Culinary Characters Unlocked

Chef David Bancroft got into the food biz early, selling jerky to his classmates in elementary school until he got busted by a teacher. He went on to become a force in southern and local cuisine, then added Tex Mex and...

Kyle and Amanda Lussier spent five years overcoming challenges to open their own restaurant, The Pines. And speaking of challenges, they did it in a small northern Minnesota town where they admit they’ve had to educate...

Mesmerized by the chefs see saw on TV, chef Melissa Perello fell in love with cooking as a child. Her mom still talks about the leg of lamb she made from a cooking show recipe when she was 8 years old! After attending...

Their Washington state restaurant boasts of doing farm to table since 1986 and is credited with helping define Pacific Northwest Cuisine. It even has its own farm, and what they don’t grow there they get from a network...

Chef Ana Sortun knew as a teenager that she wanted to cook. At 16 she decided to move to France for culinary school. It changed her life. But so did another trip many years later, to Turkey, where she found her true...

James Beard Award winning chef and restaurateur Spike Gjerde has totally re-thought the way restaurants ought to be feeding us. He’s obsessed with doing things his way, building a restaurant group to pursue that...

Kari Lauritzen and Sonya Sanford met and became best friends when both were private chefs in Los Angeles. Now they are coaxing non-cooks into the kitchen and teaching home cooks how to make fabulous meals (and enjoy...

Chef Travis Herbert began cooking with his grandmother as a child, but it was sharing a chairlift with a chef at a Utah ski resort that got him into the business. Now he’s got two restaurants at the center of a culinary...

Chef Star Maye has had a remarkable rise through the culinary world. Born in a small Alabama town, this self-described “black, queer single mother” went from a small Alabama town to the U.S. Navy, to prison, where she...

Chef Andrew Black got his first cooking job in his native Jamaica in his teens. That began a stellar career that took him to the Ritz in Paris and the Peabody in Memphis. When he was offered a job in Oklahoma City he...

As a child, Chef Renee Erickson would go salmon fishing with her father. And fruits and vegetables came from the family garden. She’s taken that grounding in the fabulous foods of the Pacific Northwest and built a...

Chef Zak Baker cooks what he calls Midwest Italian and it's unlike anything most folks have ever had before. It began when he first went to Italy and was thrilled by the food, but also surprised. He'd never had anything...

Chef Kathy Fang pretty grew up in her parents’ legendary San Francisco Chinese restaurant, House of Nanking. She tried a career in business but couldn’t escape the pull of the restaurant world. So she returned to her...

When he was in his teens, Zach Midgett found a refuge from problems at home by working in a suburban Philadelphia restaurant. He started as a dishwasher, fell in love with kitchen life, soon was promoted to cook on the...

On this special bonus episode, we revisit great conversations with three chefs who just won James Beard awards. Nok Suntaranon’s Thai restaurant Kalaya won 2026 Outstanding Restaurant. Alinea veteran Dave Beran was...