Foil Swans Podcast

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Bobby Flay has been a fixture on the Food Network almost from the beginning, having written 18 cookbooks and is a household name to just about everyone. But what gets lost in the sauce is that he is a James Beard Award-winning restaurant chef who is changing the restaurant landscape in bold and groundbreaking ways. Flay joins Tinfoil Swans to talk about her new book Part 1her rules for visitors, her competitiveness, and why her tiny chef apron makes her cry.

Meet our guest

Bobby Flay dropped out of high school at 16, earned his GED, and set out to learn the art of cooking. In 1984, he was a member of the first graduating class of the French Culinary Institute (now operating as the Institute of Culinary Education) and began studying under his mentor Jonathan Waxman. That training, and his developmental stint as a chef at the now-closed Miracle Grill in New York City, allowed him to open his first restaurant, Mesa Grill, in 1991 and launch an illustrious on-screen career on the fledgling Food Network. Flay has earned multiple James Beard Awards as well as multiple nominations, including Rising Star Chef of the Year, Who’s Who in Food and Beverage in America, and Television Food Show (National). Flay is a four-time Daytime Emmy Award winner, the first chef to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and currently owns Amalfi and Brasserie B in Las Vegas, as well as the Bobby’s Burgers franchise. The eighteenth book Part One: Iconic Recipes and Inspiration from the Trailblazing American ChefIt was released in October 2024.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is Food & Wine’s executive features editor. Hello, Anxiety: Living with a Bad Nervous ConditionHost of the Food & Wine podcast and founder of Chefs With Issues. He previously served as senior food and beverage editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and executive editor at Tasting Table, and founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won the 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing with Recipes and the 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and her work was featured in the 2020 and 2016 editions. Best American Food Writing. It was nominated for a James Beard Publishing Award in 2013, won the EPPY Award for Best Food Website in 2011 with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. He is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food. is an expert on culture and mental health issues in the hospitality industry and a former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

He’s at school and learning his way

“When I was a kid, they didn’t test us for a learning disability every 10 minutes, but I definitely had one. I don’t even know how to describe it, but I wasn’t interested in learning English through a textbook. I didn’t know it then, but to get really excited about anything, I had to use my hands. Seven years later, my chance was.” It worked out, but I was struggling in school when I was 10 and I couldn’t do it. I was an athlete, playing baseball and basketball, doing everything the kids in the city did, I was too young to know anything at the time.

On Wolfgang Puck and finding weirdness

“We didn’t have that kind of food culture (in 1983). The only thing I started hearing about — this being pre-internet and all kinds of electronic communication — was a guy in Los Angeles who was starting to become famous.” Wolfgang Disc. He had a restaurant called Spago and all the celebrities, actors and stars went to his restaurant. He was putting smoked salmon on the pizza. People were coming to the restaurant where I worked and wanted to take the menu and show it to us. That’s how you learned things. It was very slow – word of mouth – but something was starting to happen. I took an Austrian guy to revolutionize food in America. I have great respect for Wolfgang because he was very dynamic when he started doing this. He opened Spago and said, “You know what? Great food doesn’t have to be like sleep-inducing food. It can be whimsical. It can be fun, it can be energetic. I can put duck sausage or smoked salmon on a plate, pizza, and it can be really good cuisine.”

On being in restaurants

“I don’t have a restaurant in New York anymore, but I always did. I had two or three restaurants for 30 years. And people were saying to me, 10 times a night, ‘I can do it.’ ‘I believe it’s here.’ And I said, ‘This is where I want to live, this is where I need to be.’ “I think if you don’t pay attention to your restaurants, the people who work for you won’t either. You’re the one who cares the most, so you should lead by example and be there to inspire people. Even if you’re busy with other things, restaurants have always been the most important thing to me.” .”

In the review that put him on the map

“In 1988, I was cooking at a restaurant called Miracle Grill in the East Village. I was the opening chef there and was there for three years. At that time, the East Village was a very dangerous place to walk around, and I’d been there before. It became the hottest spot today, $9 If we compare today with then, I just couldn’t have a starter on it. New York Magazine, New York Timesmaybe a few more things. Voice of the Village It was an important publication, especially for that neighborhood. my review Voice of the Village It was for Miracle Grill, probably one of the most important pieces of media I ever got there. Inside New York MagazineJane Freiman had the Underground Gourmet for under $25 per person. The title of the review was:First Miracle.’ “The restaurant blew up, but that was the biggest thing that could happen for a restaurant like this.”

In the Best New Chef Award

“(In 1992) I got a call from someone Food and Wine An acquaintance said: ‘I just want you to know that you will be the New York representative of Best New Chef. I said, ‘This is great.’ Mesa Grill was making a lot of noise. To be fair, there wasn’t much going on in the world, we were actually in a recession and Mesa Grill and a handful of other restaurants were getting all the ink. I was honestly so excited when I got the call, like it was one of the best calls I’ve ever received in my career. And then suddenly the business side of it Food and Wine They decided not to do it for a year and decided to do something called the DiRōNA Awards. I don’t know exactly what it was, but it was some kind of restaurant reward. The reader lost his mind. ‘Wait, what? ‘This is our favorite issue of this year and we get to see who these new chefs are.’ Remember, this was pre-internet, so that’s how we get all our information in the food world. “By the time the next year came, I was old.”

Little chef on his jacket

(Note: Flay at the 2023 Food and Wine Classic in Aspen, honorary Best New Chef and to compensate for this mishap, a traditional framed miniature chef’s jacket was issued.)

“I cried, but no one knew that. I don’t get outwardly emotional about things like that very often, but it touched me that someone would think of that, because how many years ago was that? You’re talking. About 30-odd years. Who would care that you guys thought of that and gave me that award, I’m sure from the audience everyone was like, ‘What are they doing?’ “But I thought it was very special and incredibly touching.”

About showing love

“When I do interviews, people ask me, ‘What do you do to relax?’ I say, ‘I cook,’ and they’re always surprised by that. But I cook at home all the time. You can’t just come to my house and say, ‘Let’s order pizza.’ It’s my way of showing my appreciation to my friends, my family, and people. .There’s a dynamic in people’s minds that when you’re on TV, they automatically decide that you’re a chef on TV but not a real chef. Believe me, I stopped worrying about it because it was so tiring. You say, ‘I can really cook.’ Then you should stop because you’ll lose your mind.”

About podcast

Food & Wine has been leading the conversation about food, beverage and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of candid, informative, surprising and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles and crossroads moments that made these personalities what they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like: Daniel Boulud, Rodney Scott, Asma Khan, Emeril and EJ Lagasse, Claudia Fleming, Dave Beran and Will Poulter, Dan Giusti, Priya Krishna, Lee Anne Wong, Cody Rigsby, Kevin Gillespie, Pete Wells, David Chang, Raphael Brion, Christine D’Ercole, Channing Frye, Nick Cho, Ti Martin, Kylie KwongPati Jinich, Yotam Ottolenghi, Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George, Tom HollandDarron Cardosa, Bobby Flay and other special guests delve into their development experiences with host Kat Kinsman; the dishes and dishes that make them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future? Indulge in a feast of abundant wisdom and quotable morsels to savor that will nourish your brain and soul.

New episodes are released every Tuesday. Listen and follow: Apple Podcasts, Spotifyor wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript to be downloaded does not go through our standard writing process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.