Hunter Lewis Knows He Can Make a Call That Will Change a Chef’s Life

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

Spotify

On this episode

Food & Wine editor in chief Hunter Lewis shares the untold story behind the magazine’s iconic Best New Chefs list and reveals the 2025 class. From the intense debates that shape each year’s Best New Chefs decisions to the lessons he’s carried from his days as a three-sport “prep jock,” line cook, and local journalist, Lewis reflects on the long, strange trip that led him to the helm of Food & Wine. Along the way, he opens up about why he still calls himself a “glorified home cook,” his upcoming cookbook, his brush with Anthony Bourdain, how he approaches leadership, and the future he sees for restaurants in America.

Meet our guest

Hunter Lewis has been the editor in chief of Food & Wine since 2017, leading a team that has earned multiple James Beard and IACP Awards and a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Prior to that he was the editor in chief of Cooking Light, executive editor of Southern Living, food editor of Bon Appétit, and kitchen director of Saveur. Lewis cooked under chef Jonathan Waxman in Sonoma County, California, and as a line cook at Barbuto in New York City. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was also a reporter for The Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina. You can find him in his home kitchens in Birmingham, Alabama, and New York City cooking for his friends and family, on Instagram @notesfromacook, and as a guest judge on Bravo’s Top Chef. His upcoming cookbook, Just Play the Hits, will be be published by Union Square & Co.

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 Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans (currently a finalist in the Folio Awards), 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 feeling like a lifelong walk-on player

“In my junior and senior years, I was a scholarship player. It’s important to me because I’m the ultimate walk-on. Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve walked on. I walked onto the lacrosse team. I worked part-time for the Herald Sun newspaper as a weekend cops reporter, and then I earned a full-time job. I walked into the kitchen at Barbuto and tried cooking there for a couple months, unpaid. Then I started making 10 bucks an hour as a line cook. I was an interim kitchen director at Saveur. They tried me out, I walked on there, and then I worked my way up to Bon App and beyond. But I still keep that chip on my shoulder, and I still feel the need to scrap and to fight and to compete. Not in an antagonistic way, but I think that chip on the shoulder is important to get through life, and it’s helped me in my career too.”

On ditching his restaurant critic dreams

“That first day at Barbuto, the duck guy came in from Long Island, the people from Salumeria Biellese came to drop off the salami, and the chefs had just come back from the Greenmarket and were shelling peas at the table. You’ve got this dishwasher working his tail off in between lunch and dinner service and helping get family meal on the table. The wine folks were at the bar doing a tasting. I looked up and I had a whole reporter’s notebook filling up with detail, as I was peeling peppers to make this relish for the skirt steak dish that night. 

This is a whole economy. There are so many people who make this place work, getting paid bi-weekly by what’s coming in and out of this place. That first day was when I decided I was not going to be a restaurant critic. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the financial livelihoods of these people. That was clarifying for me.”

On being a “glorified home cook”

“Jonathan Waxman called me a glorified home cook on the line one night at Barbuto when I was really slow and putting out food that was not to the caliber of the chefs next to me. He did not mean it as a compliment. I have embraced it 100%. That’s my identity, at work and at home. I take all of the things I’ve learned in professional kitchens cooking every day. I’ve taken all the lessons, tips, recipes, advice, and the access to world-class talent and applied that to the role and what we share with our readers. I also have applied it at the stove at home, cooking six nights a week for my family. It’s also the approach I’ve taken to this book I’m working on, Just Play the Hits: 125 Recipes and Kitchen Wisdom from a Glorified Home Cook. 

It’s really a reclamation of my identity as a cook, because some of that gets lost as you rise up as an editor. Day to day, the job is managing people and growth and you’re not writing like you used to. You’re definitely not running kitchens and cooking like you used to or being in the recipe weeds. This is going to be an exercise in reclaiming that part of my identity. Cooking is such a natural thing for me. It is the most soulful, natural, organic thing that I do.”

On finding his happy medium and meeting Anthony Bourdain

“My happiest times were when I was cooking and writing. I did that for a period of time at a restaurant called La Residence, Bill Neal’s old place. I was a prep cook there, and I was a weekend cops reporter in Durham. That’s the first time I encountered Anthony Bourdain. There was a line cook named Dustin who pulled me aside one day and showed me his copy of Kitchen Confidential. He was like, ‘This is the goods, man. This is what you need to be reading, college boy.’ He also told me I was never going to be a real cook because I hadn’t spent any meaningful time in jail. I didn’t know what the term ‘three hots and a cot’ was. 

I don’t know where Dustin is today, but I got to meet Bourdain once I moved to New York. Out late one night. I bought him a Pilsner Urquell and he kind of waved me off. But it was funny that the intersection of that point in my life happened in a restaurant kitchen. Fast-forward to now, the cooking and the writing are so obvious. It’s what got me to this point.”

On leaving it all on the field

“Playing sports is what first taught me what a good boss is. It taught me about what a team culture is. It taught me about what a bad boss is and what you don’t want to do. It taught me how to lose, taught me how to win. I really have re-embraced that.”

On making life-changing phone calls to Best New Chefs

“I was familiar with Best New Chefs because I worked with a couple of people who were really bummed out not to get it. I knew what it meant to them personally and professionally, and what that could’ve done for their careers had they received that accolade. But I didn’t know the power of Best New Chefs until I experienced it for the first time. In 2018, my second year with the brand, I got to be onstage to announce that class and see the look on these chefs’ faces and the way that their lives and careers were changing overnight. That’s when I really began to understand that this is something completely different.

It is one of the most fun parts of the job when you get to call a Best New Chef. It’s not the hyperbolic reactions. It’s more quiet settling in, taking in the news, because you can watch as it dawns on them … what the power of this thing is.

It’s an honor and a privilege and it’s one of the many things that makes this brand so special. We have legacy franchises that are more relevant now than they’ve ever been because we’re tending to them, caring for them, and focusing on creating community as we do it.”

On legacy and lessons for the future of restaurants

“I’m not a surfer, but I’ve been riding this collective wave for the past eight years with this team at Food & Wine. I want to stretch this wave out for as long as we can go. It could crash at any moment and that surfboard could crack at any moment, but I want to keep riding this thing indefinitely. We’ve got such a storied, rich legacy at Food & Wine. It’s such a privilege and honor to be able to be a steward of it.

I want these folks at independent restaurants to share best practices. I want people not to make the same mistakes over and over again. I want restaurant people to cross-pollinate with leaders of other industries and to realize that with the way that restaurants have always been led, there are pieces that should never change, but there’s always room for improvement. Food & Wine can be a part of leading this conversation.”

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 and beyond, 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 Roy Choi, Byron Gomez, Vikas Khanna, Romy Gill, Matthew Lillard, Ana and Lydia Castro, Laurie Woolever, Karen Akunowicz, Hawa Hassan, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Wylie Dufresne, Samin Nosrat, Curtis Stone, Tristen Epps, Padma Lakshmi, Ayesha Curry, Regina King, Antoni Porowski, Run the Jewels, Chris Shepherd, Tavel Bristol-Joseph, Paola Velez, Bryan Caswell, Harry Hamlin, Angela Kinsey, Hunter Lewis, Dana Cowin, Edward Lee, Cassandra Peterson (a.k.a. Elvira), Ruby Tandoh, 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.