Claim OwnershipCulinary Characters Unlocked
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Emmy Winner, International Acclaimed Journalist, Executive Producer, Food & Travel Lover, and Creator of the Beloved show “Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives” David Page takes us deep into the world of chefs, restaurateurs, and everything “foodie” from the nationally and internationally awarded to the locally loved on Culinary Characters Unlocked. New episode every Tuesday.
51 Episodes
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Born and raised in Japan, Chef Julia Momosé developed a respect and love for hospitality watching her mother entertain at home. Her motivation for entering the culinary world was a visit she made to a bar in Kyoto watching the bartender hand making ice spheres for use in drinks. She pursued that newfound passion while attending college in the U.S., working at bars and local restaurants, before making a big name for herself as a bartender in Chicago, working for celebrated chefs and restaurateurs at Michelin starred restaurants, before opening Kumiko, what she calls a dining bar, pairing cutting edge drinks with Japanese food that goes far beyond sushi and ramen, and earned a Michelin star there. Recently, she’s taken on an even greater role—when health issues
forced her Executive Chef to step down, she took his place, and is getting
fabulous reviews, including from the Michelin Guide. And Kumiko has now won Outstanding Bar in the 2025 James Beard Awards.
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Pioneering chef Jordan Kahn holds Michelin stars at two different Los Angeles area restaurants— two stars at Vespertine, and one star at Meteora. Appropriately, the Michelin Guide calls his rise in the food world “meteoric.” Kahn worked under legendary chefs Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz before striking out on his own, He is known for crafting not just a meal, but a multi-sensory experience intended to connect the diner with the natural world, featuring a range of what he calls “exceptional ingredients” ranging from algae, ancestral grains, and wild herbs and flowers, to inventive creations of local seafood, quail, wagyu beef, and
more. And each dish — and meal —is intended to tell a story, often historical, even ancient, through the selection and juxtaposition of ingredients and cooking methods. Kahn also has a third restaurant, Destroyer, aimed at recreating the vibe of historic café society in Paris.
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Chef Anita Jaisinghani grew up in India and, while she loved food, she didn’t make it a career at first. She became a microbiologist, worked in that field when she and her husband moved to Canada, and only decided to enter the restaurant business when they moved to Houston. There, she opened what she describes as an Indian diner, Pondicheri, and in the space above it, a bakery, infusing even traditional baked goods such as croissants with Indian spices and flavors. She has received multiple James Beard Award nominations, include one for her cookbook, Masala: Recipes from India, the Land of Spices.
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Laurent Tourondel is a Michelin star winning French chef who opened an affordable New York steakhouse, Skirt Steak, that became a Tik Tok sensation. Born in Auvergne, France, he has worked all over the world in a
storied 40-year career (and even says his time in Moscow was a great culinary learning experience). He has earned a Michelin star, three stars from the New York times, founded the BLT Restaurant Group, and now owns LT hospitality, running a range of restaurants including Skirt Steak, which exploded on Tik Tok after being discovered by a couple of influencers. And he has some great advice for home cooks on making the perfect steak and burger.
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Marisa Baggett had never seen sushi, never tasted sushi, when a customer asked for it at her Starkville Mississippi café. And that launched her quest to master the age old Japanese culinary tradition, graduating from the California Sushi Academy, and championing creativity that remains true to the fresh and local soul of sushi, such as her southern influenced sushi made with ingredients including pickled okra, catfish, and collard greens. She says anyone can learn to make their own sushi at home, and she’s written the cookbooks to help people make it happen. She’s also writing
about Japanese food — sushi and much more — in a Substack column called Dear Sensei at dearsensei.substack.com.
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Chef Eric LeVine was so taken by cooking that before he even attended culinary school, he wrote a letter to groundbreaking chef David Burke at the legendary River Café in New York – and got hired. He credits Chef Burke with setting him on the path to culinary achievement and, after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, Chef LeVine cooked at a variety of restaurants, winning a three-star review from the New York Times. He then began opening restaurants of his own, building a restaurant group that now includes locations in Brooklyn and on Long Island, offering cuisines that run the gamut from burgers to handmade pasta to elevated high-end cooking that evokes his life, such as an upscale homage to the bagels, knishes, and hot dogs from the Brooklyn of his childhood. Along the way he was named champion on Chopped. And he did it all while repeatedly battling cancer.
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Amy Mills grew up surrounded by barbecue. Her father Mike Mills owned 17th St. Barbecue in Murphysboro, Illinois and was the first pitmaster ever named Grand Champion three times at the “super bowl of swine,” the Memphis in May barbecue competition. Her father passed away a few years back and Amy now runs the growing operation which includes two restaurants, a sauce factory, and catering. She’s kept the quality and the flavor up to her father’s standards and reveals some of the secrets for creating 17th Street’s signature ribs, brisket, sausage, and more. She’s now consulting and teaching barbecue classes as well.
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James Beard Award winning chef Alon Shaya, born in Israel and raised in Philadelphia, was cooking for his family at the age of seven. When he began getting into trouble as a teen, his high school home economics teacher intervened, getting him his first fine-dining cooking job when he was just 16. He says she saved his life. He went on the Culinary Institute of America, then cooked in a variety of restaurants, become an executive chef at 21. He won the 2015 James Beard award as Best Chef South for cooking at the Italian restaurant Domenica which he co-owned in New Orleans. The following year his restaurant Shaya, also in New Orleans and offering Israeli food, won the James Beard Award as the country’s best new restaurant. He then moved on to open two more highly popular Israeli restaurants, in New Orleans and Denver, and is now growing his Pomegranate Hospitably group with locations featuring other cuisines as well, including a restaurant in the Bahamas.
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Chef Alycia Wahn Martindale is cooking up southern flavors north of the border at Conejo Negro (Black Rabbit in Spanish), the massively popular Toronto restaurant she owns with her husband and their good friend. The menu is a combination of Creole, Caribbean, and Latin American cooking. And she is making everything possible from scratch— bacon, butter, pickles and much more. The former punk rock musician says she wants diners to feel the love in her food, which should feel like something someone’s grandmother would make. After little more than a year, Conejo Negro was feted by Michelin with a bib gourmand and an award for outstanding service.
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Often cited as America’s best deli, Katz’s has been a lower East Side institution in New York for more than 137 years this month. Owner Jake Dell’s father and uncle bought the deli from the original Katz family in 1988. Jake joined in 2009. He refuses to change anything about the customer experience there—from the ancient decor to the scratch made pastrami, corned beef, chopped liver, knishes and everything else on the expansive menu. He is, however, working to bring his food to even more people, opening a take-out location in Brooklyn and expanding into nationwide shipping. Katz’s was, of course, the location for the famous “I’ll have what she’s having” scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally, a scene recreated there by stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal for a 2025 Super Bowl commercial for Helmann’s mayonnaise. Dell insisted he would only allow the ad to be shot there if the producers promised not to put mayo on pastrami, which requires mustard.
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Cara Tobin got her first restaurant job at the age of 17 by lying about her cooking experience in the job interview—she had none at all. In the years that followed she went to culinary school, graduating number one in her class, then worked her way up the cooking ladder at several restaurants before falling in love with Eastern Mediterranean cuisine when she worked at Oleana in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now she is cooking that cuisine at two restaurants she co-owns in Burlington, Vermont—Honey Road and The Grey Jay. And she and her business partner have been named finalists for the title of America’s Outstanding Restaurateur in the 2025 James Beard awards, which will be announced in June.
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Chef André Bienvenu spent more than a quarter-century as executive chef at America’s highest grossing independent restaurant, Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach. He considered that the pinnacle of his long career and was looking ahead to retirement, but those plans changed dramatically. Given an unexpected opportunity to partner on a new restaurant, he began a second chapter in his professional life as an owner, opening Catch & Cut in Fort Lauderdale, an old school seafood and steak restaurant that became an instant hit. He does things his way—a reservation book instead of an iPad, an obsession with running a civilized kitchen with no shouting, and of course his own take on stone crab.
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Named a Food & Wine Best New Chef for 2024, Karyn Tomlinson has won raves for her restaurant Myriel in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her menu, combining elements of French, Nordic, and Midwestern cuisines has been dubbed “Grandma Chic.” A major advocate of local, seasonal cooking, she sources all her ingredients from local farms, which she visits every week. But she is pragmatic about getting people to eat better, encouraging them to simply do as well as they can (and she herself admits to enjoying a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios after work).
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After coming to the United States from Peru in his teens, Diego Sanchez found a sense of belonging in restaurant kitchens. He cooked under some of the world’s greatest chefs before striking out on his own and now owns his own restaurant on the Jersey shore, 39 Degrees North in Manahawkin, NJ—a diner he has reimagined his way, adding items like handmade gnocchi and lomo saltado to the traditional diner menu.
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Chef Mary Nguyen grew up in a Vietnamese immigrant household in Denver, went on to work as an investment banker, then decided to make a major career change—into the world of food. She began by working three culinary jobs at once, and becoming one of America’s first female sushi chefs, before opening the first of several restaurants in her hometown, including Olive & Finch, which is now a growing restaurant group. It offers chef-driven, scratch-made food without the fine dining prices.
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Michelin star winning chef John Fraser worked for Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Thomas Keller, and in some of the most storied restaurants in France, before opening a restaurant of his own and then continuing to build a culinary empire. He has won Michelin stars at two different restaurants, including the vegetarian Nix in New York city. His restaurants focus on a range of cuisines, including French, Greek and Turkish, and vegetable-focused California style cooking.
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Sheila and Duffy Witmer bought the Pioneer Saloon in Ketchum, Idaho nearly half a century ago. And they’ve kept it a jam-packed favorite ever since, with scores of repeat customers including Clint Eastwood, Sandy Koufax, and Ernest Hemingway’s grandchildren. The menu is beef-heavy, featuring steaks and their legendary prime rib. And scraps from preparing the prime rib are the key ingredient in the Jim Spud, a massive twenty-two ounce baked potato stuffedwith teriyaki beef, cheese, sour cream, caramelized onions and more.
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Carlos Gaytán has earned a Michelin star (the first Mexican-born chef ever to receive one) at two different restaurants. He is noted for combining regional Mexican cooking with classic French techniques. After working his way up from dishwasher in a hotel kitchen, he now owns restaurants in Chicago, Mexico, and recently opened several in the Downtown Disney District adjacent to Disneyland. He has appeared on Top Chef and as a judge on numerous cooking competition shows in the U.S. and Mexico.
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Called the Soul Food Scholar, Adrian Miller is renowned for his knowledge of African American and southern cooking. Author of multiple books, he won James Beard awards for two of them: Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, and Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. Yet culinary history was not his original career path. He was a lawyer, worked for the Clinton White House, and then for the governor of Colorado, before turning to culinary research. His findings are profound and often surprising. Our conversation ranged far and wide – from the white historyof chitlins, to vegan soul food, the German origins of chicken and waffles, and how, in his words, mac and cheese became “so black.”
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Chef Katie Button is a James Beard winner for her Asheville, North Carolina Spanish restaurant Cúrate, which is the flagship of her restaurant group. Button discovered her deep love for food when she was living in Paris, studying for a master’s degree in biomedical engineering. The awakening was so profound that she changed careers, worked for two of the world’s greatest chefs, Ferran Adrià and José Andrés, before opening tapas-based Cúrate, then building a culinary empire that includes a Catalonian restaurant, a Spanish market, European tours, a cookbook, and more. She is heavily involved in helping the Asheville community rebuild after massive flooding from Hurricane Helene.
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