Even Stars Eat Struggle Meals

Dear Pros,

You've got Kat this week and you're catching me as I high-five my 10-year-old self. Followers of the Tinfoil Swans podcast know that I begin each episode by asking my guest who they were at that age, because it often provides an early glimpse of the person they are today. At 10, cable TV had just come to my suburban block at long last, and I was completely in the thrall of MTV, I Love Lucy reruns, and the previous summer's blockbuster, Clash of the Titans. There's not a chance in Argos that I could have imagined I'd someday be sitting across from its star, Harry Hamlin, interviewing him about his open-source food company, line of jarred pasta sauces, the clean fusion energy company he co-founded almost 28 years ago — or that he'd be waxing rhapsodic about the smell of tomato leaves and the pickled beef tongue he ate as a kid.

But that's the thrill and surprise of these episodes — at least for me and I hope for listeners as well. Food, drinks, and hospitality are always the axis point, but in the whirl of conversation with chefs, celebrities, beverage experts, authors, and other leaders in the culinary sphere, so many deeply human details spin out.

In this week's episode, 2025 F&W Game Changer Ayesha Curry shares how she ate pineapple fried rice five nights a week when she was a teenager living on her own in Los Angeles, but skipped the shrimp because she was flat broke. On previous episodes, 2010 F&W Best New Chef Roy Choi explained the reason he uses the metaphor of a baked potato to describe how it feels to be a person of color in America, Bobby Flay revealed the reason a baby-sized chef's coat made him cry, and Top Chef star Kevin Gillespie shared how dealing with cancer has driven him to make fearless decisions at his restaurant.

And in the episode that will drop this Tuesday, you'll hear Oscar-winning actress Regina King spontaneously recite a childhood poem together with me — and then fight back tears as we talk about the power of a shared glass of wine to connect us with the spirits of people we love, who are no longer with us on Earth. It's a conversation that I haven't been able to get out of my head or my heart since we recorded it at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen this past June, and I hope you'll find as much beauty in it as I do.

Additional upcoming guests include Samin Nosrat, Padma Lakshmi, Edward Lee, our editor in chief Hunter Lewis (revealing the 2025 F&W Best New Chefs!), Paola Velez, and Angela Kinsey along with plenty more fascinating folks. New episodes air every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other feeds, and you can stream them from the Tinfoil Swans episode pages on foodandwine.com. And if you're attending the Food & Wine Classic in Charleston this November 14-16, you can catch a live recording of Tinfoil Swans with special guest Phil Rosenthal. I hear he likes beef tongue, too.

Swanningly yours,
Kat