Special Sauce with Ed Levine

Latest Episodes:

Ella Quittner: Obsessed With The Best Apr 03, 2026

Show notes

As someone who has spent the greater part of a half-century searching for and obsessing about where to find the best of any kind of foodstuff, I was immediately drawn to Ella Quittner's book Obsessed with the Best. Quittner and I delved into the pleasures and pitfalls any writer encounters when he or she tackles this most subjective undertaking.

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AI: An Existential Threat to Recipe Developers Mar 27, 2026

Show notes

Smitten Kitchen's Deb Perelman explains why she and many other recipe developers and food writers regard AI as an existential threat on this week's episode of Special Sauce. This is serious business, serious eaters. Listen up!

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Noma and Redzepi: A Shocking Tale of Abuse Mar 20, 2026

Show notes

According The New York Times, Noma chef and co-owner René Redzepi physically and verbally abused more than thirty of his kitchen staff between 2010 and 2017. To find out what that means, I sat down with longtime restaurant critic Bill Addison of The Los Angeles Times, and best selling author and youtuber, Kenji Lopez-Alt. Kenji worked in many serious restaurant kitchens in Boston for a number of years after graduating from college, before opening his own restaurant Wursthall in San Mateo, California. Can fine-dining restaurant kitchens become kinder and gentler places? What should happen to Redzepi? We mull over these questions and more on this episode of Special Sauce.

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LA Taco Reheat: Leading the ICE Resistance One Taco at a Time Mar 13, 2026

Show notes

This week we're reheating one of our favorite recent episodes on the ongoing struggle between ICE and the immigrant-driven food cultures of major American cities. LA Taco's editor-in-chief Javier Cabral explains how and why his website became one of the leading voices of ICE resistance in the "City of Angels'.

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Are Restaurant Critics Obsolete? Part 2 Mar 06, 2026

Show notes

On part 2 of our revealing and refreshingly honest conversation with three of the best food critics in America, Hannah Goldfield of The New Yorker, Bill Addison of The Los Angeles Times, and Elazar Sontag of The Washington Post, all three are not feeling particularly sanguine about the future of restaurant criticism in general. And it's not just social media to blame.

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Are Restaurant Critics Obsolete? Part 1 Feb 27, 2026

Show notes

Are restaurant critics dinosaurs in the age of social media? We discuss that and more in part one of our critic's roundtable with The New Yorker's Hannah Goldfield, The Washington Post's Elazar Sontag, and The Los Angeles Times' Bill Addison.

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Food Critic on a Diet, Part Two: The NYT's Pete Wells Feb 20, 2026

Show notes

This week Pete Wells and I talk about our mutual worst food enemy, our addiction to sugar. Pete explains how the hidden added sugars in many packaged and processed foods just compound our dietary problems. We also talk about how the mixed messages we get from the government add to our dietary woes.

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Food Critic on a Diet, Part One: The NYT's Pete Wells Feb 13, 2026

Show notes

On this first of two episodes featuring The New York Times's Pete Wells, the former Times restaurant critic explains how he learned to eat differently after a trip to his doctor scared the crap out of him. Yes he eats many more whole grains and avoids added sugar any way he can. But as you'll hear his health and diet journey revealed just as many unexpected truths about how to eat right.

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REHEAT: Kenji on Superbowl Food Feb 06, 2026

Show notes

For millions of serious eaters the Super Bowl has turned into a food event almost on a par with Thanksgiving. With the Super Bowl coming up we thought it would be fun and edifying to reheat last year's Super Bowl episode featuring Kenji Lopez-Alt giving serious eaters sage advice about making pizza and wings at home. I've had Kenji's wings and his pan pizza, and they are both seriously delicious and pretty simple to make. We should note that Kenji is no sports fan. In all the years I've known him I can't remember one conversation about sports. But maybe as a resident of Seattle he has found a reason to root for the Seahawks.

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ICE Invades Minneapolis Jan 30, 2026

Show notes

On this episode of Special Sauce the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Sharyn Jackson reports on the devastating effect of the ICE operation on the Twin Cities' restaurant and food community. ICE's terrifying tactics in Minneapolis have been met with many creative forms of resistance.

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