Chef's PSA Podcast

Jules Wiringa is the Dutch chef behind Jules Cooking, which publishes fine dining recipes and technique videos made for chefs. He came up in Michelin-starred kitchens, became a sous chef at a two-Michelin-star restaurant, and has been making cooking videos for 16 years, starting with a pasta dough made with a whisk at age 15.

Jules says kitchens still gatekeep knowledge, and he saw it firsthand when a chef threw away a chef de partie’s recipe book after the cook had given two and a half years. He went the other way. Every recipe on Jules Cooking is tested, photographed, filmed, and written out in full, and last year he rewrote roughly 2,500 of them by hand.

• How he runs about 150 dishes a year off roughly 100 foundation recipes, and fixes the written recipe instead of re-filming when a dish needs ten more grams of vinegar
• Why culinary school never teaches you to cook 50 steaks at once, and why you open the oven between rounds to stop the gray edge
• Why chefs should eat at their own restaurant as a guest, and why he caps a tasting menu at two and a half hours

André Natera and Jules Wiringa cover recipe gatekeeping, how Jules develops dishes in his head before he cooks them, why he makes recipes for chefs and not foodies, why fine dining starts to look the same, why you should zest down, his start at 15 and a trial day in a three-Michelin-star kitchen, how he spots a good cook in the first second, the tools he will not work without, the flavor lifts he reaches for, Josh Niland, and his advice for young cooks.

It closes with a rapid-fire round: Robuchon or Ducasse, Ferran or René, Keller or Achatz, Marco Pierre White or Gordon Ramsay.

Guest

Jules Cooking Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julescooking/
Jules Cooking website: https://www.julescooking.com

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef’s PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef’s PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Jess Pryles returns with more meat science. She is a live fire cook, the founder of Hardcore Carnivore, and the author of Prime Cuts, a 288 page guide to choosing, understanding, and cooking meat with more than 100 recipes built cut by cut. She holds a Graduate Certificate in Meat Science from Iowa State University and judged Food Network’s Pitmasters. This time she gets into the parts chefs argue about: what to call a cut, how to salt it, and how far to cook it.

Her case starts with the menu. London broil is a preparation, not a cut, and Delmonico has no standard definition, which is how a kitchen can invent a name and get away with it. Then she explains why picanha, duck, and lamb eat poorly when served too rare, and why a chef should cook a duck breast properly instead of asking the guest.

• How an equilibrium brine works, why her recipe adds sugar for balance, and why red meat is harder to brine than pork or chicken
• Dry brine versus cure: why she says salting a steak overnight is a dry brine, and the parts per million math behind her bacon calculator
• Why she likes tri-tip around 138 degrees, and why she believes resting a steak is mostly carryover cooking

André Natera and Jess Pryles cover who Prime Cuts was written for, the steakhouse menu she wants to see with more breeds, grass-fed beef, picanha, flat iron, and hanger, who should decide how a steak is cooked, why curing salt is pink and what happens if the math is wrong, and what to do when a guest says safe chicken is raw because it is pink near the bone.

Guest

Jess Pryles Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jesspryles/

Hardcore Carnivore Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hardcorecarnivore
Prime Cuts and signed copies: https://www.hardcorecarnivore.com

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef’s PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef’s PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Christophe De Lellis is chef and partner at Mamani in Dallas, a French restaurant with an Italian accent that earned a Michelin star in 2025, less than two months after opening, and kept it in the 2026 guide. Before Dallas he spent 13 years at Joël Robuchon Las Vegas. He arrived in 2010 as a cook who could barely speak English and was running the kitchen as executive chef by 27. He still asks what can come off a dish before he asks what can go on.

The Robuchon kitchen he walked into was nothing like the Paris bistros he came from. Asparagus peeled with a paring knife, micro arugula dressed by rubbing oil between the fingertips, a ruler for the brunoise, and a cook counting the dots on a plate. He says he was hooked right away. Then the executive chef left, his mentor asked if he was ready, and the answer he got was no, you are not ready, but you are going to have to be.

• How a chicken jus built from 180 pounds of wings, water, and shallot, with no salt, becomes about 70 percent of the sauce on his meat dishes
• Why he removes an ingredient before he adds one, and why he says better sourcing fixes half the problem
• How a duck dry aged for 14 to 19 days becomes one dish that blends French and Persian cooking, with the breast in an orange sauce and the legs as kebab

André Natera and Christophe De Lellis cover why he walked out of a finance program on day one and went to cooking school in Paris, the visa call that came in the middle of a Tekken game, the year he left Robuchon to work for Shawn McClain at Sage at Aria, how a random message from Brandon Cohanim brought him to Dallas, why Mamani is à la carte with 100 seats instead of a tasting menu, how he balances a menu, why he does not want servers telling the chef’s story, and which station he says is the mark of a restaurant.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore, plus the line he would build with Joël Robuchon on the pass.

Guest

Christophe De Lellis Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christophedelellis/

Mamani : https://www.instagram.com/mamanirestaurant/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef’s PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef’s PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Paid partnership with Toast. This episode ends with a sponsored bonus segment on menu pricing, built on data from Toast's Menu Price Monitor and their free Menu Checker tool. Check your menu against the market → https://biz.toasttab.com/us1XN

Sarah McIntosh is the chef-owner of epicerie in Austin, open on Hancock Drive since 2012 and running 450 covers on a busy Saturday. She came out of Louisiana, cooked at Bouchon and Ad Hoc, and has spent 20 years in and out of the Austin industry. Last year she flew to Argentina to cook alongside Francis Mallmann. None of that is why this conversation matters. She is one of the only chefs in the country who has worked out how to own the dirt under the restaurant instead of renting it.

In 2008 she bought a house on the east side of Austin for around $219,000 at under four percent interest. Her payment was $600 a month, less than the apartment she had been renting. She still lives in it. It is paid off. During the pandemic it crossed a million dollars. That single piece of math is why she now structures deals where she owns the property and the business, and why when a developer offered her a percentage to recruit tenants for a project down the street from her restaurant, she turned it down and asked for ownership in the development instead.

- The ownership structure she learned from Sam Hellman-Mass: buy the property, borrow against it to build, and the investor's money is protected by an asset that outlives the restaurant

- What to actually look for in a lease, in her words: MEP, tenant improvement money, triple net, CAM, percentage rent, and why a landlord covering mechanical, electrical and plumbing is the signal that a deal is real

- How she writes a proforma on purpose at 60 to 70 percent of what she thinks she will do, in three versions, with someone hired to pick it apart

Andre Natera and Sarah McIntosh cover why most chefs put a million dollars into a building they will never own, the difference between leasing and buying when you have no backers, the brokerage math on a commercial deal and why she refuses to get a license, how a 20 year network produces deals that never hit the market, paying 100 percent of staff health insurance instead of raising wages and the staff revolt that followed, being quick to fire before a one person problem becomes a five person problem, and why her empathy has grown to the point that she now hands the firing decision to her team.

It ends with the only award she says she needs. Butts in the seats, 450 of them on a Saturday, and a restaurant that is making money

Sarah McIntosh on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/sarahmcgrams/

epicerie on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/epicerie_austin/

epicerie → https://epicerieaustin.com

Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Bonus content sponsored by Toast.

Abraham Salum has one rule he wishes every restaurant would adopt. A friend of his makes everyone pile their phones in the middle of the table before dinner starts. First person to reach for theirs pays the bill. Nobody ever touches their phone.

That same instinct for reading a room runs through the whole conversation. Salum opened Salum in Dallas 21 years ago on a block his own realtor questioned and a commercial broker publicly predicted would fail. He ran into him years later. The broker told him he had taken his foot out of his mouth a long time ago.

• Why he banned the words no problem in his restaurant and trained every server to say my pleasure instead
• How servers at his restaurant made more money in 2020 than they did the year before, even as the restaurant itself brought in 40 percent less
• The exact leverage he used against an insurance company after a flood to make sure his servers still got paid

Andre Natera and Abraham Salum cover growing up between Mexican, Lebanese, Italian, and Spanish grandmothers who all wanted to feed him, running 300 staff across seven restaurants in Cancun by his mid twenties, the kitchen design mistake from opening night that he is still working around two decades later, a storm that punctured his roof and shut the restaurant down for four and a half months, and the two year process of writing his first cookbook, A Spoonful of Everywhere, a project he kept completely secret from his own business partner.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

salumrestaurant.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/salumrestaurant/

https://www.instagram.com/asalum/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App: https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books: https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch: https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack: https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Nick Walker is an FSR 40 Under 40 chef who oversaw the James Beard nominated Meridian and now leads 11 Whiskey Cake locations across Texas and Florida. He started in a kitchen at 15, under the table, and cut his thumb open on his first real shift when a slamming office door caught his hand mid cut. They poured kitchen whiskey on the wound, duct taped it shut, and he finished service.

Why he believes a cook can cook food, but a chef has to manage people and run the numbers, and why so many talented chefs never make that jump

The line he still thinks about from a mentor who caught him publicly berating a cook over garnish, telling him to be the sous chef he always wanted

Why he says followers do not equal dollars, period, and what actually separates a viral line cook from restaurant success

Andre Natera and Nick Walker cover what kitchen culture looked like before HR existed and why some chefs still cannot accept it changed, the real staffing crisis behind restaurants paying 28 dollars an hour and still coming up short, the formula behind a menu item that actually sells versus one built for a chef's own ego, and why Brussels sprouts and hamachi keep showing up on every menu in the country.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

@chefnickwalker

Links

Lead Like a Chef App: https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Get the Books: https://chefspsa.com/books

Shop Chef's PSA Merch: https://shop.chefspsa.com/

Get Episodes Early on Substack: https://chefspsa.substack.com/

Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Tim Laielli will not call himself a chef. He is clear about it every time someone assumes otherwise, including his own father, who is one. Eighteen months after posting his first cooking video, Tim was on set cooking against professional chefs for Gordon Ramsay on Next Level Chef.

He built Bare Food Tim, over a million followers, without ever working a line, and he explains exactly why. His father worked two jobs his whole childhood and told him constantly not to follow him into restaurants. Tim listened, then found a way to work with food anyway.

Three things worth hearing straight from him. Why he thinks most chefs make content for other chefs instead of the person actually watching, which is usually a tired parent looking for dinner ideas, not a technique lesson. The real numbers behind brand deal income, and why capping sponsored content around 10 to 20 percent is the difference between monetizing and losing your audience's trust. And the two paths he tells struggling restaurants to choose between when they want to go viral, an oversized showstopper dish or full personality driven content, because trying to do both at once usually does neither well.

Andre Natera and Tim Laielli also get into the friction between chefs and content creators, why lighting matters more than the camera you shoot on, which dishes reliably perform online and which never do, and the moment Tim realized the platform had started driving him instead of the other way around.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

Bare Food Tim on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/barefoodtim/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App: https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books: https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch: https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack: https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Matt Lambert earned a Michelin star at The Musket Room in New York in four months, a goal he'd given himself three years to hit. He describes what followed as treating the star like a religion, the Church of Michelin, and says he's never felt that emotional high again, chasing it in different forms for years after.

Why he thinks the tasting menu has lost the plot.

The moment he realized every chef on Instagram was making the same tart with a different color, and what he did about it

Why moving back to New Zealand after New York hit him harder than the original move to America ever did

André Natera and Matt Lambert cover 75 Hard and the 30 kilos he lost once he finally started taking care of himself, winning a major international chef award a week after his brother's funeral and feeling nothing standing on that stage, the moment his own chef de cuisine's face told him he didn't want to be the best anymore, why hospitality matters more than the food itself, and building Return in Auckland as his own answer to what The Musket Room used to be.

Guest

@chefmattlambert

@return_restaurant

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books

Shop Chef's PSA Merch →https://shop.chefspsa.com/

Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/

Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Bryan Caswell has cooked inside three very different kinds of rooms. Jean-Georges Vongerichten's kitchen in the early 2000s, where he learned that a quiet, organized kitchen beats a screaming one. Seventeen restaurant openings of his own, roughly half of them his own concepts, from Reef to his new restaurant Latuli in Houston. And, less known, rooms full of policy people deciding how the Gulf actually gets fished.

• Why he thinks the redfish fishery is in the best shape he's seen in his career, and why almost nobody outside the industry knows it
• A real proposal for cutting aquaculture's biggest cost problem in half, using something shrimp boats currently throw away for free
• The specific menu-writing rule he still uses today, learned running R&D inside one of the most systemized restaurant groups in the country: count every move a dish takes to plate

André Natera and Bryan Caswell cover what it was actually like working under Jean-Georges before he was a household name, why talent alone breaks the moment a chef has to build a kitchen from nothing instead of running an established one, the Gulf Coast bycatch program he pioneered at Reef that's now industry standard, why he hasn't touched red wine in a sauce in over two decades, and his return to Houston with Latuli, his first restaurant of his own since Reef closed.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

@wholefishLatuli Houston

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Rosana Rivera runs three businesses under one roof: a bakery storefront, a wholesale bread program, and a catering and events company called Gatheria Studio. Most operators would guess wholesale wins on volume alone. It doesn't. Catering does, by a wide margin, sometimes 30 to 40 percent margins in a good season, more than either of the other two combined at the bottom line.

She's also the first Latina chef to ever beat Bobby Flay on television, and the casting process that got her there is worth hearing before you ever get a similar email yourself.

• The one piece of advice from her producer that won her the Beat Bobby Flay episode, and how she practiced her signature dish for exactly the time she'd be given
• What it actually costs to open a restaurant right now, and why the number most people quote is too low
• Why she runs a monthly AI audit on her own online reviews, and what it caught in her matcha program before it became a real problem

André Natera and Rosana Rivera cover why most influencer marketing for restaurants doesn't move the needle, whether kitchen robotics are actually worth the investment, the one ingredient that wrecks her food cost every single year no matter what, why a bakery's margins are thinner than most chefs assume, and the full breakdown of why her events business outperforms both her storefront and her wholesale account.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

@chefrosanarivera@chefandthebaker

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Eduardo Osorio moved to Dallas from LA less than a year ago. Then Kent Rathbun, Dallas royalty, ate at Meridian and posted about it, and the walk-ins started within days. It's the kind of endorsement that doesn't happen for just anybody.

He's built a career on adapting fast. Restaurant Daniel in New York, where a chef corrected his micro-green prep on day one and made it clear there wouldn't be a second warning. Eight months in Jeddah, cooking out of what was essentially a shipping container in 130-degree heat, where he learned the hard way that crossing your legs the wrong way gets you slapped. And now Meridian, where he's building a kitchen that runs on almost none of that old pressure.

• Why he thinks LA took ten years to build its dining scene and Dallas will do it in three or four
• What actually happens when you build a kitchen with no yelling, and why his team is more surprised by his calm than anything else
• The brown butter trick behind his now-signature cornbread, and the one ingredient nobody expects

André Natera and Eduardo Osorio cover the guest chef dinner series that's turned Meridian into a clubhouse for Dallas's next generation of cooks, the difference between LA, Vegas, New York, and Saudi Arabia kitchen cultures, why his sous chef of fourteen years just walked away from cooking entirely, the influencer economy and why a bad review travels further than a good one, and what it takes to run ten restaurants and two burger concepts at once without losing the plot.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore, and the phrase his entire kitchen shouts when a table sends back a compliment.

Guest

@chefeduardoosorio https://www.instagram.com/chefeduardoosorio/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Enrique Lozano is a Chopped champion, James Beard nominee for Best Chef Texas, and executive chef at Aguazul in San Antonio, with roots at Benny Frank's in El Paso and Mija opening soon in San Elizario.

He'd been trying to get on Chopped for over a decade before the call finally came, right after his James Beard nomination. His strategy once he got there: cook exactly what he already knew, nothing more ambitious, nothing borrowed. It won him ten thousand dollars and, once the embargo lifted a year later, a wave of business he hadn't planned for.

• Why he thinks contestants lose on cooking competition shows by trying dishes they've never made before, instead of doing what they already do well
• What actually separates Beat Bobby Flay from Chopped once the cameras are off, and why one felt like being treated like a rock star
• Why he doesn't strain his ramen tonkotsu broth anymore, and the tare trick a friend talked him into trying

André Natera and Enrique Lozano cover what it actually takes to build a 100% sustainable restaurant from the ground up at Mija, why a 200-item menu at Aguazul isn't chaos but cross-utilization, San Antonio's quiet run of Michelin recognition, the deep well of chef talent coming out of El Paso, two restaurant closures and the identical tax mistake behind both of them, who actually showed up when things fell apart and who didn't, and whether music belongs in a kitchen at all.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore, and the one addition to his tonkotsu broth that isn't a spice.

Guest

Instagram: Chef Enrique Lozano

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Matthew Cutolo is a third-generation chef at Gargiulo's, the Coney Island restaurant his family has run since 1965 and that has fed Brooklyn since 1907. In 1977, The New York Times gave it three stars, unheard of at the time for a restaurant outside Manhattan.

He learned to bake from Mike the Bake, the restaurant's pastry chef of over forty years, who refused to write down a single recipe, including for family. Matthew asked to learn anyway. Mike's answer was, "If you want to learn, you have to watch." For the first two months, Matthew stood at the mixing bowl and watched Mike add ingredients with no measurements at all, a scoop of this, a lap around the kitchen, a conversation with someone else, back to the bowl. Only after two months did Mike start telling him what was actually going in.

• Why the same holiday recipe came out different every year, because it was never really written down, it was feel
• Why Matthew never uses a thermometer frying cannoli, and the one thing his uncle said that changed his mind about tradition versus evolution
• How a summer internship on The Chew turned into a decision to go all in on content, and why cooking videos never worked for him but talking to the camera did

André Natera and Matthew Cutolo cover the difference between Italian food and Italian American food and why that argument goes back to Ellis Island, the family's daily 2:30 lunch that nobody is allowed to skip, guys' night and the right way to make a negroni, the meatball debate settled once and for all, sauce versus gravy, dried pasta versus fresh, Parmigiano versus Pecorino, what actually makes a video do well on YouTube versus Instagram, and why toxic kitchens exist in family restaurants too.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore, and the correct cannoli filling.

Guest

@matthewcutolo
https://www.matthewcutolo.com/Gargiulo's on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/gargiulosrestaurant/

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/booksShop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Bobby Hicks read roughly 800 mid-century cookbooks to write one, and what he found was not a list of bad recipes. It was the exact point where American home cooking lost its thread.

The Great Depression ran into World War II with almost no recovery in between. Two generations of mothers cooked without butter, without sugar, without the ingredients their own mothers' recipes assumed. What did not get cooked did not get taught. By the time the post-war boom arrived with canned soup and boxed everything, and women moved from house labor into factories and still had to put dinner on the table, the chain was already broken. The dishes we laugh at now were what filled the gap.

• Why a pineapple was a status symbol, and why people rented them by the party
• Why aspic was proof you owned a refrigerator, not something anyone wanted to eat
• What actually broke the transmission of technique, and who put it back

Bobby Hicks is a food historian, a Next Level Chef season four alum, and the author of Retro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist from Countryman Press. He shows up with a vintage basting spoon from an estate sale and opens with the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him in a kitchen. He was telling an extern that onion skin works as a bandage. Mid-sentence, he cut off the tip of his finger.

André Natera and Bobby Hicks cover the three books he studied before going on television, why sleep and food were what actually wrecked him on set, the market exercise he still gives private chefs, why he believes you can teach technique but not adaptability, what happens once a publisher wants 100 recipes in six months, twelve years of content advice from before it was a career, and how to order a drink without embarrassing yourself.

It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.

Guest

Retro Recipes Kitchen on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/retrorecipeskitchen/
This Fellow on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/thisfellow/
retrorecipeskitchen.comRetro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist → https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324117257

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
Get the Books → https://chefspsa.com/booksShop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/Get Episodes Early on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

Chef Toby Archibald is the New Zealand-born chef and owner of Quarter Acre, a Michelin Guide restaurant on Lower Greenville in Dallas. Texas Monthly named it one of the Best New Restaurants in 2023. D Magazine ranked it a Top 5 restaurant. He spent twenty years working through Michelin-starred kitchens in London, Canada, New York, and Australia before opening Quarter Acre in December 2022. His career includes sous chef at The Greenhouse in London, sous chef at Café Boulud Toronto and New York under Gavin Kaysen and Aaron Bludorn, and Executive Chef at Georgie by Curtis Stone.

This episode starts in 2006. Toby is 23, backpacking across America, staying in a hostel. He gets a reservation at Restaurant Daniel. Shows up 20 minutes early, gets fitted with a dinner jacket from a room full of them, sits in the middle of the dining room as a solo diner, and has a meal he cannot describe but has never forgotten. That one dinner changed the entire direction of his career, his life, and who he is as a chef.

• Why you cannot learn to really cook from YouTube because you cannot taste or smell what is happening in the pan, and the critical learning lives entirely in that gap
• The difference between French charcuterie and Italian salumi and why calling a plate of Italian cold cuts a charcuterie board is almost always the wrong name
• What one extraordinary hospitality experience at age 23 can do to a twenty-year career and why Daniel Boulud built his entire reputation on making every single person feel exactly the way Toby felt that night

André and Toby cover the Bocuse d'Or dinner at Kent Rathbun's house where this friendship started, the language barrier at The Greenhouse that forced real learning, the seventh generation charcutier at Café Boulud Toronto who could debone a pig with a spoon, Gavin Kaysen leaving New York a week after Toby arrived, Daniel Boulud pulling out his phone at Toby's farewell dinner to look up Sydney hotels, and what Quarter Acre is and why it is impossible to put in a box.

Guest

• Toby Archibald on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/tobyarchibald/
• Quarter Acre on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/quarteracredallas/
• Quarter Acre Website → https://www.quarteracrerestaurant.com/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Geno McWilliams is the self-taught chef and owner of Lucia's Italian Kitchen in Effingham, Illinois, a 39-seat open kitchen Italian restaurant three hours south of Chicago that has become a destination in rural America. He spent decades as a construction contractor while teaching himself to cook, traveled with more cooking equipment than construction tools, fired pizzas in hotel rooms with an Ooni Koda, and opened Lucia's in November 2020. He is a member of the US Pizza Team and Women in Pizza certified.

He attended the Rewiring Hospitality conference in Irvine, California the week before this recording. His biggest takeaway became the central argument of this entire episode: after years of obsessing over the food, the food is not the point. The food is the bonus. Hospitality is what brings guests back.

• Why Lucia's pre-shift meetings never discuss 86 items, cover counts, or operational details and spend every minute on one question: how are we going to make the guest experience better tonight
• The difference between Italian and Italian American cuisine and why Geno built his menu around traditional Italian dishes in a town that walked in expecting fettuccine Alfredo and chicken Parm
• The pasta economics that every small Italian restaurant needs to understand: 90 percent extruded, 10 percent stuffed, and why pushing that ratio in the wrong direction will destroy your labor and your consistency

André Natera and Geno McWilliams cover the wedding dance moment that went viral on social media, reading guests through body language and NLP, the Roman tonda meets New York style pizza hybrid that defines Lucia's pizza, the discovery that French toast originated in fourth century Rome, and the construction contractor financial discipline that gave Geno a foundation most self-taught chefs never develop. The episode closes with his Mount Rushmore of chefs by category, his yellow tape kitchen in honor of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and his tagline: cheaper than a ticket to Italy.

Guest

• Geno McWilliams on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefginomc/
• Lucia's Italian Kitchen on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/luciaseffingham/
• Lucia's Italian Kitchen Website → https://luciasik.com/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Chef Matt McCallister is the Food and Wine Best New Chef 2014, three-time James Beard Award finalist, and one of a handful of chefs to ever receive a five-star review from the Dallas Morning News. He opened FT33 in Dallas in 2012, followed it with Homewood, and is now opening River Sing, a 24-seat tasting menu restaurant in Fair Park, Dallas, in fall 2026. He has been sober since 2016.

This episode is the less glamorous side of the chef world that people do not talk about.

• How the success of FT33 accelerated access to every vice that was already available, and what that looked like by 2016
• The morning he called his business partner's wife two days before Valentine's Day, ready to say something stern, and she answered and said Michael's dead
• What imposter syndrome actually feels like when you move from being one of the best fine dining chefs in Texas to being a food and beverage director at a casual dining group

André Natera and Matt McCallister trace the full arc from FT33's peak to Homewood's collapse to getting sober to disappearing from public view to building River Sing. The conversation covers the intervention, the shame of public failure, what forgiveness actually costs over time, and why he is doing it again. River Sing is named after a line in a Grateful Dead song and his lifelong love of fly fishing in the Arizona mountains. It enters through a courtyard garden. It opens this fall. It is 24 seats.

Guest

• Matt McCallister on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/matthewt.mcallister/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Hanalei Souza is the sous chef, author, and content creator behind @ladylinecook, one of the most recognized culinary humor and leadership voices on Instagram with 88,000 followers. She has been in the industry since 2018, has worked at the same restaurant for seven years in a mountain town, and is the self-published author of the kitchen memoir "Nice Work, Boys!" She started making cooking videos on YouTube at age 14, posted with no audience for 11 years, and went viral on Instagram in 2022. She was flown to Texas by commercial kitchen equipment brand Cuchimix, which is how she ended up at Just Push Record Studios in Austin for this episode. The episode was also recorded twice because André forgot to press record the first time.

This episode opens with the night a man was literally on fire outside her restaurant. Hanalei grabbed a kitchen fire extinguisher, pulled the pin, chased him down the street, helped save his life, and then went back inside to finish the last three hours of service. That is the opening story. It gets better from there.

• Why a title earns zero automatic respect in a kitchen and how the only path to genuine authority is being the person who can actually do every job in the building
• What the night she burned $300 in New York strips as a new sous chef taught her about leadership, integrity, and why a good chef does not fire you for one mistake
• Why creators who build their platform by complaining about the industry are doing more damage than the toxic kitchens they claim to expose

André Natera and Hanalei Souza cover the clipboard fear she had as a line cook and why she now runs four of them, why 80 percent of her job as sous chef is still hands on the food, the transition from being everyone's friend on the line to being the person responsible for their stations, and the social media conversation that the culinary world needs to have about what viral actually means and who it serves. The episode closes with her Mount Rushmore of chefs, her Mount Rushmore of culinary content creators, and a shoutout to Cuchimix and the women's chef coat she co-created with Funky Chef.

Guest

• Hanalei Souza on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/ladylinecook/
• Lady Line Cook Website → https://www.ladylinecook.com/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef

Chef RJ Yoakum is the chef de cuisine at Michelin-recommended Sushi Kozy in Dallas, a kaiseki-inspired omakase restaurant from chef-owner Paul Ko. A 2025 James Beard Award finalist for Emerging Chef, he previously led the kitchen at Georgie in Dallas to its first Michelin recommendation and trained at The French Laundry, Angler, and The Clove Club in London.

He is 32 years old. He has trained in some of the most demanding kitchens in the world. And in this episode, he says that the more successful he became in Dallas, internally he was broken.

• Why four excellent elements on a plate always beat seven mediocre ones, and how learning to edit is what separates mature cooking from the need to prove yourself
• How cooking meat and fish whole on the bone and portioning after service protects yield, improves consistency, and teaches teams to develop real judgment instead of following a timer
• What nobody tells you when you leave a three-star kitchen to lead your own, why the resume gets you in but culture has to be built from zero, and why the army disappears the moment you need it most

André Natera and RJ Yoakum cover the TFL classics that shaped his approach, the asparagus question of when technique serves the ingredient versus when it gets in the way, the mentorship of David Breeden and Thomas Keller and what it actually transferred, the imposter syndrome that followed his success in Dallas, and the leadership lessons that only made sense once he was on the other side of them. The episode closes with his Mount Rushmore, rapid fire questions, and what he is building at Sushi Kozy.

This episode is sponsored by Rational USA. Learn more at https://rationalusa.com

Todd Duplechan and Jessica Maher are the husband-and-wife chef-owners of Lenoir, a MICHELIN Guide restaurant in Austin's Bouldin Creek neighborhood open since 2012. They also formerly owned Métier Cook's Supply next door and opened Boni's Bar, a Spanish drinks and bites concept, in Spring 2026. Todd is a native Texan who trained at The Danube under David Bouley and served as chef de cuisine at the Four Seasons Austin before opening Lenoir. Jessica cooked through the Bouley restaurant family and at Tabla with Floyd Cardoz and Gray Kunz before moving to Austin. They met through the Bouley restaurants and have built Lenoir together for 14 years.

This episode is about the gap between technically skilled and genuinely great, and what it actually takes to close it.

• Why great cooking is built through process, patience, and accumulated experience, and why social media trends actively work against that development
• The foundational cookbook list every serious cook should own, from Ducasse's Grand Livre de Cuisine to Jacques Pépin's La Technique to Paul Bertolli's Cooking by Hand
• How mentorship through observation, athletic team dynamics, and genuine hospitality have kept Lenoir evolving for 14 years without losing what makes it worth returning to

André Natera, Todd Duplechan, and Jessica Maher cover Todd's stage at The Danube, being hired, and the 12-course meal at the pass that changed how he understood professional cooking, how they met through the Bouley restaurant family, what separates cooks who develop into great chefs from those who plateau, and the teamwork and hospitality philosophy that has driven Lenoir's 14-year evolution. The episode closes with rapid fire kitchen gear, the chef Mount Rushmore, and the story behind Métier and Boni's Bar.

Guest

• Todd Duplechan on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/duplechananigans/
• Lenoir on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/lenoiratx/
• Boni's Bar on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/bonisbaratx/

Links

• Subscribe on Substack → https://chefspsa.substack.com/
• Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
• Visit Chef's PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/
• Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef