Chef Bios
After working on set in Panna’s studio kitchen, I profiled them for the website. Click through to view their recipes, which I also edited.
Andrew Zimmern
You know him for his fearlessness: From bats to bladders, Andrew Zimmern has eaten all sorts of oddities in over 150 countries on his Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods. But Zimmern has more than an iron stomach: He’s also a journalist, a businessman, and a damn good cook.
“I love food,” he says, adding, “What I love even more is food with a story.”
And the story of how he became one of America’s food moguls is just as bizarre as the things he loves to eat.
As a young chef in the ‘90s, Zimmern was on the fast track to success, cooking in New York City restaurants helmed by Anne Rosenzweig, Joachim Splichal, and Thomas Keller. He helped open and run a dozen restaurants—but he was also an addict and an alcoholic. Eventually he lost his apartment, and lived for a year on the streets, stealing to support himself. His friends intervened and sent him to a rehab program in Minneapolis, where afterward he found a job as a dishwasher at Café Un Deux Trois. One day, when a line cook missed his shift, Zimmern took over his station; seven weeks later, he was executive chef. During his six-year tenure, he transformed the restaurant into a thriving bistro.
His reputation caught the attention of local news stations, which eventually led to regular appearances as the “in-house chef” on HGTV’s early slate of programming produced in Minnesota. In 1997, he sent a pilot to the Travel Channel for a show that eventually became Bizarre Foods, and hasn’t stopped traveling the world, mouth first, since then.
Along the way he’s gobbled guinea pig in Peru, grasshoppers in Oaxaca, and pufferfish in Japan—while also getting nominated by the James Beard Awards for his blog and rising to the top of Adweek’s “30 Most Influential People in Food.” His strange snacking habits, however, are not just for shock value. Zimmern is all about demystifying and destigmatizing the culinary traditions of other cultures. “I have absolutely no qualms about eating somebody’s pet,” he says. “Or their perception of pet; that’s a cultural totem… If we just took one or two meals a week from those animal groups...it would be a radical quick fix to some of our food problems.”
You’d expect a lauded chef and insectivore like Zimmern to cook rarefied recipes, but as a Midwesterner at heart (and a Panna contributor), he sticks to familiar flavors he grew up with: flattened slices of white bread wrap his crunchy, fried crab rolls; chunks of kielbasa add smoky depth to his grandmother’s split pea soup; and his homemade corned beef tastes like (dare we say, better than?) the Jewish deli classic. We know you’ll definitely fall in love with this kind of grub, versus the actual grubs we’re used to watching him eat.
Daniel Boulud
How many chefs can trace their first restaurant job back to a countess? Daniel Boulud, winner of half a dozen James Beard Awards and owner of multiple Michelin-starred restaurants, can.
Appropriately enough for a chef who shows a reverence for great ingredients, Boulud began his life on a farm: “There was a certain connection to everything,” he recalls about growing up on a 60-acre plot near Lyon. He was surrounded by vegetables, orchards, chickens, and cows—and it was there that his grandmother first taught him to cook, at a small café attached to the ranch. For years, he’d deliver fresh milk and eggs to a countess, who eventually heard about his dream of becoming a chef. She placed a call to the chef at Nandron, a two-starred restaurant in the city, to get Boulud a job. Only three years later, at just 17, he was awarded Best Culinary Apprentice in France by the Maitres Cuisiniers de France.
From that point on, Boulud charged through the cosmos of France’s Michelin-starred restaurants on a meteoric rise: he worked for Georges Blanc, Roger Vergé, and Michel Guérard, some of the greatest French chefs of our time. After his first experience working abroad in Copenhagen’s Plaza Hotel, Boulud took an even further leap to Washington, D.C., as the private chef to the Ambassador of the European Commission. But Boulud couldn’t contain his ambitions within a private kitchen, so he soon made a break for NYC, where he cooked alongside Thomas Keller at the Polo Lounge.
From there, it’s easy to run down Boulud’s impressive resume, from his six career James Beard Foundation awards to the expansion of his restaurant empire from Singapore to Miami, London and beyond. But you can't eat glitz and panache! Instead, find proof of his genius and culinary mastery in his refined, custardy French omelette; Basque-style cod simmered in tomato-chorizo sauce; salade niçoise drizzled with his grandmother’s garlic vinaigrette; and luscious chocolate soufflés that tremble on your spoon.
French cuisine is all about technique. These dishes, in particular, can be challenging to make if each step isn't carried out just right; with written instructions alone, it can be hard to achieve the best results. That's why video instruction from a perfectionist like Boulud is a rare gift. Simply press play to plunge into his delectable universe, and you'll amaze yourself by what you can accomplish with Boulud's help.
Vivian Howard
Vivian Howard, chef-owner of Chef & the Farmer in North Carolina, was a locavore way before it was cool. As a daughter of tobacco- and hog-farming parents, she ate with the ebb and flow of seasons in her hometown, Deep Run, North Carolina. But as an aspiring journalist, her dreams felt too big for butter beans and biscuits: she was plotting an escape to New York. “I just wanted night to sound like car horns and people instead of frogs and crickets,” she writes in her James Beard Award-nominated cookbook, Deep Run Roots.
After college, Howard got a job in advertising, but when she found herself hiding on a vacant floor to take naps during her lunch break, she quit and finally gave in to her passion for food. From a server at Greenwich Village’s Voyage, she worked her way up to being a member of the opening team at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market.
But eventually, Howard's roots called her back home, where she opened Chef & the Farmer to preserve, stew and transform the foods of her childhood into her own cuisine. The intimate relationship between chef, ingredients, and hometown became the subject of “A Chef’s Life,” the Peabody and Daytime Emmy award-winning series that also earned her a James Beard Award for Outstanding Personality/Host in 2016. “The ingredients are characters who shape my life," she writes. "Eastern North Carolina is my Tuscany, my Szechuan, my Provence.” Of course, hints of Italy make themselves known in her crunchy endive salad with Parmesan and pine nuts, while Southeast France peeks through in her spicy fish stew.
Like Howard herself, her dishes may start out local, but they succumb to wanderlust. The recipes she’s made for Panna are no exception: BLT Dip, a blissful concoction that reimagines the flavors of an iconic American sandwich, includes a touch of tarragon and anchovy; her glazed pecans—aka "Viv's Addiction"—are tossed in a powerful mix of paprika, cumin, chipotle, and coriander. We can't wait for you to turn Howard's kaleidoscopic Southern dishes into traditions of your own.
Gabriel Orta
Like any successful cocktail, there's a formula for a successful mixologist: Combine equal parts mad scientist and artist with a few strong dashes of ambition. But there’s successful and there’s incredible. To concoct the latter, you need Gabriel Orta, co-owner of Miami’s Broken Shaker.
This is the guy, after all, who invented the Chorizo Cordial, a sweet-and-smoldering distillation of the Mexican sausage into cocktail form. This is the guy who turns Cocoa Puffs into an Old Fashioned, and who may be the first bartender to deploy a hashtag in a drink name: the #ShakerLife Punch.
But it’s not all whimsy here. Orta understands that a great cocktail is more than just cleverness: It’s “ingredients, good spirits, technique, glassware, but most important, balance,” he says.
Orta, who grew up in Colombia and Hawaii, set off on the road to greatness early on. “I got here by working my ass off since I was 15,” he said. Along the way, he’s held “every position in F&B from barback to dishwasher and cook.” He’s especially proud to have cooked a vegetarian meal for Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys at the Tibet Freedom Concert in San Francisco.
With his business partner, Elad Zvi, Orta opened Broken Shaker as the first pop-up bar in Miami, in 2012. Their signature drinks, stirred with custom-made ice and fresh herbs snipped straight from the garden, were among the first such cocktails in the Miami bar scene—and launched the trend there. The 30-day pop-up turned into a mainstay at the Freehand Miami Hotel (and now ranks #16 on the World’s 50 Best Bars list), and has since expanded to Los Angeles and Chicago. Orta and Zvi also co-founded Bar Lab, an agency that helps clients, from American Airlines to the W Hotel, craft innovative hospitality experiences and creative beverage programs.
Orta’s cocktails may be Wonka-esque, but he says his spirit spirit is mezcal: “Like me, it’s smoky, rare, and delicious.” It’s a rare and delicious opportunity to have Orta on Panna, and when you stir up his cocktails, you’ll sip the exquisiteness, too.
Anthony Sasso
Saffron-golden paellas, melt-in-your-mouth cured meats, seafood sizzled a la plancha: the seductiveness of Spanish cuisine is like a siren, and can make a chef go mad—in a good way. Anthony Sasso, executive chef at La Sirena’s tapas bar, is living proof.
At La Sirena (appropriately, it means “siren” in Spanish), Sasso has plunged himself into a world of pungent raw garlic aiolis, paper-thin jamón slices, seared head-on shrimp shimmering with salt.
But let's start at the beginning: Sasso's love affair with Spanish food was sparked by a post-college trip to a small village in Catalunya to reconnect with distant family members. The amazing food he ate there led him to the Institute of Culinary Education back in the States, to pursue what he came to recognize as his culinary calling. Bar Jamón, the sister restaurant of tapas restaurant, Casa Mono, was his professional home before Casa Mono snagged him as a prep cook.
But soon enough, his memories of Spain lured him back to a famed marisqueria in Barcelona, El Hogar Gallego, where Sasso dedicated himself to becoming a disciple of Catalan specialties. After a year of learning, cooking, and eating, he returned to Casa Mono as Chef de Cuisine with a notebook and head brimming with ideas for tapas. With his help, the restaurant earned its first-ever Michelin star—and the attention of Mario Batali.
Sasso remembers his secret back-room meeting with one of the stars of the food world very clearly: “He’s waiting, super-Godfather style. He wouldn’t tell me anything over the phone except that he was going to switch things up a lot at Sirena.” And Sasso was going to play a huge role.
Sasso brought his whimsy to Sirena’s tapas bar, crafting far-out dishes like the jamón de la Bellota globe, his wink at the classic prosciutto-melon combo: cured meat is draped over a Himalayan salt candleholder, fitted with a tea-light made of rich lard. Diners dip their toast into the molten fat before nibbling on a piece of cantaloupe “crack candy.” For dessert: apricot panna cotta, dramatically decked with blackberry “caviar.”
Though Wonka-fying Spanish cuisine is one of his strong suits, Sasso also loves cooking the classics, which is what he’s made for you here at Panna: fideos flavored with chorizo and shellfish, paella's more laid-back, noodly cousin; patatas bravas, dusted brick-red with smoked paprika and tangy tomato powder; and simple but oh-so-succulent Gambas al Sal, as elegant as ocean fare gets. Cooking these dishes, you’ll understand why Spanish food fuels the fire in Sasso's belly: the smells, tastes, and colors are vibrant and intoxicating, awakening all the senses. The moment your saffron-scented fideos begin to simmer, or your potatoes hiss in olive oil, you too will find yourself under the spell of these tempting Catalan sirenas.
Ashley Christensen
Can a dish of mac-and-cheese revitalize a city? If it’s made by Ashley Christensen, chef-owner of Poole’s Diner and six other restaurants in Raleigh, North Carolina, it’s possible. Poole’s turns out 15,000 of the gooey 3-cheese macaroni dishes a year (The New York Times says it’ll leave you “speechless”). In fact, there’s a whole station in the kitchen dedicated to making it, and it’s become an attraction in what was once a languishing downtown.
The story of Poole's Diner begins with dessert: it was a pie shop that became a luncheonette in the 1940s, and stands as one of the oldest restaurants in the city. While studying at nearby N.C. State, 18-year-old Christensen got a job as a line cook at Poole’s. After she graduated from school and had several other restaurant jobs under her belt, the proprietor offered to sell the diner to her. Although all the appliances needed replacing, Christensen was still enchanted by the retro, emotional decor: a double-horseshoe counter, formica green top, worn in places where longtime customers put their elbows while drinking coffee.
As you'd expect from any diner serving and mac-and-cheese, Poole’s feels classic and comfortable. But Christensen also wanted to offer something more: a celebration of local ingredients re-imagined with new flavors, like her slow shrimp with tangy marinated peppers— a modern riff on a Southern dish that has stood the test of time.
When Christensen creates her food, she starts with a specific feeling: "The way it felt to eat dinner as a kid with my parents—it was an escape from the day but also a reminder of its blessings.” And when you sit down to a dish of Christensen's macaroni au gratin, cheese bubbling at the edges, we think you’ll be transported, too.
Four and Twenty Blackbirds
Sisters and partners-in-pie, Emily and Melissa Elsen are cut from the same crust. Their Brooklyn pie flagship, which now has four satellite locations around the city, is named after a nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Six Pence”—a fitting name, since the sisters were around nursery-age when they first learned the craft from their Grandma Liz. In other words, “We grew up in the business,” Emily says. Grandma Liz would bake pies for their mother’s popular local restaurant in South Dakota using whatever fruit was in season, and they’re keeping the tradition alive. The result? Hard-to-rival golden-crusted masterpieces, from the more creative matcha custard to classics like lemon chess.
The sisters’ shop in Gowanus, which opened in 2009, has grown a cultish following and earned international praise. The Elsens were named “Artisans of the Year” by Time Out New York in 2011, and their pies have been featured on Oprah and in the New York Times.
Out of all the desserts out there, why pie? “Cake is kind of specific to a celebration…to me, pie is any time of day, it’s casual, it’s homey, it’s rustic,” Emily explains. “We felt there was potential for it.” Pie that lives up to that potential requires the best ingredients, which is why in our pie-baking class, the Elsen sisters aim for the sweetest cherries to sprinkle with streusel and the juiciest peaches to blanket with their signature pinwheel-design crust. Combined with a few key spices like nutmeg and Angostura bitters (their secret ingredient!), those fruit flavors truly sing. Another reason these pies are special? The Elsens mix their rich, flaky crust by hand. As they demonstrate in our pie-baking class, hands, not blades, are the best tool for sensing the right texture and temperature for framing fillings and weaving lattices.
When you bake with Melissa and Emily, you’ll discover why pie tastes best when it’s homemade: because pie is more than a baked good, it’s both an act of love and a work of art. You’ll learn everything from crimping crust to storing leftover pie properly in this delicious class. (The eating, we trust, you won't need any help with!)
Don Angie
What happens when two Italian chefs fall in love? If you're Angela Rito and Scott Tacinelli, chef-owners of West Village hot spot Don Angie, you might invent the lovechild of two Italian-American dishes: a giant pizza, but with a crispy chicken crust. The "chicken Parm pizza" is one of the most-photographed orders served at Quality Italian, one of their first restaurant partnerships as a chef-owner team.
Do a search for Don Angie's iconic #lasagnafortwo on Instagram, and it's easy to see that Angie and Scott have tapped into a red-sauce renaissance. But making meatballs for Millennials was never the goal. You'd have to look back a couple of generations to see how the couple’s love for Italian food began: cooking with their nonni.
Drying your own oregano, soaking hand-torn bread in milk for luscious meatballs, frying thin slices of eggplant for Parm that layers up like an elegant lasagna: these are just a few of the classic techniques the chefs picked up from their relatives. Angie grew up working and baking at the family business, Rito’s Bakery and import store in Cleveland. Scott would cook with his grandparents nearly every Sunday back home in Jersey. Later on, a background in some of New York City’s most illustrious kitchens (like Park Avenue Autumn/Winter/Spring/Summer, where the couple met) helped them put a fresh perspective on Old World flavors.
Scott's Lasagna Verde could veritably be a summer dish, thanks to a fresh, herb-packed pesto that stands in for the typical red sauce. Angie’s salads (a spicy antipasto and little gem Caesar) each have their own delicious twists, as does her incredible "broken meatball ragù." And their chicken Parm? It's a straight-up classic that Panna's founder calls "the best chicken Parm" he's ever had. A healthy helping of Italian tradition, with a twinkle of Don Angie’s modern spirit: that's what marks each of the dishes that Angie and Scott have brought to Panna.
Emma Bengtsson
Spend a day cooking with Emma Bengtsson, executive chef at Aquavit in New York, and you’ll discover that there’s way more to Swedish cuisine than those iconic meatballs (even though hers are some of the best we’ve ever tasted). But you can still trace nearly everything Bengtsson makes today to the lessons she first learned as an apprentice to the most authentic Scandinavian chef she knew: her grandmother.
“I cook food that I love to eat,” she says. “It’s food that comes from where I’m from. It’s what I grew up eating.”
Today, however, she’s far removed from her childhood in the small Swedish fishing town of Falkenberg: Bengtsson lives in New York City, where she stands at the helm of Aquavit, for which she’s earned two Michelin stars. “Obviously it’s a little more complicated,” she says of the upscale fare served at her elegant Manhattan establishment, “but the flavor is still there.”
Before arriving in New York, Bengtsson spent 9 years as a pastry chef in Stockholm’s busiest and most lauded kitchens (which is probably why her caramelized almond tart and chocolate cake are so stunning). Her talent eventually caught the eye of Aquavit’s former executive chef, Håkan Swahn, who recruited her for the pastry position. She took the restaurant by storm, reinventing the menu with her dazzling desserts and instituting a new bread program. However, when she was offered the executive chef job, she was hesitant: “It wasn’t necessarily, at that point, something that I felt like I could handle,” she admits. “But the more I got familiar with it, and thanks to my amazing people in the kitchen who pushed me and encouraged me on, it got easier.”
Perhaps it's not surprising that Bengtsson has fearlessly forged a unique path in the fine-dining world, since even her hobbies are varied and surprising. In her spare time, she’s an avid practitioner of bachata, a dance form originating in the Dominican Republic; she participates in international summits and competitions. Plus, as the daughter of two parents who were in the military, Bengtsson also likes to practice her marksmanship at firing ranges.
Fortunately for us, Bengtsson found time between the dancing and shooting to share some of her favorite Scandinavian classics with us. Whether it's silky cabbage stuffed with luscious beef and pork, a delicate casserole of potatoes and gravlax, or a heavenly caramelized almond toscatårta, these dishes are a sampling of clean, elegant Swedish cuisine at its most delectable.
Elise Kornack
Chef Elise Kornack is a veteran of some of New York’s most acclaimed kitchens, including April Bloomfield’s Spotted Pig and Marcus Samuelsson’s Aquavit (now helmed by Emma Bengtsson). But after working with some very big names, Kornack decided to go small. In 2013, she and Anna Hieronimus (wife and sole supporting staff) opened Take Root, a 750-square foot, 12-seat tasting menu destination in Brooklyn. Their fare reflected their philosophy: mindful dining using local ingredients, careful preparation, but without pretension (the tasting menu cost $125, a steal compared to New York standards). Out of her galley-sized kitchen, Kornack plated far-reaching flavors, from sweetbreads with shaved squash to chocolate mousse with sour honey powder. In return, critics showered her with praise: Kornack landed on Forbes Magazine’s and Zagat’s “30 Under 30” lists; was a “James Beard Rising Star Chef” semifinalist for the last three years running; and saw Take Root earn a Michelin star.
But even the brightest stars can burn out (and singe a chef’s sanity)—which is why Kornack decided to close the restaurant before that happened, ending on a high note: “When you feel like you’re doing your best, when your space looks the best, and your food tastes the best, that’s when you should stop.” She and her wife are now taking root in richer soil: the Catskills, where she hinted to us, she’s partnering with a nearby farm to open a farm-to-table restaurant.
The recipes Kornack made for Panna are fresh yet familiar. They include some childhood favorites like Beef Braciole, her grandmother’s specialty, stuffed with breadcrumbs and braised with tomato-wine sauce. You’ll melt for her Cinnamon Semifreddo, an Italian frozen custard, made sans ice cream machine and topped with bourbon-macerated figs; the silkiest sunchoke soup, drizzled with aromatic ginger oil; a giant, crispy rice pancake served with greens and a fried egg; charred cabbage wedges with almond vinaigrette; and parsnip cake (similar to carrot cake) brightened with apple compote. Luckily, you don’t have to churn it out all at once for a multi-course tasting menu like Kornack can—but you should take her skills to your kitchen, and enjoy each stunning dish, bite by bite.
Erik Ramirez
Let there be no mistake—Chef Erik Ramirez makes a mean Pollo a la Brasa, ceviche, and Lomo Saltado. But when he puts ponzu and daikon in that ceviche, or bacon and banana in his quinoa, the message is clear: there’s more to Peruvian cuisine than meets the eye. At Ramirez’s Michelin-starred Brooklyn restaurant, Llama Inn, the spotlight is on flavor, and he’ll go great lengths to achieve it—like growing huacatay, an Andean herb, right on Llama Inn’s rooftop to make a lapping-good green sauce for roast chicken. Meanwhile, the charred octopus ceviche gets a sprinkling of togarashi.
Wait. Japanese chile in ceviche? That’s not Peruvian, that’s fusion. But Ramirez will tell you that cultural combinations are fluid in Peru, where there are even specialized terms for them: “Chifa” to describe Chinese-Peruvian and “Nikkei” for Japanese-Peruvian. You can probably taste the glossy umami depth of Chinese oyster sauce in the Lomo Saltado, and Ramirez serves it with scallion pancakes so diners can build their own Lomo "tacos."
Ramirez hasn’t always been this in tune with his Peruvian palate. Having been raised in New Jersey on his mother’s traditional arroz con pollo and rich stews, he wanted to widen his horizons when he started his culinary career in NYC and sought out a ticket to another country’s kitchen. He developed classic French and American skillsets at Eleven Madison Park and Irving Mill, respectively, which shine as you watch him swiftly slice an onion or emulsify sauces to silky perfection.
But a trip to Peru shed new light on the food he'd grown up eating when a mind-blowing ceviche changed everything: “I was just like, wow...I couldn’t believe what I’d been missing out on for 28 years,” he recalls.
Outside Llama Inn, the backdrop of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway helps set the pace for his food: dynamic, never stagnant. “It’s New York cooking with a Peruvian attitude and heartbeat,” he says. “I knew it was going to translate because the flavor profiles of Peruvian cuisine are delicious. Delicious is delicious no matter what continent you are on.”
That’s certainly the case in the dishes Ramirez has made for Panna using ingredients that may raise eyebrows, but which make total sense in your mouth. Pollo a la Brasa, an iconic Peruvian dish, carries a funky whop of Chinese black bean paste in the marinade; carapulcra, an indigenous pork mole features papas secas, freeze-dried potatoes that almost look like pasta. Last but not least, there’s ceviche, swimming in a gingery, vegetal “Leche de Tigre” that will inspire an “Aha!” moment in your mouth.
Once you source a few key, special ingredients, the prep is simple, the flavors original yet grounded. His dishes have something for everyone: If you already love Peruvian food, these recipes will shake up your favorites with New York swagger. And if you’re new to Peru? You’re in for a delicious ride.
Gabriela Cámara
Carnitas hiss in lard and black beans bubble as Chef Gabriela Cámara talks tortillas. “I’ve been making them this way since I was eight,” she says, kneading the masa harina dough. She tests the temperature of her comal, a traditional tortilla griddle, with her bare fingertips without flinching. It’s only 10:30 AM in our studio kitchen, but Cámara needs no warming up before we begin shooting. And there’s no stopping her. She is, after all, chef-owner of nine restaurants in Mexico and one in the US.
Cámara never intended to be a food tycoon. The restaurant industry practically fell into her lap while she was studying art history in Mexico City. She and her friends loved eating fresh grilled fish on the coast but noticed that the city was missing a seafood scene, so she opened Contramar. Diners gobbled up her fresh tuna tostadas and grilled fish slathered with a striking duo of red and green chile sauces. “I’m taking advantage of a hole," she says, "of a missing part of cuisine in a city where people are so obsessed with food.”
From stuffing tacos to building a Mexican restaurant empire, Cámara is skilled at filling the gaps. In San Francisco, a city that’s notoriously hard to find steady waitstaff, she opened her latest restaurant, Cala, with staff consisting mostly of ex-cons who have come through job-placement programs and halfway houses. “In Mexico, I’ve had all these characters...They get it together because they see an opportunity,” she explains. “I didn’t want to use it as a publicity tool...I did not have that pretension.”
Cámara certainly favors deliciousness over pretension in her cooking as well, and that's why she’s created her Mexican Street Food class with us. You’ll learn to griddle homemade corn tortillas that taste nuttier and softer than any store-bought version; they're a key component of Cámara's tangy shredded chicken tacos, Baja-style fish tacos, deep-fried quesadillas, and egg-stuffed breakfast, all topped with homemade tongue-tingling condiments from Yucatán-style pickled onions to fresh salsa verde. There’s even more antojitos (literally "little cravings") in this colorful cooking course, and as Cámara will show you, they’re just as craveable in your kitchen as they are off the street.
Hooni Kim
For many of us, Wednesday is Hump Day. But for Hooni Kim, it’s Kimchi Day. At his Michelin-starred New York City restaurant, Danji, the Korean chef and his staff spin 40 heads of cabbage into the spicy, belovedly funky fermented dish. It’s an event that arrests all senses, which is why, Kim says, “I like scheduling things on Wednesdays” to get some fresh air.
Kim didn’t go cabbage-crazy overnight. Although he was born in Seoul, he was first classically trained at the French Culinary Institute and earned his stripes at Daniel, Daniel Boulud's world-famous French flagship in New York. At around 11:30 PM, after a hectic evening shift, Boulud often ordered a special dining room to be set for a 20-course dinner. His guests were some of the best chefs in the world. “It’s not like that anymore,” Kim says. But Kim can still cook around the clock, a drive that would allow him to become a successful restaurateur in his own right.
While working as a chef at Masa, one of New York’s finest Asian restaurants, Kim was inspired to recreate the flavors of his childhood travels to Korea on his own time. When his parents weren’t using their apartment on the weekends, he’d open up a so-called "private kitchen": free at first, for his friends, until they started booking him for parties and it became profitable. Kim eventually realized he could turn his extracurricular activities into a real restaurant. Using the money he and his wife had saved for 10 years to buy a house, he did just that, and opened Danji. "I should've been more terrified, but I was too busy to be terrified," Kim says.
It was a risk that reaped big rewards. Kim’s classic French treatment of Korean ingredients and flavors, in dishes like kimchi poutine and Korean-BBQ style braised short ribs with pearl onions and pine nuts, was something New York had never seen. In 2012 Danji became the first Korean restaurant to receive a Michelin star; not long after, he opened his second restaurant, Hanjan, further uptown. The Times heralded Kim as "the city's leading interpreter of Korean cuisine."
And now he’s your gateway to the fiery, vibrant, umami-rich cuisine of his birthplace. In Kim's Korean Cooking 101 class, you’ll learn how to make many authentic Korean essentials, including spicy pork belly, napa cabbage kimchi (don’t worry, it’s a one-cabbage version), seafood soft tofu stew, and an exquisite pot of short-grain rice—a must-have for nearly every Korean meal. The preparation is simple, the food stunning, and the instructor, ideal.
Sam Jones
A colossal heap of split oak towers in the backyard of The Skylight Inn in Ayden, North Carolina, the legendary BBQ joint where pitmaster Sam Jones got his start. It’s a fitting monument to the generations his family has been smoking whole hogs, since the 1830s, when his great-great-great-grandfather sold smoked pork out of a covered wagon.
The Skylight opened in 1947, and Jones grew up working there alongside his father and grandfather. In many ways, Jones was destined to be a pitmaster, but he was initially hesitant to devote his life to it: “When I was young, I was a little bit embarrassed of Skylight," Sam admitted. That changed after Jones wrote a college term paper on the history of barbecue and realized it wasn’t just about slogging away, elbow-deep in coleslaw: “I saw it no longer as a job, but as a way of life.”
Jones dropped out of school to help out back home after his grandfather fell ill, and he never looked back. After the Southern Foodways Alliance made a short film about Skylight, fame followed. In 2003, Skylight Inn was awarded the James Beard "America's Classics" Award, and he opened a second location, Sam Jones BBQ, soon after. He’s traveled the country to tell his family’s story, and it's a heritage you can smell, see, and taste when you cook with him in our BBQ class.
“BBQ is a primitive food that doesn’t need a lot of adulteration,” he says. “My family has cooked whole hog BBQ for over 100 years, and you don’t spend the time and energy cooking whole animals over wood to mask it with sauce.” That means when you bite into his pork, cleaved by hand into a pile of juicy meat and crispy skin, you taste pig, smoke, and the slight tang of his iconic Carolina-style vinegar sauce—in that order.
Most home cooks are used to grilling on a searing-hot flame. But Sam Jones will show you how to turn down the heat to harness the smoke: it’s what makes the pork succulent, the ribs toothsome but tender, and the chicken moist with skin that’s golden, not burnt. Of course, it wouldn’t be a full-on BBQ without the sides, and Jones’s approach couldn’t be simpler or more satisfying. His cornbread combines only a few ingredients before it's “oven-fried” in bacon fat; his baked beans and sweet slaw are uncomplicated, but represent a long legacy of pitmaster tradition.
We know you’ll enjoy not only the true taste of Carolina-style BBQ, but also the BBQ “way of life,” which requires less panache than it does patience. So get those coals smoldering, pull up a chair, and pop open a cold one: a sensational meal awaits!
SOHUI KIM
Chef Sohui Kim thinks truffle oil is overrated. “I firmly believe that salt, a pinch of sugar and/or a splash of rice wine vinegar can always save the day,” she says. And that may very well be true—as long as you know how to wield those ingredients like Kim can. Sweet-salty-spicy flavors perk up cuisine from South Korea, her birthplace, and they now electrify the food at The Good Fork and Insa, the two Brooklyn restaurants she runs with her husband, Ben Schneider.
But gochujang and kimchi aren't the only stars. On The Good Fork menu, fried calamari with fra diavolo and Parmesan are just below her savory, teriyaki-drizzled scallion pancake. It’s eclectic and fresh, but comfortably mom-and-pop cuisine. In The Good Fork Cookbook, Chef Kim describes her food as “traditional dishes heightened by a global pantry; classics, with just enough of a twist to make them new again.” It’s the kind of food that builds a following, so much so that after Hurricane Sandy damaged their restaurant, Kim was able to crowdsource $50K to rebuild.
That kind of tenacity is what put Kim on the culinary track in the first place: after graduating from ICE, she secured an externship at Blue Hill under Chefs Dan Barber and Michael Anthony. They tried to persuade her to move upstate as they opened Blue Hill at Stone Barns, but the buzz of the West Village sounded more appealing, so she moved on to work with Anita Lo at Annisa.
Kim brings her professional chops to Panna, but with a warm, homespun touch that's evident in the loving way she pleats pork dumplings (the ones that beat Bobby Flay's in a throwdown). Watch how she bundles veal shanks with butcher’s twine to make Osso Buco, the dish her husband cooked to woo her while they were dating. Other dishes taste totally familiar, but draw from the “global pantry” that defines Kim's style: pan-seared chicken breasts, bathed in a butter sauce funkified by Chinese fermented black beans, or a lentil salad specked with piquillos, a sweet Spanish chile. So, whether you’ve got flavor wanderlust or need a dose of edible comfort, Kim’s cuisine will satisfy and leave you hungry for more.
Andy Ricker
You wouldn’t expect a six-foot-tall native Vermonter to serve as America’s premier Thai food buff. Not until Ricker rolls up his sleeves to get to work, that is: his arms are inked with a traditional clay mortar and wooden pestle, bird’s eye chiles, and stylized Thai herbs. But his dedication to the cuisine is more than just skin-deep.
Sugary pad thai and chicken skewers with candy-sweet peanut sauce may have shaped America's understanding of Thai cuisine, but Andy Ricker is setting out to change all that. As the chef-owner of Pok Pok restaurants in Portland, Oregon (where he's now based), he cooks food that tastes like it's from half a world away—because it is. He's been traveling to Thailand for over twenty years to bring its true flavors Stateside. His phat thai, speckled with salted radish and redolent of sour tamarind water and palm sugar syrup, boasts a precise balance of sweet, tart, and umami-rich flavors. His kai yaang, brined whole and stuffed with aromatics, was inspired by an old friend in Chiang Mai who spent 30 years spit-roasting young chickens alongside a wall of glowing charcoal.
His first visit to Thailand was simply one of many stops he made while backpacking around the world, picking up odd jobs from New Zealand to England to support his travels. But his second trip there marked a watershed moment in his culinary career. He still remembers the one dish that blew his mind: a Northern-style mushroom curry. “It was like seeing an entirely new color," he recalls in his best-selling cookbook, Pok Pok. "From then on, my eyes were open.”
Ricker dedicated himself to language lessons and befriended home cooks and street vendors, talking his way into their kitchens. His flavor quests became more systematic: he’d taste something outrageous, then try versions of it everywhere he could to understand how to recreate it. At times, his love affair with Thailand made him a hard hire back in the States, because he’d return every year. Eventually, he decided it was time to open his own restaurant.
Ricker’s ambassadorship of Thai cuisine has boomed into an empire over the last two decades: in addition to his Pok Pok restaurants, he’s the founder of Pok Pok Som (a drinking vinegar company) and managing partner of Pok Pok Thaan (a charcoal importing enterprise). He’s also a two-time James Beard Award-winner and best-selling cookbook author.
Even after decades of traveling to Thailand, Ricker doesn’t consider himself an expert: “I'm a student like everyone else who's interested in Thai cooking," he says. "My experience with Thai cooking is concentrated heavily on northern Thai food. Central Thai is something I'm learning more about. Southern Thai is almost an entire mystery to me.” His approach to Thai flavors is nearly sociological, and his devotion to ingredients keeps his dishes very close to their source.
Ricker may not consider himself an expert, but he's undeniably a chef who’s passionate about creating food that tastes like it’s straight from Thailand. In his cooking class, you'll learn not only about the flavors and ingredients that define Thai cuisine, but the techniques, as well—the unique way street vendors shred green papaya for a classic salad, for instance, or how to use a traditional clay mortar. All of this was lifelong-obsession fodder for Ricker, now available to other Vermonters who can view video (though we secretly wish we had the guts to quit our jobs and taste our way through Northern Thailand.)