Her explanation is the useful part. Wholesale has a high entry cost, real machinery, real volume commitments, and a thin 1 to 2 percent margin if you’re doing it manually. Retail carries better margins than most people assume, close to double what wholesale returns, which is why she’ll tell you outright that a $6 croissant isn’t the overcharge people think it is once you account for European butter, labor, and the cost of doing it right. But catering strips out most of the overhead entirely. Her core team is four people: an executive sous chef, a banquet manager, herself, and a salesperson, filled out with a reliable roster of gig workers project by project. No storefront lease, no daily walk-in traffic to manufacture, no fixed labor sitting idle on a slow Tuesday.

The tradeoff is real, and she’s upfront about it. Catering income is lumpy, brutal in high season, quiet the rest of the year, and almost nobody outside the industry understands the actual labor behind it. Her description: pack an entire restaurant into a truck, drive it to a location, rebuild the whole operation on-site, run the event, tear it down, and do it again a few days later. It is not the glamorous version people picture when they hear “private chef.”

The rest of the conversation is just as practical. She’s the first Latina chef to ever beat Bobby Flay on television, and walks through exactly what the casting process looks like, the three-month pipeline, the background checks, and the single piece of advice, know your signature dish cold and rehearse it for the exact time you’ll be given, that won her the competition. She’ll tell you the number most people quote for opening a restaurant, somewhere around a million dollars, isn’t enough anymore, and that a proper ground-up build now runs closer to two. She explains why she rejects most influencer partnerships that land in her inbox, and what she looks for in the rare one she says yes to. And she runs a monthly AI audit of her own online reviews, which is how she caught a real, fixable problem with her matcha program before it became a pattern anyone noticed.

Guest

@chefrosanarivera
@chef_andthebaker

Links

Lead Like a Chef App → https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachef
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He got here the hard way. Restaurant Daniel in New York, where a chef corrected his micro-green prep on day one and made clear there wouldn’t be a second warning. Eight months in Jeddah, cooking out of what was basically a shipping container at 130 degrees, where a stranger once slapped his foot, hard, for crossing his legs the wrong way, a gesture nobody had warned him was disrespectful. He came up in real pressure.

Which makes the kitchen he’s actually built at Meridian more interesting. Post-shift meetings where the team calls each other out as a group. A rule that character matters more to him than raw skill, because skill is teachable. When his cooks tell him he’s rarely angry, he says he checks himself first, before he checks anyone else. His sous chef of fourteen years, the one who followed him from LA to Vegas to Dallas, just told him he’s done with cooking for good, headed back to finish a medical degree. Osorio didn’t fight it. He rearranged the schedule around him instead.

The rest of the conversation is Osorio building out what he wants Meridian to be. Live fire cooking. A foil-wrapped cabbage roasted for two hours in the hearth that became a signature almost by accident. A cornbread with a brown butter secret, powdered milk stirred in to pull more solids back into the fat, now the most requested dish on the menu. He watched LA’s dining scene take a decade to mature and thinks Dallas, powered by social media in a way LA never had, gets there in three or four years instead. And there’s a sharp aside on why a bad influencer review travels further than a good one, and what he does instead when someone asks him for the truth.

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/⁠

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

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He’s not the only one making that case, and he’s not the only one proving it. He runs through a list of chefs who’ve come out of El Paso and gone on to real recognition elsewhere, in New York, Colorado, Chicago, and it’s longer than most people realize. That’s part of why he is a part of El Paso Family Meal alongside Rico Torres, Gabe Erales, and Jake Rojas, a group built specifically so that talent from a city most of the industry overlooks doesn’t stay invisible.

The rest of the conversation is Lozano applying that same instinct, that visibility matters as much as talent, to everything else he’s built. He has a theory about how television scouts actually pick people, and it isn’t the food.

That clarity is also what’s driving Mija, his upcoming restaurant in San Elizario, designed so that everything on the plate, down to the beef and the vegetables, comes from land the restaurant owns. He’s honest that it’ll take years to get there fully, and honest that the discipline behind it came from two restaurants he had to close along the way, both times over the same mistake, focusing entirely on the food and not enough on who was watching the books. Those closures taught him something most chefs learn the hard way or not at all: you can be excellent at the food and still lose the business if nobody’s minding the part that isn’t food. He also talks candidly about who actually showed up when things fell apart, and who didn’t.

At Aguazul, his 200-item seafood menu in San Antonio, that same discipline shows up differently. The size isn’t chaos, it’s cross-utilization, the same shrimp doing seven different things across the menu. He makes a strong case that San Antonio might be the strongest emerging food market in Texas that nobody’s fully priced in yet, three Michelin stars in a city most people haven’t caught up to.

There’s also a ramen tip near the end worth the whole listen on its own. Stop straining your tonkotsu broth. Start emulsifying it instead.

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/
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Chef's PSA

Welcome to Chef's PSA: Leadership in the Kitchen, Redefined. Unfiltered insights into culinary leadership. Diving deep into kitchen culture, management mastery, and the relentless pursuit of greatness. For those ready to lead, not just cook.

By André Natera

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

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Mike the Bake was the pastry chef at Gargiulo’s for over forty years. He barely spoke English, he could bake anything without measuring a single ingredient, and he would not give his recipes to anyone. Not an employee. Not a family member. When Matthew Cutolo, fresh out of college, told him he wanted to learn, Mike’s answer was simple. If you want to learn, you have to watch.

So Matthew stood at the mixing bowl. Mike threw in a scoop of flour, no measurement, then walked off and talked to someone else in the kitchen for ten minutes. Came back, added the next thing, walked off again. That went on for two months before Mike said a word about what was actually going in the bowl. Even then, if anyone else asked what he’d put in, he’d lie to their face. A little water, a little flour, when it was neither.

What eventually got taught wasn’t a recipe. It was why. Why too much of something ruins it, why not enough does something else, until Matthew could feel his way through a batch the same way Mike did. He still doesn’t use a thermometer frying cannoli, the same way Mike never did, because that’s how he learned. The one exception is his uncle, who pulled him aside and told him Mike learned in an Italy that didn’t have thermometers. Some things carry forward exactly as taught. Some things are allowed to evolve. Knowing the difference is its own skill.

That tension runs through the whole conversation, tradition against what the moment calls for. It shows up again in the debate over what even counts as Italian food. Matthew’s answer is that Italian American food is close to its own cuisine, built by immigrants who took the principles they knew and adapted them to what was actually available here. Eggplant parmigiana is the only parmigiana in Italy. Chicken parm exists because chicken was on hand. Meatballs barely exist in Italy at all. None of that makes it less real, it just makes it a different thing with its own history.

And then there’s the settled question. Fry the meatballs first. Matthew will die on that hill, and so, on record, will André.

The back half turns into a conversation about building an audience from nothing, which sounds a lot like the DeBake apprenticeship in reverse. Matthew’s first attempt at cooking content cost him three hundred dollars and six hours to make a thirty-second video that twenty people saw. What actually worked was standing in front of a camera and saying something sharp. Four years later that’s a podcast that ranks first or second globally for culinary shows, a PR relationship with a major agency, and a family that finally stopped saying nobody wants to see it.

His read on YouTube is worth sitting with if you make anything. People don’t click because a video looks good. They click because the person on screen might know something they don’t.

Guest

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

Aspic was the same move. When refrigeration was new and expensive, a soup that stood up on its own when you turned the mold over was proof you owned the machine. Nobody was eating it because they wanted to.

Bobby Hicks found both of those while researching Retro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist, and they are the fun part. The part that stayed with me is what he found underneath.

The Great Depression ran into World War II with almost no recovery between them. That is two generations of mothers cooking without butter, without sugar, without the things their own mothers’ recipes took for granted. You cannot teach a technique you are not able to practice. So it did not get taught. And when the post-war boom arrived with cream of mushroom soup and everything in a box, and women moved out of the house and into factories and were still expected to get dinner on the table, convenience filled a gap that had already been there for twenty years.

The dishes we laugh at were not a failure of taste. They were what people reached for when the knowledge was gone. It took Julia Child in 1961 to make anyone want to learn again.

That is the whole episode, really, and it is not about retro food. It is about what happens when nobody teaches the next person.

Bobby’s own story runs on the same logic in reverse. He got started because he had a mentor. He prepared for Next Level Chef by packing a suitcase of textbooks and making flashcards, and the three he names are worth writing down: Sauces by James Peterson, Heritage by Sean Brock, and The French Laundry Cookbook. One teaches technique. The other two teach why it matters.

The most useful thing he says is about hiring, and it cuts against how most kitchens do it. You can teach knife skills. You can teach the difference between a béarnaise and a hollandaise. You can teach someone to explain what they are doing. What you cannot teach is what happens when the timeline is impossible and half the ingredients are wrong. He suggests running your own low-stakes mystery basket once a quarter, not to find the best cook, but to find out who has it.

Then there is the exercise he still gives private chefs, which costs nothing. Go to a market that sells food you did not grow up with. Buy something you cannot identify. Try it raw, boiled, fried, roasted, mashed. Get it wrong repeatedly until something works. He calls it expanding your vocabulary, and the payoff is that you stop freezing when what you planned on is not there.

The back half turns into a conversation about making things in public. Bobby has been at it twelve years and his advice is unglamorous. Stop buying gear. Start shooting. Put it out. Let the audience tell you what they respond to. He points out that Chef’s PSA ran a hundred solo episodes before the first guest, which was not patience so much as data collection.

There is also a stretch on bar etiquette every cook should hear, which comes down to waiting your turn, not name-dropping where you work, tipping people who do what you do, and saying bartender’s choice instead of pretending.

Mount Rushmore: Julia Child, Pierre Koffmann, Sean Brock, Thomas Keller.

Salt is Diamond. Tape is green, and he tested it against this show’s own claim in low light before answering.

Guest

Retro Recipes Kitchen on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/retrorecipeskitchen/
This Fellow on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/thisfellow/
retrorecipeskitchen.com
Retro 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/books
Shop Chef's PSA Merch → https://shop.chefspsa.com/
Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/

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Twenty years later, he owns Quarter Acre, a Michelin Guide restaurant on Lower Greenville in Dallas that Texas Monthly named one of the Best New Restaurants in 2023 and D Magazine ranked in its Top 5. The restaurant is his biography on a plate. Every dish has a story. The kingfish ceviche is named ceviche so people will actually order it, because at home in New Zealand they just call it raw fish. The smoked beef tartare is his attempt to put Texas barbecue into a bistro setting. Harry’s Sausage Sizzle, his charcuterie dish, is named after his father and built around a fundraising tradition every New Zealander grows up with. The menu is global and contemporary and completely uncategorizable, which is exactly the point.

The central argument of this episode is one that Archibald makes directly and without qualification: you cannot learn to cook from YouTube. You can learn the steps. You can follow the procedure. But you cannot taste what is happening, you cannot smell when the thyme hits the brown butter and the Maillard reaction goes exactly right, and you cannot feel when the sausage protein changes in the mixer and becomes the thing that will hold instead of split. His second favorite smell in the world, he says, is when thyme hits brown butter in a hot pan. That is not in any video. That lives in your body after you have stood over that pan a thousand times and learned what it means.

The conversation covers his three years at The Greenhouse in London, where working across a language barrier with French chefs who could not explain technique in English forced him to watch, taste, and understand rather than follow instructions. It covers the seventh generation French charcutier who arrived at Café Boulud Toronto and could debone an entire pig with a sharpened spoon because he simply knew where every muscle was. It covers arriving in New York to work for Gavin Kaysen and learning a week later that Gavin was leaving for Minneapolis to open Spoon and Stable. And it covers the farewell dinner Daniel Boulud made a point to attend, where after more than an hour of conversation he pulled out his phone and started looking up hotels in Sydney to see if he could open a restaurant there so Toby could stay working for him.

There is also a lesson for anyone who has ever called a plate of Italian cold cuts a charcuterie board. French charcuterie and Italian salumi are entirely different traditions. French charcuterie is the art of cooked, set, confit, emulsified, and cased preparations. Italian salumi is the art of salt, time, hanging, and air. They are not interchangeable, and almost every charcuterie board in America is actually a salumi board. Archibald says this with the energy of someone who has held this opinion for a long time and is glad to finally be on a podcast where someone will let him finish the explanation.

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

• 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

The week before this recording, Geno attended the Rewiring Hospitality conference in Irvine, California, where Will Guidara, Tyler Florence, and Preston Lee spoke on hospitality leadership. He flew home with one takeaway that reframed everything: the food is the bonus. Hospitality is the point. He spent the first years of Lucia’s obsessing over the cooking, making sure it was the best food within hundreds of miles, and it was. Then the food got to where it needed to be, and that is when he started to see what was actually driving guests back. It was not the carbonara. It was the way they felt when they walked in the door.

Three weeks before this recording, a server told him a five-top had gotten married at a courthouse 20 minutes earlier. Geno found out their wedding song, turned the restaurant music off, played it through the room, walked to their table, and offered them their first dance as a married couple. The entire restaurant stopped. They got up and danced. The whole room went nuts. It went on social media and went viral locally. He had read the story in Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality and applied it immediately, in his own way, in a 39-seat Italian restaurant in rural Illinois.

The conversation covers what Geno is building next after attending the conference: a complete restructuring of Lucia’s internal culture around guest experience rather than operational efficiency. His pre-shift meetings already never discuss 86 items, cover counts, or kitchen logistics. That information goes on a dry erase board in the back. Pre-shift is one question: how are we going to make the guest experience better tonight? He renamed front of house staff experience makers. He trains the team to read body language and leave guests alone when they want to be left alone and give them everything when they want it.

The episode also goes deep on what separates Italian food from Italian American food, why Geno built his menu around traditional Italian dishes in a town that walked in expecting fettuccine Alfredo, and how guanciale has become the single most effective menu education tool he has. Tell someone you have guanciale, describe it as bacon but elevated, and watch them forget they ever wanted Alfredo. He also covers the Roman tonda meets New York style pizza hybrid that defines Lucia’s pizza, the pasta economics that govern a small Italian kitchen, the discovery that French toast is actually a Roman invention from the fourth century, and the construction contractor financial discipline that gave him a business foundation most self-taught chefs never develop.

His tagline is stitched onto every shirt he sends out: cheaper than a ticket to Italy. His tape is yellow, for the Pittsburgh Steelers. His kitchen makes 800 to 900 lasagna sheets per week. He has no plans to open a second location. He just wants to make Lucia’s the best it can be.

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 →

Chef's PSA

Welcome to Chef's PSA: Leadership in the Kitchen, Redefined. Unfiltered insights into culinary leadership. Diving deep into kitchen culture, management mastery, and the relentless pursuit of greatness. For those ready to lead, not just cook.

By André Natera

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

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

Leave a comment

This episode is the conversation he has not fully had in public before.

He came to Texas originally to go to a treatment center. That is how he ended up in Dallas. He stayed, built a career, opened a restaurant, and by the time the accolades arrived the pressure and the access and the personal turmoil of a separation from his first wife had quietly combined into something he could not manage without a drink. The intervention happened in 2016.

He closed FT33 in June 2018, noting publicly that the closing date was the two-year mark of his sobriety. He opened Homewood shortly after with business partner Michael Burnett, who was himself in treatment for alcohol when the restaurant opened. The deficit was structural from day one. During COVID, Burnett became increasingly absent, operating from California, and the team ran the restaurant largely without financial visibility. They were doing well. Then Burnett decided to remove Maggie Huff and general manager Carrie from the operation. That was the beginning of the end.

Two days before Valentine’s Day, McCallister called Burnett’s wife to say something about the restaurant. She answered and said, “Michael’s dead.” The family attorney shut the restaurant down the same day and told the staff to leave.

McCallister describes what came next in one line: he really just wanted to disappear. The public nature of restaurant failure compounds the loss. Everything that a chef pours into a restaurant becomes identity, and when it ends in front of people who have been watching, the shame response is as real as the grief. He moved into a behind-the-scenes role at Local Favorite Restaurants, a Dallas group running casual concepts like Twisted Root, Snuffers, and Mesomaya. He describes the first year as the worst imposter syndrome of his career. He had spent his entire professional life in fine dining, and suddenly he was trying to have meaningful conversations with line cooks about enchilada prep at El Fenix.

He stayed. He healed. He started exercising seriously for the first time. He started taking his son to a Buddhist meditation center on Sunday mornings. He started texting people instead of deleting the texts. And about a year into the role, he emailed a stranger back, someone who had eaten at Homewood and left an open-ended note about doing something someday, and that conversation became River Sing.

River Sing is 24 seats inside a 1928 building that was once Dallas’ General Motors Truck and Coach showroom, one block from Fair Park. Guests enter through a courtyard garden that McCallister designed as the first condition of any lease negotiation. The restaurant features a four-course short format tasting menu, a preservation room where the team will make their own verjus, misos, vinegars, and pickles, a wine room, and a cookbook library. It opens mid-to-late fall 2026. He is collaborating with Chris Morina, his second-in-command at Homewood, on every menu.

He named it after a line in a Grateful Dead song and his lifelong love of fly fishing in the mountains of northern Arizona. Nature is where he goes to collect himself. The restaurant is named after the sound that helped him do that.

He says forgiveness takes a lifetime. He says he is still working on it. He says the version of himself who opened FT33 and the version building River Sing are not the same person. He is right.

Guest

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

Links

• 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

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Hanalei Souza, known online as @ladylinecook, is the sous chef, author, and content creator who has spent seven years at the same restaurant in a mountain town building a career and a platform at the same time. She started making cooking videos on YouTube at 14. She posted for 11 years with no meaningful audience. She went viral in 2022 with a video about sauce on the side, and has since built an Instagram following of 88,000 people who show up to watch someone who still works the line every day and has not pretended otherwise.

She was flown to Texas by Cuchimix, a commercial kitchen equipment brand, which is how she ended up at Just Push Record Studios in Austin, which is how this episode happened. André forgot to press record the first time, so they did it twice. Hanalei said the second one was better. It probably was.

The central argument of the episode is one that Chef’s PSA comes back to repeatedly but rarely with this much specificity: the gap between having a title and having respect is real, and it cannot be closed by promotion or force or a strongly worded meeting. It closes when the people you lead know that you can do their job, that you will stay when it gets hard, and that when you run toward their station it is because you can actually help. Hanalei spent months as a de facto sous chef without the title before she got it, and she is direct about what that period forced her to build that the title alone never could have given her.

The burned steak story is the practical illustration. Month one as a new sous chef, party of 30, New York strip special ordered for the event, she forgot to set the timer, pulled them at 175 internal, and had to recover on the fly using the loin end of rib eyes to rebuild the plates. The head chef did not fire her. Did not scream. Did not go Gordon Ramsay. She asks the question directly: what would screaming have gained? The customer was still waiting for the steak. You either solve the problem or you waste time making the person who made the mistake feel smaller while the problem stays unsolved. The answer informed everything she has done as a leader since.

The social media conversation is where the episode goes somewhere most culinary podcasts avoid. Hanalei has 88,000 followers and is honest about what that means and what it does not mean. She talks about the content creators who build their platforms by complaining about the industry for views, who use the language of toxicity to describe accountability and pressure, and who are doing more damage to the industry than the bad kitchens they claim to expose. She does not name names. She does not need to. If you are in the culinary social media world you know who she is talking about. Her version of the job is to tell the truth, offer a solution, and not confuse complaining with changing anything.

Guest

• Hanalei Souza on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/ladylinecook/

• Lady Line Cook Website → https://www.ladylinecook.com/

Links

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

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

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Yoakum is now the chef de cuisine at Sushi Kozy, a Michelin-recommended kaiseki-inspired omakase restaurant in the Dallas Arts District from chef-owner Paul Ko. The restaurant features a 17-course experience rooted in the principles of kaiseki, Japan’s traditional multi-course dining style, and emphasizes balance, restraint, and artistry. It is the kind of kitchen where Yoakum’s instinct toward fewer, better elements on the plate has a natural home.

That instinct is the cooking philosophy at the center of this episode. Four excellent elements on a plate always beat seven mediocre ones. It sounds obvious. It takes years to actually believe it and longer to cook it. Yoakum traces the idea back to his time at The French Laundry, where David Breeden taught him what precision time and temperature cookery looks like in practice and where he first understood that consistency once means nothing. Consistency a hundred times is the standard.

The conversation gets technically specific on meat and fish. Yoakum cooks whole on the bone and portions after, a method that protects moisture, produces more consistent results, and requires the team to develop real judgment about when a protein is ready rather than following a clock or a color chart. He walks through the lamb preparation in detail: dry aged, rolled with oxtail mousse, brushed with yogurt, rolled in seaweed and crispy shallots, smoked, then broken down to order. Each piece is different. Each cook has to evaluate what they have and make a decision. That is the point.

Yoakum also talks openly about a childhood learning disability, reading comprehension difficulties following a seizure at age two, and how that shaped how he learns and how he now teaches. Not everyone learns the same way. Not everyone processes the same kitchen environment the same way. The compassion that took him years to develop for his team came directly from understanding what it felt like to be the person who needed more time.

He is now at Sushi Kozy, building something with more intention and more patience than his first run in Dallas. He says he would not change the speed bumps.

Guest

• RJ Yoakum on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/rj_yoakum/

Links

• 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

• Sponsored by Rational USA → https://rationalusa.com

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Duplechan and his wife Jessica Maher co-own Lenoir, a MICHELIN Guide restaurant in Austin’s Bouldin Creek neighborhood that has been open since 2012. They also formerly owned Métier Cook’s Supply next door and are opening Boni’s Bar, a Spanish drinks and bites concept, in Spring 2026. They met through the Bouley restaurant family in New York, both coming through Bouley’s kitchens alongside Gray Kunz and Floyd Cardoz at Tabla, before moving to Austin to build something of their own.

The central argument of this episode is direct: technical skill and genuine greatness are not the same thing, and the gap between them cannot be closed by social media, shortcuts, or trend-chasing. It closes through process, repetition, patience, and the accumulated experience of cooking the same thing hundreds of times until it reveals what it is actually supposed to be.

They back that argument with a foundational cookbook list that every serious cook should own. Ducasse’s Grand Livre de Cuisine. The French Laundry Per Se. Jacques Pépin’s La Technique. Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques. Paul Bertolli’s Cooking by Hand. Michel Richard’s Happy in the Kitchen. These are not coffee table books. They are the texts that build culinary vocabulary, and Duplechan and Maher are specific about why each one belongs on the list.

The episode also covers how mentorship through observation works better than instruction at every level, why athletic team dynamics transfer directly to a high-performing kitchen, and what warm genuine hospitality actually means as a business philosophy after 14 years of running the same restaurant through every shift in the Austin dining scene.

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

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

  Subscribe now

That story is not just an interview anecdote. It is the template for how Lewis thinks about leadership, preparation, and controlling outcomes before other people define the terms.

Lewis is a three-time James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef Northeast, with nominations in 2018, 2022, and 2025. He trained under Jean Louis Palladin at the Watergate Hotel, Marco Pierre White at The Criterion and Mirabelle, and Eric Ripert at Le Bernardin, and has since built Full House Hospitality Group from the ground up into a four-restaurant operation with 125 employees across The Cottage in Westport and Greenwich, Connecticut, and OKO in Westport and Rye, New York.

This episode covers the transition from chef identity to CEO responsibilities in practical terms. Lewis talks about how he empowers his teams with genuine autonomy inside non-negotiable standards, why he only opens a new location when existing operations can thrive without him present, and how he made the identity shift from being the creative voice in the room to leading other chefs to express theirs. He is direct about what that costs personally and what it produces operationally.

The conversation also gets into the research trip to Japan that preceded the launch of OKO, the role of kindness as a management standard rather than a soft option, and the use of strategy and psychology as the primary leadership tools at scale. Lewis closes with a section he calls the Kitchen Art of War, an approach to competitive positioning and internal culture that draws on principles most chefs never consider until they are already leading at his level.

Guest

• Brian Lewis on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/brianlewischef/

• Full House Hospitality on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/fullhousehg/

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

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The concept took more than a decade to reach opening day. The original idea came from a visit to Eataly, the Italian food hall format that showed Dady what a single-destination, multi-concept culinary space could look like if built around a specific culture and cuisine. For San Antonio, the answer was obvious. The negotiation on the 15-year lease took 18 months. COVID created financing setbacks that nearly killed the deal entirely. A small Houston bank eventually stepped in and made the numbers work. Mexico Ceaty opened April 20, 2026 with eight distinct venues including Tres Arcos for Tex-Mex, Dos Cantinas as a 300-seat bar, kiosks for ceviche, tacos, burritos, and frutería, a tortilla station, Dulce Aroma for panadería and coffee, and El Último, a speakeasy mezcal tasting room accessed through an old walk-in refrigerator door.

The operational story is where this episode gets genuinely useful. Dady used targeted social media ads to recruit and onboard 196 employees in a single week. The SOPs and recipes that govern every concept are calibrated to the gram, not because Dady is controlling but because at that volume, consistency is the product. He also covers the EOS Traction framework he uses to run the business, specifically the L10 meeting structure and issue-processing approach that creates leadership accountability without requiring the founding chef in every conversation.

The deeper theme of the episode is the transition from chef-operator to CEO, what that shift actually demands, and why most chefs hit a ceiling because they build for the kitchen they can run personally instead of the organization that can run without them.

Jason Dady Instagram

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This episode is the most honest inside account of America’s Culinary Cup that any competitor has given publicly. Peters walks through being matched against Phil Tessier his friend and coach in episode one, the sequestering process that prevents outside communication or preparation, how the point structure shaped every strategic decision, and the mental fatigue that builds when curveballs arrive in the finale including cooking someone else’s food and executing a Mexican tostada task under pressure. He reacts directly to the too chefy criticism and does not deflect from it. He also lays out exactly what he would change about the format: fewer contestants, cumulative scoring, and a structure that more accurately identifies the best chef rather than the most adaptable television personality.

The conversation then goes deep on sauce, which Peters treats as the central technical argument of the episode. He contrasts Thomas Keller’s approach to clean, precise reductions with Alain Ducasse’s fat-emulsified sauce philosophy, argues that the choice between those two schools is not stylistic but foundational, and explains why every serious cook eventually has to decide which direction their cooking voice belongs in.

Peters is also currently Head Coach for Team USA at the 2027 Bocuse d’Or, coaching Chef Vincenzo Loseto and Commis Tyler Higson on the road to Lyon. He covers the training timeline, the pressure of returning to the competition as a coach rather than a competitor, and what it means to bring Vincenzo, his former teammate from the 2017 gold-medal run, full circle.

Guest

• Matt Peters on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/chefmattpeters/

Links

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

• Visit Chef’s PSA Website → https://chefspsa.com/

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The central argument is direct: success destabilizes priorities if you are not watching for it. Volume increases. Scrutiny increases. The internal pressure to hold a star changes how decisions get made, which changes what gets cooked, which changes the thing that earned the recognition in the first place. LeRoy is honest about where that pressure comes from and what he has put in place to manage it.

He also addresses the larger issue of what Texas barbecue’s dominance as the national formula has done to the genre. When every pitmaster is chasing the same brisket profile, the same rub, the same wood, the same cook temp, the result is a monoculture of taste that makes individual voices harder to hear. LeRoy has spent nearly a decade building one of those individual voices. He is not interested in watching it disappear into a trend.

The episode gets technically specific on brisket in a way that is genuinely useful. LeRoy covers trimming for airflow, the reasoning behind his Dalmatian rub ratios, post oak selection, pit temperature management, rotation and stall, the wrapping decision and its tradeoffs with bark development, and the overnight heated rest that he treats as non-negotiable. That section alone is worth the listen for any cook trying to understand why their brisket does not taste like the ones coming out of the best pits in Texas.

His debut cookbook, New School Barbecue: Recipes for Next-Level Smoking and Grilling from Austin’s LeRoy and Lewis, co-authored with Paula Forbes, is out May 12, 2026. It took three years to build and contains nearly 100 recipes that translate LeRoy and Lewis’s restaurant technique into something a home cook can actually replicate.

Guest

• Evan LeRoy on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/evanleroybbq/

• Sponsored by Rational USA → https://rationalusa.com

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

Lee co-owns and operates Scratch Restaurants Group with his wife and executive pastry chef Margarita Kallas-Lee. The portfolio includes Michelin-starred Sushi by Scratch Restaurants and Pasta|Bar, NADC Burger, and Shokunin, built across multiple US cities through a model that prioritizes small footprints over large-format dining rooms and controlled capacity over volume. This is his third conversation with André Natera on Chef’s PSA, and it is the most operationally detailed one yet.

The episode covers how NADC Burger grew from free pop-ups with no overhead into a multi-location concept, why small tasting-menu restaurants fill faster and execute more consistently than large casual formats, and why Sushi by Scratch scales better than Pasta|Bar across the portfolio. One Pasta|Bar location is being converted into a 22-seat Austin boutique steakhouse, and the reasoning Lee gives for that decision is worth listening to closely.

The conversation also gets into the open world RPG framework Lee uses to process adversity, the specific warning he gives about sharks and partnership structures in the restaurant industry, and an extended, precise discussion on the line between culinary inspiration and outright copying. That section of the episode is one of the most direct conversations about culinary originality, influence, and intellectual honesty that Chef’s PSA has produced.

Lee closes with a preview of his upcoming podcast Fire the Board and forthcoming Austin-area concepts.

Phillip Frankland Lee on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/phillipfranklandlee/

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

That origin is not a footnote in this conversation. It is the frame for everything Sutcliff talks about, from why he thrives in environments that break other cooks, to why he became obsessed with systems, standardized recipes, and onboarding as a way to build something that does not depend on chaos to function.

Sutcliff is now the Corporate Executive Chef and Partner at 55 Seventy, a private members club for wine lovers with locations in Dallas and Houston. His career includes chef de cuisine at FT33, executive chef at Mirador, and recognition as CultureMap Dallas Rising Star Chef of the Year and a Zagat 30 Under 30 honoree. He got there by being deliberate about it in a way most cooks are not.

The central piece of career advice in this episode is specific and practical: map your career backward from the end goal, not forward from wherever you are standing right now. Know the title you want, the kind of operation you want to run, and the skills that role requires. Then build toward it with intention instead of reacting to whatever job opens next.

The episode also gets into station setup as a leadership signal, why consistency matters more than talent at every level, how the sports mindset transfers directly to kitchen team dynamics, and what reputation actually means in an industry where everyone eventually works with everyone.

Sutcliff closes with the transition from chef to business thinker, what changes when you are responsible for openings and systems rather than a single kitchen, and how books and AI tools are changing how he leads.

Guest

• Josh Sutcliff on Instagram → ⁠https://www.instagram.com/jsutcliff/⁠

Links

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

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

• Visit Chef’s PSA Website → ⁠https://chefspsa.com/⁠

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This episode covers the operational detail behind that arc and the personal decision at the end of it.

On scaling, Bull explains why management agreements protect standards in ways licensing cannot, and why the right partner matters more than any pro forma. On leases, he gets specific: CAM charges, parking clauses, utility splits, tenant improvement allowances, and the terms that quietly kill restaurant deals before a single cover is served. On kitchen culture, he talks about the mentorship principles that have to evolve as a team grows, the ways intensity has to be calibrated to the people in the room, and what happens when a leader stops reading the signals that a kitchen is struggling.

Bull co-founded the Mineral Wellness Center in Mineral Wells, Texas, a faith-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing mental health stigma and providing counseling, addiction recovery resources, and community support. He is also developing Restored and Delivered, an upcoming concept in Mineral Wells that extends that mission into the dining room. The move from one of Texas’s most celebrated c

ulinary careers to a small town with a bigger purpose is not a retreat. It is the work he was building toward the entire time.

David Bull on Instagram →

Sponsored by Rational USA →

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Harpster is now the National Corporate Chef for Training and Events at RATIONAL USA. His job is to translate the iCombi Pro, iVario Pro, and iHexagon into real kitchen outcomes for working chefs and operators. That means training academies, field support, and developing cooking programs that run consistently whether there is a seasoned cook at the station or not.

The episode gets technical in the best way. Delta-T roasting builds in resting through the maturing function, protecting yield without requiring anyone to stand over the oven. The iVario Pro runs overnight stock with better clarity and yield than a stovetop ever could, unattended. The risotto program takes three stirs and 15 minutes, which sounds impossible until Harpster explains the system behind it. He also walks through his Peking duck process, developed through ConnectedCooking, covering skin drying, rendering, and fin

ishing in a program any operator can replicate.

The conversation also covers what RATIONAL’s corporate chef network actually does. It is not a sales role. It is a culinary role that happens to live inside a technology company, and for chefs who want to move off the line without leaving the industry, it is worth understanding what that path looks like.

The episode closes with kitchen essentials, the chef Mount Rushmore, and a pasta-in-sauce preset that André calls a secret setting.

• RATIONAL USA Linktree → https://linktr.ee/rational_usa

• RATIONAL USA on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/rational_usa/

• Chef Brandon on Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/brandon.harpster/

• RATIONAL ChefLine → https://www.rational-online.com/en_us/customercare/contact-us/chefline/ | 866-306-2433

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