The Go To Food Podcast

This week on The Go-To Food Podcast, we’re joined by one of the most important voices in pizza culture: Frank Pinello. The founder of Brooklyn’s legendary Best Pizza, host of The Pizza Show and now Pizza with Frank, Frank joins us fresh from a huge week eating across London — and gives an unfiltered verdict on why the city has quietly become one of the great pizza destinations in the world. From Vincenzo’s and Dough Hands to New York aesthetics taking over London, Frank explains why British pizza makers are now genuinely earning respect from New Yorkers.
But this episode goes way beyond pizza rankings. Frank tells the unbelievable story of almost becoming a stockbroker straight out of school — working in a real-life Wolf of Wall Street-style boiler room on Long Island, standing all day cold-calling strangers about fake IPOs while managers shouted slogans like “motion creates emotion.” He talks about turning up in suits thinking he’d made it, only for the entire operation to eventually get raided by the feds. Before pizza fame, before Vice, before Williamsburg — there was Frank trying to survive among future federal inmates.
We also go deep into old New York food culture: growing up in Bensonhurst, the smell of Sunday sauce hitting the hallway before you even reached his grandmother’s basement, annual tomato canning traditions, animal heads in the kitchen, Sicilian cauliflower pasta with cinnamon breadcrumbs, and learning early that food meant love. Frank opens up about his first pizzeria jobs, burning his leg so badly on his first day in a serious kitchen that the skin peeled off — but hiding it for 12 hours because he didn’t want chefs to think he was weak. He talks about culinary school feeling like military training, becoming obsessed with Thomas Keller and Ferran Adrià, and then slowly realising pizza could be treated with the same seriousness as fine dining.
There are incredible stories throughout: consulting on pizza at Chiltern Firehouse before it opened, meeting Nuno Mendes and Patrick Powell, seeing Roberta’s completely change global pizza culture, and building Best Pizza during the wild early Williamsburg years of artists, hipsters and old Italian families living side by side. We get Frank’s thoughts on Dave Portnoy, hot honey, pizza dips, New York slice etiquette, why ketchup should never touch a hot dog after the age of 10, and the exact technique for folding and attacking a slice. Plus Ben cooks a full Sunday sauce for Frank on the studio floor — ribs, sausages, chops and meatballs included — while the conversation descends into debates about crust strategy, baguettes, greasy pepperoni cups and whether pizza should ever be taken too seriously at all.
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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a multi-award-winning British chef, writer, broadcaster and campaigner, best known as the creator of River Cottage. He joins the Go To Food podcast fresh from the release of his new book, High Fibre Heroes, before settling into a gloriously wide-ranging conversation full of stories from a life spent cooking, eating, questioning and occasionally causing national outrage.
Hugh looks back on childhood in Gloucestershire, learning to cook alongside his mother, helping make shepherd’s pie from leftover roast lamb, and later becoming the “pastry chef” for her 1970s dinner parties. He shares tales from Oxford dinner parties, smoked haddock obsessions, and his time at the River Cafe, where he made lemon tart for Rose Gray and secretly doubled the chocolate in Elizabeth David’s chocolate cake — only to be politely rumbled by Elizabeth David herself.
The conversation also revisits Hugh’s early television years, from Cook on the Wild Side to TV Dinners, including the infamous placenta pâté episode that earned an Ofcom complaint and became part of British food TV folklore. He reflects on the beginnings of River Cottage, moving from London to Dorset, learning from farmers, foragers and local characters, and building a world that helped change the way Britain thought about food, farming and self-sufficiency.
Along the way, there are stories of roadkill rumours, wild boar charcuterie, Gordon Ramsay’s pigs, Jamie Oliver, school food, restaurant culture, barbecue hogget, decorative garnishes, and why you should never put an oyster shell on mashed potato. Funny, thoughtful and occasionally surreal, this is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall at his storytelling best.

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Honey & Co founders Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich join us for a brilliant, chaotic and deeply honest conversation about food, marriage, restaurants, reinvention and the realities of building one of London’s best-loved hospitality groups.
From opening the original Honey & Co in 2012 without proper recipes, to turning family cooking, Middle Eastern flavours and sheer instinct into a restaurant empire spanning delis, restaurants, cookbooks, classes and podcasts, they tell the story of how it all began — and how it nearly broke them.
We get into the rebirth of Honey & Smoke, the closure of the deli, floods, wine, tablecloths, growing older with your customers, why London restaurants are having to change, and how they’ve built a business around care, quality and the refusal to cut corners.
Plus: childhood food memories in Israel, Ottolenghi, brutal old-school kitchens, the second-site nightmare, Greece, burrata backlash, banana hatred, vomit stories, legendary cheesecake and why hospitality needs to start respecting itself a lot more.
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Max Halley joins The Go To from Max’s Sandwich Shop in Finsbury Park — a place he describes as “a surprisingly serious restaurant masquerading as a silly sandwich shop.” From the ham, egg and chips sandwich Tesco tried to copy, to focaccia engineered for mayonnaise, juice and structural integrity, Max explains the thinking behind one of Britain’s most joyful food institutions.
In this episode, Max talks about his new book Cooking with Sausages, built on the revelation that sausages are really just pre-seasoned mince waiting to be liberated. He serves up a Morteau sausage, explains why he boils rather than grills, and takes us through sausage lasagne, Le Pig Mac, mortadella cheeseburgers, porchetta tacos and hangover macaroni designed to be eaten with a spoon.
We also hear how Max nearly made a TV show called Chicken Lips and Salmon Legs before losing out to Taskmaster, why his first sandwich shop idea was called “Out Here on the Dance Floor,” and how an awkward licensing dispute became one of his greatest restaurant moments: a customer told to “get up and fuck off” to a round of applause.
There are stories from Le Coq, Keira Knightley’s alleged praise, Raymond Blanc being angry about missing tarragon, electric toothbrushes for sale outside Finsbury Park Tesco, cold lasagne in a croissant with honey, and a childhood memory of eating sheep on a spit in a French village. Expect sausage philosophy, sandwich engineering, strong opinions on cheese, and plenty of Max’s “little pleasant splashes” of joy.

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Order The Greatest Meat In The Country From HG Walter Here & Have Restaurant Quality Meals From Home - www.hgwalter.com
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Today we’re joined by Gary Usher — the chef behind a North West restaurant empire, award-winning gastropubs, and one of the most honest voices in hospitality today.
We sit down in Liverpool to talk about the evolution of his restaurant Wreck — from a derelict site to one of the busiest spots in the city — and the moment everything changed. After months of standing outside asking passers-by why they weren’t coming in, Gary discovered people thought “Wreckfish” was a seafood restaurant. A simple rebrand, clearer signage, and the business jumped 30% almost overnight.

Beyond the success, this episode goes deep. Gary opens up about crowdfunding his restaurants, selling meals in advance to raise hundreds of thousands, and how that early community became fiercely loyal regulars. But he’s equally candid about the darker side — closing multiple sites, navigating debt, and the harsh reality that many restaurants today aren’t failing because they’re quiet, but because they’re too expensive to run. It’s an unfiltered look at an industry under serious pressure.
We also get the full journey: from struggling with dyslexia at school to finding his place in kitchens, working at Chez Bruce, learning under Angela Hartnett, and even the wild years in Ibiza plus much much more....

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Order Ben's Incredible Book - All You Can Eat - By Clicking Here - https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-You-Can-Eat-British/dp/1805221523

Get 2 Months of Blinq For Free - With Code - GOTOBLINQ - https://blinqme.com/

Order The Greatest Meat In The Country From HG Walter Here & Have Restaurant Quality Meals From Home - www.hgwalter.com
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