Bobby Flay Gets Deep About His Latest Cookbook, Showing Love, and the Review That Made His Career

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

On this episode

Bobby Flay has been a fixture on Food Network since almost the beginning, written 18 cookbooks, and is pretty much a household name. But the thing that gets lost in the sauce is that he’s a James Beard Award-winning restaurant chef who changed the restaurant scene in some bold and groundbreaking ways. Flay joined Tinfoil Swans to talk about his new book Chapter 1, his rules for visitors, being competitive, and why a tiny chef coat made him cry.

Meet our guest

Bobby Flay left high school at age 16, got his GED, and set out to learn the craft 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 went to work for his mentor, Jonathan Waxman. That education, and a formative period as chef at the now-shuttered Miracle Grill in New York City, allowed him to open his first restaurant, Mesa Grill, in 1991, and kick off a storied onscreen career on the fledgling Food Network. Flay has won multiple James Beard Awards, including Rising Star Chef of the Year, Who’s Who of Food & Beverage in America, and Television Food Show (National), as well as multiple nominations. Flay is a four-time Daytime Emmy Award winner, was 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. His eighteenth book, Chapter One: Iconic Recipes and Inspirations from a Groundbreaking American Chef, was released in October, 2024.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s podcast, and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor-in-chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing. She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On school and learning his way

“When I was a kid, they weren’t testing us every 10 minutes for learning disabilities, but I certainly had one. I don’t even know how to define it, but I wasn’t interested in learning through an English textbook. I didn’t know it then, but I needed to work with my hands to really be excited about anything. That’s how I got lucky, seven years later, but when I was 10, I was really just starting to flounder in school and didn’t really care about schoolwork at all. I was an athlete. I played baseball, basketball. I did all the things that city kids did. That was basically the only thing I really cared about. I didn’t know that I needed to work with my hands then. I was too young to know anything.”

On Wolfgang Puck and finding whimsy

“We didn’t have that food culture at all (in 1983). The only thing I started hearing about — this is pre-internet and any kind of electronic communication — was this guy in L.A. who was becoming famous, named Wolfgang Puck. He had this restaurant, Spago, and all the celebrities and actors and stars were going to his restaurant. He was putting smoked salmon on pizza. People would come to the restaurant that I was working in and they would like have a menu and show it to us. That’s how you learned about stuff. 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 just was so dynamic when he started doing this. He opened Spago, and he was like, “You know what? Great food doesn’t have to be like sleepy food. It can be whimsical. It can have fun, can be energetic. I can put duck sausage or smoked salmon on a pizza and it can be really good cuisine.”

On being present in his restaurants

“I don’t have any restaurants in New York anymore, but I always had. For 30 years, I had two or three restaurants all the time. And people would say to me, I mean, 10 times a night, ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’ And I’m like, ‘This is where I live. This is where I want to be. This is where I need to be. It’s important.’ I think that if you don’t pay attention to your restaurants, the people that work for you are not going to pay attention as well. You’re the person that cares the most, so you have to lead by example and you have to be there to inspire people. Even if you’re busy doing other things, the restaurants to me were always the most important thing.”

On 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 I was there for three years. This was when the East Village was a very dangerous place to walk around, and before it became the hip place that it is today. I couldn’t have an entrée over $9. That was the rule; not an appetizer, an entrée. It was really fun because it was sort of this underground restaurant because, let’s go back just to compare today to then, there was just New York Magazine, The New York Times, maybe a couple of other things. Village Voice was an important publication, especially for that neighborhood. My review in the Village Voice was for Miracle Grill, was probably one of the most important pieces of media I got there. In New York Magazine, Jane Freiman was The Underground Gourmet, which was under $25 a person. The title of the review was ‘Miracle on First.’ It blew the restaurant up, but that was as big as it could possibly get for a restaurant like that.”

On the Best New Chef Award that wasn’t

“[In 1992] I got a phone call from somebody at Food & Wine who was an acquaintance of mine who said, ‘I just want to let you know, you’re going to be the New York representative for Best New Chef. I was like, ‘That’s amazing.’ Mesa Grill was making a lot of noise. To be fair, there wasn’t a lot going on in the world, we were basically in a recession, and Mesa Grill and a handful of other restaurants were getting all the ink. When I got the phone call, I was obviously thrilled, like one of the best calls I’ve gotten in my career. And then all of a sudden, the business side of Food & Wine made a decision not to do it for one year, and they decided to do something called the DiRōNA Awards. I don’t even know exactly what it was, but it was some kind of restaurant award. The readership lost their minds. They were like, ‘Wait, what? This is, this is our favorite issue of the year and we get to see who these new chefs are.’ Don’t forget this is pre-internet, so this is how we got all of our information in the food world. By the time it was next year, I was old.”

On the little chef coat

[Note, at the 2023 Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Flay was made an honorary Best New Chef and given the traditional framed miniature chef’s coat to make up for the mishap.]

“Well, I cried, but nobody knew it. I don’t really get emotional about stuff like outwardly like that very often, but I was so touched that somebody thought about it, because how many years ago was that? You’re talking about 30-something years. Who’s going to worry about that? The fact that you guys thought about that and handed me that award — I’m sure everybody in the audience was like, ‘What are they doing?’ But I thought it was amazing. It was so special and incredibly touching. I definitely got emotional about it.”

On showing love

“When I get interviewed and people say to 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. If you come to my house, I’m cooking for you. You can’t come to my house and not be cooked for, it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just say, “Let’s just order in pizza.” It’s the way I show my adoration. It’s the way I show my appreciation for my friends, my family, people who I want to get to know even better. It’s an important part of who I am. When you go on television there is this dynamic that happens where you automatically become less skilled as a chef in people’s minds. They just decide that you are now a chef on TV but not a real chef. Trust me, I stopped worrying about that 25 years ago because it’s exhausting. But at first, you’re like, ‘Wait a minute. But I really am. This is what I really do, I really can cook.’ Then you have to stop, cause you’ll lose your mind.”

About the podcast

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

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Daniel Boulud, Rodney Scott, Asma Khan, Emeril and E.J. 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 Kwong, Pati Jinich, Yotam Ottolenghi, Dolly Parton and Rachel Parton George, Tom Holland, Darron Cardosa, Bobby Flay, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.