taste of where they came from. Eventually the late, great restaurant critic Jonathan Gold called it “The best Oaxacan restaurant in the United States.” Bricia Lopez grew up in that restaurant, taking it over when her parents moved back to Mexico, and is bringing their love of their…

If you step into a cool cocktail bar today, chances are they have drinks made from mezcal, a Mexican spirit with an intense, roasted, smoky flavor. But just a decade ago, barely anyone in America had heard of it. You could call it the hot new thing in bartending, except that it’s hundreds of years old. And in Oaxaca, it’s much more than that. Bricia Lopez, who’s been called the Mezcal Queen of Los Angeles, is the owner, with her family, of Guelaguetza restaurant in Los Angeles. She talked with Francis Lam about the cultural and spiritual importance that mezcal plays in Oaxaca. Try her recipe for the mezcal cocktail Pasión de Oaxaca from her book Oaxaca: Home Cooking From the Heart of Mexico.

To Damira Inatullaeva and her Uzbek roots, cooking is not simply cooking, it is a way of socializing and sharing knowledge. So, we were excited when we were recently invited into her home to learn to make a very special dish. Damira is a retired cardiologist and her husband Sahib Aminov was a professor of Central Asian history at the University of Samarkand; they came to the U.S. from Uzbekistan seven years ago. Damira now teaches Uzbek cooking classes in her Brooklyn home as part of the League…

Saliha Mahmood Ahmed is a doctor in London, who turned her passion for cooking into a winning appearance on the British TV show Masterchef. Then, she turned her other passion, for culinary history, into Khazana, a cookbook of dishes inspired by the long-defunct Mughal empire. Yes, the empire that conquered Central Asia through north India, and built the Taj Mahal. But, what do we know about their food? The multitalented and ever-curious Saliha joined Francis Lam to tell us all about it. You can…

There are a lot of questions and concerns right now around the coronavirus and the safety of our food. The science behind all of this is an everchanging field of study, but we wanted to learn the current findings and recommendations for keeping safe not only with home-cooked food and delivery, but also when out in public shopping for food and grabbing take-out from restaurants. We learned a lot from food science writer J. Kenji López-Alt. He is the Chief Culinary Advisor of Serious Eats and the…