. Food, Travel & the Stories That Shape Us with Karl Wilder

There are cities that reveal themselves slowly, not through monuments or museums, but through the people who feed them.

The bakers who wake up before dawn.

The grandmothers who guard recipes like heirlooms.

The street vendors who move every week carrying history in their hands.

And the chefs who turn neighborhoods into stories you can taste.

Today we meet someone who has spent his life chasing those stories across continents, cultures and kitchens.

I'm your host, Michael Hurst.

Welcome to One more thing before you go.

So glad that you joined us.

We're going to have a great conversation today.

We're exploring two guiding questions.

What does food reveal about who we are?

And how does travel transform the way we see the world and ourselves?

My guest is Carl Wilder.

He's a chef.

He's a food tourism pioneer, storyteller, novelist, voice actor and the co founder of the Chef Tours, a company redefining what it means to experience a city through food.

Carl has lived and cooked in Italy, the Dominican Republic, France, Spain and the U.S. i'm coming to his house next time to eat.

He's learned from Italian and Bulgarian grandmothers, Vietnamese cooks and French chefs.

He smuggled food into East Berlin as a child.

He's also written detective novels, a comic novel and deeply personal essays for the Huffington Post.

He's built food tours in Paris, Seville, Berlin, Mexico City, Istanbul and beyond.

Each one rooted in authenticity, craft and human connection.

This is a conversation about food identity, migration, counterculture, storytelling, and encourage to build a life that feels true.

Welcome to the show.

Carl.

Good morning from Mexico City.

Well, you and I have something in common in that regard.

It's probably a little hot there and it's a little hot here in Phoenix.

You know, it's not hot here at all.

We're a very high elevation city and so it's between 70 and 80.

You're around.

That is brilliant.

I would love 70s and 80s.

We moved from Colorado to here.

So we moved up from behind pikes peak about 8,500ft where the highs were 70s and we walked out of the truck.

When we got down here, it was 120 degrees.

My wife about killed me.

Oh my gosh.

Nothing like that here.

Nothing like that.

And at night it drops down to 48.

So the nights are always cool.

That works.

I like that.

I like that.

My wife and I, we visited Chichen Itza in Tulum and Playa del Carmen.

And when we were down in that area, we got down, there was 100, like 115, 120.

The humidity was like the mosquitoes were crazy blistered.

My Back actually, yeah, it was not good.

But Mexico City, that's kind of more central, isn't it?

It's central and it's a really high elevation, so we don't give those weather extremes.

I think it's an incredible place for a multitude of reasons.

That's very cool, Very cool.

Well, we got to know each other just a little bit before we dive into the cities and the food and the stories.

Let's start at the beginning.

Tell me a little about yourself by growing up.

What shaped you?

Well, my mother and my mother recently passed away from my kids here.

She died in December.

But she was an extraordinary woman.

She had energy to burn.

She loved life, she loved her kids, I think more than anything.

And she was my big influence in two ways.

I mean, I became a chef essentially.

I say I learned to cook in self defense.

My mother could make a pie, it would make you weep with joy.

She could make cheesecake and cookies, but when it came to food, she opened cans and dumped it in the crock pot.

And pretty much everything was covered with cream of mushroom soup growing up.

So that's why and how I learned to cook.

You know, it.

I think that from that perspective I, I grew up kind of in the same environment.

And it is my condolences on your mother, by the way.

My heart is with you.

And it's interesting because my parents came, my mother at least came from the southern perspective in cooking.

So her idea was cooking was very different than my father's and then very different from what I ended up from the age of 11 on learning from the Italian culture.

But my brother in law was Italian and he brought his friends and family over with him and it was like Little Italy.

And I learned so much from that and saw the significant, the stark differences between what my mother was cooking and what they were cooking.

It was crazy, crazy, crazy.

You've lived in so many places like Italy, in the Dominican Republic, France, Spain, the U.S. how did those experiences shape your understanding of food as culture?

Well, food is probably the best way to tell the history and the story of study.

Greece is a great example.

The food in Athens is outstandingly good, but 90% of it comes from the Ottomans.

And then the opinions took what the Ottomans came with their occupation, they refined it.

And so it's very different now than what you would find in Istanbul.

But there's a lot of commonalities.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

So food is.

You look at America, you mentioned Italians.

This is one of my favorite things.

I love American Italian cuisine.

It's loaded with garlic.

It's tomatoes.

You know, it's a really delicious.

But it came about because four southern Italian women who had been living on greens and beans into the US and cooked the way they imagined the rich northern Italian thing.

And they created a whole new cuisine based on their imagination.

I didn't know that.

That's pretty interesting.

My mother, my brother in law actually came from Rome.

And when he brought his people over, and we have family in Sicily, so when they all conglomerated here, they all migrated here.

They came from Naples and Rome, Naples, Sicily, you know, those areas.

And they brought this unique culture to us from that perspective.

So I got to see even.

Even within Italy, not just the American side of it, but from Italy.

I saw a difference in the way that they cooked food from Rome and Naples, for example, and.

And Naples and Sicily, you know, it.

There was a distinct difference in how they made certain sauces or made certain.

The way they did the chicken or where they did the pastas and things like that, which I thought was kind of.

Kind of cool.

And that's what ignited my fire.

And when me getting more interested in food and how it's created and where it comes from and the culture behind sitting at the table and having a conversation, not watching TV or watching our phone.

Yeah, I'm lucky.

I mean, we grew up in an era milk bored.

Everyone was watching TV and staring at their phones at the dinner table.

And I'm very glad of that.

I'm glad that there's.

And I still.

I don't watch television behind the eight.

I enjoy the meal, I enjoy the company.

Even if I'm eating alone, I enjoy.

My God.

Exactly.

It's a conversation with what you.

It's a conversation with your food.

Yeah.

And when you're focused on television or movies or whatever, you're not paying attention, you're not present.

And I think that's why there's so many obese people, because they're not present with their food, with their dining houses.

I know that when I go to a movie theater, I love the first taste of popcorn if I get it.

And then you just eat mindlessly after that.

Because you're watching this train.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Your culinary education came not just from school, but it came from like grandmothers and cooks and things like that, who taught you kind of their traditions and the way you do things from all of those mentors, so to speak.

Do you think that brought you your understanding of how food and culture and sitting at that table that we were just talking about kind of all come to play.

Did you learn that from that perspective?

If you go through city and you see a very old person sitting on a park, talk to them.

They are the most extraordinary historians because they lived it.

They lived whatever the history is.

And when it comes to food, you find out things that you never find out at restaurants.

You know, here in Mexico City, I learned to make tamales.

I was in Oaxaca, and I spoke to a very elderly lady about mole.

And she started explaining the differences in mole, how mole is made.

And I ended up at her house the next day.

And we made three different mole together with a mortar and pestle, the way it is done traditionally.

And the only way you can have those experiences is if you are not afraid of people.

It helps.

I speak five languages now.

That helps.

But even if you don't speak your language, people are willing to work with you and they're willing to share.

I think that the best people on this planet are over 7 because they have lived.

They can tell you what things are really like, not what you read in a book that's been written by someone.

It's real dispute.

It's real life.

Well, and I appreciate that from that perspective as well.

I think that we are losing certain traditions because people don't have conversations anymore.

We're losing certain cultures because people don't have conversations anymore.

And you can see it.

You can watch it.

You can see with the very younger generation, I've lost track of whether or not their generation, what, xv, whatever it happens to be.

What are we now?

I think we're Gen Z. I think Gen Z.

Something like.

Yeah, something like that.

I don't really it.

But you watch them in a restaurant and you watch some of the older people in a restaurant, you will see a significant difference in how they eat, how they.

How they have that conversation with that kind of food.

Plus, again, I think that we're losing.

We're losing history through voice.

We're losing tradition through voice because of that.

So, yeah, I agree with you.

You see somebody sit down and have conversation with them, talk to them, learn.

How did you move into food tourism and working with, like, eating Europe and secret food tours and things like that?

Was that part of understanding those kind of traditions or kind of what we just talked about, having conversations?

Well, became that.

It was one of those kind of strange things that happened.

Someone very close to me passed away when I was a new spouse and I could not take New York anymore.

I had two restaurants.

I had Empire Biscuit and I had Nolan's Restaurant.

And I was paying whatever, 2000 something for an apartment.

And I decided to change my entire life.

And I shut down both restaurants, and I gave away literally almost everything I owned to a homeless shelter.

I put one wooden trunk together of some, you know, LPs and 78s, things that I didn't want to lose, that I eventually had shipped over to Germany.

I had two suitcases and two cats.

Everything else went to a homeless shelter.

And I started life over again.

And I was not a young man.

I was over 40 when I did this.

And it's been more than 10 years.

And it was the best thing I could do.

First of all, when you're trying to learn German, you can be sad, but you can't be depressed.

Oh, it's the hardest language on earth.

I'm still not Perfect.

I'm at E1 level, which is good conversational, but I still have more to learn.

And I was doing some work for Omni Media, which is Martha Stewart, writing articles, et cetera.

And I saw this job listing for Secret Food Tours, to do food tours in Berlin.

And I thought, well, I just had taken a tour in Paris with Chef pj, who's now my partner in this company.

And it was great.

Not because of the food.

It was kind of.

The food costs were really sort of cheap, and it was a.

In the back room of a wine store, but because of the knowledge of the chef, and that sort of sparked something in you.

So I responded to this ad, and one of the partners flew out, and he was hiking four cities at the time.

Berlin became the fifth.

And then I said, this is such a good concept.

We have to expand it.

And I talked to Nico, one of the partners, and I said, we have to San Francisco, New York and New Orleans.

I could do it for 3000 city.

This is how you know, obviously, obviously.

And I set up those three cities, and it was a big deal for them.

And then I became their expansion director.

And when I left the company, I think it was cities around the world, and it was the lockdown.

So everybody was laid off.

They shut doors down, et cetera.

And I just kept moving.

I almost five years, I was on one plane after another, and I just kept going from place to place to place and setting up food tours.

And that was when I realized.

I mean, it took me a long time to get to the point of the chef tours, but I realized this could be better.

This could be much better because I only had a few days to get in there, hire a manager, and set up a food store.

And we Were sort of going with the top list.

We weren't taking a deep dive into the culture.

It was, you know, all right, we're in Philadelphia.

We've got to have cheesesteak.

We've got to have this.

And I realized that there's a deeper way to look at this and to find the things that matter.

Historically, Philadelphia, I managed to get it on the tours.

I don't even know if Philadelphia is still open for them, but I got pepper pot soup.

Pepper pot soup was a soup that came over from the island that George Washington adapted for the American taste.

And it got both the soldiers and the population through the war and long, cold winter.

It had a historical significance.

That cheesesteak, which is delicious.

Didn't have.

It told the story of the city in a different way.

And so I tried to at least find one thing in each tour that would tell the story of the city in a deeper way than those top lists, and I succeeded.

I think those were some of the wild moments that got the great reviews.

It just kind of happened.

And I loved the work.

And then the lockdowns came, and they didn't treat people very nicely.

It was not a good breakup.

Yeah, I think that that changed a lot of people's lives in many different ways and forms.

Luckily, you had that opportunity to learn.

Learn more about people, cities, the storytelling during those years that you were able to bring with you, I guess to bring you to where you're at today.

In regard to what you do with the chef tours, I'm sure has helped you kind of build that.

Of course it helped.

And then after the lockdown, I went with Eating Europe, and I rebuilt Paris for them.

I already had Chef PJ there, and he's like a brother to me.

And so I rebuilt Paris for them.

And I didn't go generic.

I went with a couple of tours.

One was in the footsteps of the French chef, and we did a tour walking in Julia Child's footsteps on the day, decided that she was going to go to the Corambula and become a chef, finishing at the restaurant where she formed her husband.

Awe of her decision, what she was going to do with her life.

And this was not a young woman at the time.

I mean, she wrote, of course, the two quintessential French cookbooks.

And I knew Julia, not the work, best buddies.

But she always came to my restaurants when I was chef.

Her sister Dorothy, I do very well in San Francisco.

And it was like, where's my little Jonah?

Where's my little Jonah?

You know, that's what she called me because she could never remember my name.

So I had personal stories to bring to that.

And I.

One point in that tour, we were doing very well with our guides, and I was guiding some of them.

I hired two chefs to leave it, and it became a different tour.

Nick Dent's just gone with the generic neighborhood tour and killed the Julia Child on step.

But that was the spark of where I'm at now.

These two chefs brought so much more because they knew who she was, and they.

They had experiences with her.

Not personally like I had, but.

And I got Shep to sheptoid the shep daughter.

But I didn't go there right away.

I did a very short skid with Original Food Source, which was not a company I think you had spurred.

It lasted two months, and I got into event management.

And then PJ called me one day, and he goes, set up a company.

You have to do it.

He was reading, Eating Europe.

And so we created the chef.

And I already have the images from the two companies I've worked with.

Let's go, geek.

Let's tell our stories.

Let's be chefs.

Bring our passion and our knowledge to the table.

Not a memorized script.

Those scripts are used ever.

You know, we don't have.

PJ doesn't need a script to tell him how the bagel, or I'm not the bagel, the baguette came to be the bagel.

My story, how the baguette came to be, or the origin of the kurtzan.

He knows these things.

So when you lose script, it becomes organic.

Every day becomes a different tour, and it's a much more exciting way to work.

There's no parachute.

You just get up and say, this is my city.

This is my story, and this is what I love.

And this is what I think is brilliant.

I mean, brilliant.

You built something that's very different, something that's more intimate, more human, more real.

I think that, you know, gives us the opportunity to really kind of feel it and to experience.

Experience the culture.

Not.

Not just talk about the culture.

Experience the culture, Experience the stories.

Understand from the.

The.

The mouth to my ear and to my stomach of how something was made or how it began or how it started.

You know, I. I appreciate that because that's how I learned how to make pasta.

That's how I learned how to make.

Seriously.

My first job ever was two guys from Italy, pizzeria.

And I started off as a dishwasher, but I learned how to make pizza.

I learned how to make.

I learned how to make Italian pizza.

Not Italian.

American pizza.

Italian pizza.

These guys come over from Rome.

They came from Naples.

And everybody that I came in contact with during that time, there was a.

Like, we called it a little family.

There was probably 20 people.

And I learned that culture, that Italian culture, where you.

Everybody contributes to the meal.

It's slow, it's methodic.

There's a story behind it.

And then when you eat it, you take your time and you understand it, and you have conversation with the people across the table from you and in enjoying what they just created and.

And I think that we, as individual.

See, I get.

I get excited.

Sorry.

I get excited.

Come on.

Yeah, it is.

It's kind of a.

When I.

When I make a meal, you know, I mean, I. I am not like a chef.

I mean, I was a cook in.

In a restaurant here, and I was a cook in a restaurant, but.

But not like a chef chef.

So I started to learn to be a chef.

I started learning how the.

How to plate it and how to present it and how to.

How to refine it and how to put myself into each recipe.

But it started with learning how to cook from Roberto and my sister and Renata and Sergio and Giovanni and these individuals that taught me what you just learned.

So, to me, I branched off from part of my family.

My brother stayed with the southern side.

I moved up with this.

This side of it, and it gave me the.

The appreciation of the culture and the food and how it's all tied together and how that ties us together and how sitting at a dinner table ties us together.

So, yeah, what you created was unique, and I think it.

It is more personal and it's.

It's more.

Thank you very much.

You walk away with something.

You don't just walk away with a meal.

You walk away with a story.

Yeah, you walk away.

It's an experience.

And we also cut the group sizes down.

Of the 15, that many blue blood to six.

Six make it really personal.

And that way, I can tell you I had a wonderful group here in Mexico City today, and I can tell you the names of everybody who was on my tour.

I still remember them.

If they meet somebody or they call me here, I will know who they are.

But with those big groups, that never happens.

I had a trick.

I would memorize one name and keep referring to that person to try to convince the group that I knew who everyone was.

But of course I do.

Yeah, I've been there, done that one.

Yes, yes, it works.

But I think taking it down to six gives you.

Gives you that Intimacy that you know, when you go someplace, you have that experience.

And I think experience is worth more.

You walk away with an experience.

You remember the experience, you feel the experience.

It's not just going into a restaurant and eating.

It is going into an environment, is going into an experience, and you walk away with it.

So, yes, you don't even.

Berlin.

There's no restaurant I take into my home.

Berlin is what?

I'm sorry, in Berlin, we have no restaurant.

I take them to my home and

cook, you take them to your home.

See, that's amazing.

I think that's an opportunity because again, you walk away with an experience.

And, you know, we all want to take a vacation, we all want to go.

We all want to experience things wherever we go.

But we don't always get to take that experience home with us.

So from your perspective, we get to take that experience home with us.

I love it.

I love it.

Let's talk about counterculture a little bit.

I know that.

Can we start in Paris?

The parish tours, I think you talked about, and I may mispronounce this and make a note of it.

Montmartre,

that depending on who you.

France.

I'm correct a lot.

Most many people say because they're French, they don't pronounce many of the letters.

But other people say, depending on which generation you are.

So it fought neither.

So let's talk about that countercultural food scene.

The secret bars, the underground cellars, the chef hangouts.

And what makes that world so special and why is it so hidden?

Okay, well, Feature has two tours, and the one you're talking about is the wine food.

And what many of the younger people in the world do not realize is that not everybody has a website.

So among the places you take people to is a little groom in the back of a wine store where they serve cheese, charcuterie, and you can buy any wine in the place.

And that's one of the kinds of places he takes them to.

There's another place where a hotel doesn't normally allow guests up there in the hotel, but everyone knows PJ Mun.

And they go up there and they have more wine and more food and a view of the Eiffel Tower.

And this tour will vary Nice tonight because he's got so many places.

Then there's a bar that Jalkin goes to finish off after taking him to his restaurant, of course, where they eat at P Up.

And the place hasn't changed in about 100 years.

It's the same old chair, it's table wall.

It Looks like history, feels like history.

And you know there's only one good wine at this bar, it's the Cote du Rod.

But the Cote du Rod is excellent and it's a great place and it's down an alley and people just don't find it behind a hotel.

So we do our confidential theory which eat temple is shuttered right now because we eat an E Chef.

That's a sad story.

She's gone.

Literally gone.

And so I have to reopen Istanbul.

But that was one of the confidential.

I've got a Mexico City confidential.

And they're all places that you just wouldn't buy.

And sometimes they're not on the Internet.

No influencer has talked about them and they don't have a website.

And that is the part of a city that ignites me the most in Mexico City.

All our entire tour, daytime food tour.

There's no website for navy places.

It's, you know Pedro, it's Pepe, it's Juan.

And I know these people and I know what they do, but they don't have websites.

They're not on Google Map.

No AI then give you this experience to share this with you.

Well, I think that from a cliche you kind of avoid the cliches.

You give somebody again a personal experience.

Experience.

I think when you built the like the Paris food tour or Istanbul or Berlin.

Berlin is absolutely more personal from, from that perspective.

But I like how you, you kind of avoid the cliches, the let's dine under the Eiffel Tower let's go to because we all know my wife and I've been have gone to different places like that too.

And you can tell the ones that when we, we go to Hawaii all the time to Maui.

Oh yeah.

And you, you'd go to.

We have friends that live there.

So that was helpful because you could see the difference between the tourist restaurants.

You could taste the difference, believe it or not.

I mean you, you would believe this between the tourist restaurants and the, the, the family restaurants, the, the, the family owned restaurants, the, the locals restaurants that you know, you could see the difference, you could taste the difference in going even to there.

So I think that you kind of bring that to this when they, when they take one of your tours, especially in Paris or Berlin or Istanbul, which again you're going to start up again.

But Mexico City, I think you bring that to the table.

Did you find, how do you find the artisan doing world class work in tiny spaces?

Do you think that's that fits within that realm?

The artisans really work in finding spaces.

Yeah, I mean, from what you're bringing people to, when you bring people into these little hideaway places, that's more artisan, isn't it?

Absolutely.

More artisan.

Well, in Paris, for instance, artisan has a legal meaning.

We do other work.

So to become an artisan baker, that means he had an apprenticeship with a master baker for a certain number of years.

And all the fickets he has to.

Artisan has a legal meeting in front.

It's not the guy making pickles in his basement, but one of our first stops on Mexico City day food tour is a family run restaurant.

And grandma's in the kitchen and her daughter is the hostess and her grandson is our waiter.

One of our.

I had a group yesterday, they already reviewed the tour.

They were so enraptured by this place.

And the food is incredible.

She's from Oaxaca.

She comes from a tradition of, you know, incredible cooking.

So they're literally in a grandma's house, practically, even though it's open to the public.

And dining with grandma and her family.

And the food, it's my favorite restaurant in all of Mexico City.

The food is absolutely phenomenal.

The hermole will make you weep with joy.

Or red sauce on the cherikile.

You know every single item on the menu.

Pozole, which has a strange and interesting history.

It used to be made with the thigh of the person defeated in war.

It was a cannibalistic recipe that.

An adaptive support.

But it's.

Every single bite is filled with flavor and freshness and love.

You can really feel it.

Yeah, that's amazing.

That brings family.

That brings family to the table.

I think that's pretty cool, actually.

Yeah, I. I'm.

I'm getting hungry.

But then it's even too bad.

Well, yeah, you know, I don't know how I treat those band because.

Because what do I eat?

But I'm rarely sitting still for more than an hour, so that could be me as well.

I think that we need to obviously stay active, move forward, try new things constantly.

Keep us moving and thinking and defining and creating, which you do a lot of.

We're going to get more into that.

Berlin.

Let's go back to Berlin, if you don't mind.

I know that Berlin's a city defined by change.

You've said that you can taste the change.

The Turkish bakeries, vegan labs, the punk cafes, neighborhood makers.

What does Berlin taste like to you?

I know you bring people to your house on this tour.

You bring them there, you cook for them.

But what Does Berlin taste like to you?

You just told me about Mexico.

Berlin tastes like the future.

Because there's still some German restaurants that still do.

You know, in German chefs, they're not the most creative.

Be honest.

You know, I was born.

My childhood was shaped by New Orleans, not Germany.

Because German chefs tend to make currywurst on kirch and sandwich with salami.

And if they are from the south, they will make sour.

But if you show, say, a German cut of pork that he would normally eat for schnitzel, and you say make anything about schnitzel, it just doesn't confuse.

Because that.

No, that's what use for schnitzel.

Why can you make something else with it?

Yes, but it's not for something else.

It's for schnitzel.

So they're not the most creative.

But Berlin is an international city.

We have people.

We have people from Russia, we have people from Ukraine.

We have people from America.

We have people from literally every spot on earth.

It's very much like I imagine New York was in the 1970s, with everybody from all over.

Not a horribly high cost of living, yet still a lot of artists and creators and thinkers and writers that make the culture of the city so amazing.

I could leave my house and go to Vegans 1900, which was our first vegan restaurant in New York, and have a delicious meal, then cross the street and go to a Vietnamese restaurant, then go to a Georgian restaurant that makes the most incredible food, those wonderful big Georgian dumplings.

Then I could go Chinese.

Then I, you know, pizza, incredible pizza.

Because it is an international city.

And still, I think that's the future.

The future is the world coming together.

Our politicians want to do this.

They want to separate us.

They want us to hate each other.

But I think humanity is moving past that thing.

Our politicians are a bunch of fools.

They're involved in all kinds of things we don't even really get into on this podcast, and they're not to be listened to or respected.

We don't want war.

We don't want to hate our friends and neighbor.

And I think inadvertently what may come about because of the horrible situation we're in worldwide is world peace.

I believe that might be the future, because I think humanity is done with this concept.

We're done with being live.

We're done with being manipulated.

You know, we want to go and do it and have a human connection.

And I think Germany overends.

The future needs to help.

That's.

That's profound, actually.

I think I agree with you and Everything you just said, I think that is an opportunity for us as society, for us as human, as mankind, to grasp that opportunity.

We all need to grasp that opportunity for peace and for more humanity and compassion and understanding that we're all people and we just want to all live together and eat together and enjoy life.

Yeah.

And all those mentioned, one country that Owens talk about, the grass, is it really blood?

They're not.

I mean, there's problems everywhere but Russia.

When I went to Russia, I was so warmly welcomed by the Russian people.

I had so many great dining experiences.

I had a cab driver who invited me to Sunday dinner at his house in Moscow so that I could pick his mother's uv.

I had incredible experiences there because of the people, people.

Let's throw the politicians in the heat, in the rubbish pile and let the people connect to the people.

I agree.

People in Russia are incredible.

Yep.

I agree.

I agree.

People, humankind, we as human beings and as a society can connect easier than having politicians have their.

I mean, this, that could go.

This could go in a whole different way.

Politicians have their own agenda and their own agenda doesn't always include the best.

What's best for us, it's what's best for them and whoever's putting the money in their pocket to keep them in office.

I won't say much past that.

Obviously we want to.

We'll concentrate on this.

But I agree with you.

I think that we should move towards what you had said.

I think if you don't mind, I'm going to touch on you bringing guests into your own home and cooking for them or I find that very unique and I find it important to us as an experience.

Goes back to an experience.

What brought you to agreeing to maybe say, hey, this would be a great idea.

I think I'm going to do this.

Well, actually it was something I proposed to eating Europe as a Berlin food store.

I said, look, I have the hat Watson, the kiwi boy, for me to do this and I would love to do it.

And they said, no, it would compete with our other tour, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so it never happened.

And it just kept staying with me.

It's like, wait a minute, what if I took them for a 90 minute cultural tour of East Berlin and showed them the things that tourists, for the most part, never see.

We do go to the Berlin Wall, which many tourists do see.

But then I take them to the Royal Market and I kick and I show them what used to be there as well.

I go back in time, sort of the living Theater.

There's a new strip of area where I live, which it turns out I had relatives living there, you know, a hundred years ago, before it was new thing after World War II.

And so they sort of get theater of the mind, what this used to be, what it is now and how it connects to history.

And I get a big kick out of that.

I really love doing.

I think that, you know, in my notes and some of the background research that I was doing to put this show together.

Can you tell me about the 1920s East German apartment Dinner?

Sounds like a movie, right?

Well, it.

It is.

My apartment hasn't really changed since the 1920.

Well, it became condos in the 90s.

And it just.

It's the same.

It's this white clank wood long hallway.

And it looks the same.

Huge high ceiling.

One wall in the front is all windows.

And it doesn't look like anything that would be built today.

So.

And I let people see it exactly as it is.

I don't try to turn it into a museum of perfectness.

You know, not shabby hospitality because it's a lovely apartment, but it's real hospitality.

The chairs don't match, the plates don't always match.

So it's just a very real experience.

And I do it all myself.

I clean the apartment, I prepare a four to six quartz meal.

I plate it, I serve it.

If I have a large room full steak, I have cocoa and Coco will come and help and then help clean up afterwards.

Because six is a lot.

But if I have two or four, I never be myself.

That's brilliant.

That's pretty cool, actually.

It goes back to.

Again, I think that I can appreciate you in many, many, many, many ways.

One is food and combining food with culture and bringing people to the table.

And I'm loving every aspect of that.

And I think that bringing that experience to people, allowing them to get an inside look from that perspective, is an awesome way to get to know each other as human beings.

And even when you bring a group of six in, are they usually strangers?

Are they usually a family of people?

How does that usually work?

Totally, totally depends.

I had a wonderful family at one point, and it was the whole family.

I still remember Cedric.

He was this young man.

The woman was a real estate agent and she bought her three or four kids.

Cedric is one.

I remember the most because I had made a goose liver pate and goose liver isn't always popular with Americans.

But Cedric sat there and he went on, he thought it was the best thing he'd ever had.

I baked the bread.

So he was really happy about the fresh bread, warm from the oven, and the goose liver pate.

And he's so happy because he could join somebody.

That, for him, was a very fun food.

Living in the United States.

What?

He just found it delicious.

It was the best speech he'd ever had.

Very cool.

When you get strangers, do you find them interacting and getting to learn more about each other when they sit at that table constant.

Every time I go to the kitchen, the conversation continues, and they've got their own story and their own problem, and people really come together.

As it happened at my house.

Yeah.

But in May, twice.

Pj, he's had people who met on his tour who married.

And recently he had a couple come back.

They had met on his door when he was with Secret Food Tours.

And they came back and they celebrated their 10th anniversary with his current food tour.

Very cool.

That really touched it.

He's had two couples married.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, that's cool.

Again, that brings the personal to it.

That's pretty slick.

I mean, obviously, I know why you picked Paris.

Seville.

Is that how I pronounce it correctly?

Oh, Seville.

Well, Seville came about because I was 30.

I'm not 30 anymore.

I had done sort of a tour of Europe, going to a place in southern France where my friend Amanda was.

So I think I started in Nice with my friend Josephine and Dari.

And I was just taking trains and stopping, and I stopped at Sevilla, and I thought, this city looks like a wedding gate.

It is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

The architecture, the streets, the people, the food.

And I never forgot that.

So when I decided to expand and it was our.

I think it was our second sea, acquired the Berlining.

I talked to PJ and I said, I want to do a wine tour in Sevilla.

The wine in Spain, even incredible people don't get most of the good stuff that never leaves the country.

And I want to do Sevilla.

It doesn't have the highest tourism number, but I think I can make it work.

And I have, and it does.

And it is an incredible tour because it ignores every crochet.

Christian Easley now, no crochet, no tortilla Esambiol, no patatas.

Brava.

Exciting ones and exciting food.

And then we added a second store, which is the.

Where we found exciting new young chefs doing things completely differently from the previous deliverers.

Reinventing and making flavors where you go, wow, that is incredible.

And so he has the Nueva Takazua, which I have great affection for, because the Food is so extraordinary.

One of the things that, you know, it seems so simple is fried bacalao or codfish.

The fresh codfish, not the pumpish, and it comes with a honey foam with a gorgeous white wine.

The combination just makes you go, oh, my God, I'm in heaven.

And you're on the second floor of this restaurant with a little view of the square.

It's just an extraordinary wine.

That's pretty cool.

I think, again, it comes down to opportun opportunity and walking away with an experience.

And I find it interesting, the diverse.

The diverse set of places that you do.

Take the Mexico City, the Seville, the Paris, Berlin, and, oh, forgive me, I can't remember the other one, Istanbul, which

will be open new.

Gentlemen.

Oh, Istanbul.

Yes.

From those perspectives, the.

Do you see a commonality between all of that, all those cooking, those meals?

Do you see something that's common between those places and why you pick those?

What's common is me.

They are all places that were close to my heart.

Mexico City is a place where I get a job for a hotel, and I spent a month redeveloping there.

Budapest beverage department a couple years ago, and I got to know a lot of the people and they took me to the real Mexican neighborhoods outside of the Chuaso.

And I realized the food is different, people is different, environment is different.

I want to show people this, but I didn't have a plan to do it yet.

That's why Mexico City, it was a place I had experience with, and I had started studying Spanish into the eye, and I thought, well, I'll continue to study it in Mexico City City.

Which leads me to something very exciting that I haven't talked about before.

But I will on this podcast, invite people to open up.

We're doing Buenos Aires this year, and we're doing it completely differently.

One of the things that people have asked me on every tour was, how did you choose this place?

Why did you choose this place?

What made this interesting to you?

And I'm inviting guests for two weeks only to join me on that experience.

So we've got a couple of different starting points.

The guests who sign up for this will get their starting point 24 hours in advance of the tour.

And they're going to join me.

They're going to try food with me.

So we may not go and try one steak.

We need to try three states, not one empanada, but three empanadas.

You know, if our place is.

Is.

What do you think?

What do you want for dessert?

You know, what did you Think of this Italian food as it's interpreted now.

Somebody had died and settled there.

What did you think of this German importance at this barbecue house, whatever.

And so the guests are being invited to be a part of the process.

No food Jordan has ever done this before where we said, you can sign up and join us to be a part of the process of putting the tour together.

So it will be Melo company mascot, myself and six guests in Buenos Aires for two weeks.

I put it out there.

We put it on our website.

I think it was msn.

Somebody picked it up and ran a news story about it.

And we've sold out great tours already.

We're not starting from it.

That's.

That's brilliant, I think.

And a unique perspective to be able to come through it from that way because you get to learn a little bit more about not just having somebody put a plate of food in front of you.

You kind of get to learn why and how.

What.

What is the process.

And it also allows me to ask the guests what they think.

You know, I mean, the people who've signed up for it so far have not been American.

It's been people from Australia, UAE and from Canada.

Those are the three, you know, because I can see where the area codes are on the.

I haven't gotten any Americans yet.

So Americans, come on.

There's only 30 spots a week available and 18 are sold out.

So I think that Americans sometimes have a disillusioned, we'll say perspective on experience, cultures and diverse foods like that.

Because we've been so kind of.

I'm American, so I can say this ingrained in what we should be eating, what we should be watching, what we should be doing.

You get the chain, the restaurant chain, commercials, one right after the other after the other after the other.

And somebody that doesn't appreciate food or the diverse opportunities of food don't really get that if they only go to Outback Steakhouse or they only go to, you know, one of these.

I can't say too many on there because I don't want somebody yell at me.

Yeah, I love my.

But you know what I mean?

Burger King and McDonald's and this kind of a thing.

They don't understand the opportunity that you have to change your palate into appreciate food from an inside out perspective.

Yeah.

So I think, I mean, actually one of the groups that signed up for it is a group of chefs from US Australia who signed up for Argentina.

So they.

I am their vacation around the opportunity to join us.

And I'm going to Meet chefs from Australia.

Maybe we're going to be on Australia next.

One of them wants to do a food tour after, after they enter Buenos Aires.

So yeah, that's again the benefit of people counter tour.

You connect, you connect.

I think connection, human connection, connection.

We have gone to a society that loses and have lost connection.

And I think that, you know, we used to be.

I remember years and years and years ago.

I'm not a young, young guy.

I'm not an old, old guy.

But you know, I'm up here.

But you know, we used to go to coffee all the time.

People say, hey, let's go to coffee.

And you have six, seven people come to coffee and you would catch up and you have a conversation, you talk.

We don't do that anymore.

Everybody texts, you know, if.

Then they text you.

Nobody calls you anymore.

They text you, you know.

I have a friend in Berlin who's decided to change that.

She set something up.

It's called Meet New Friends in Berlin.

It's often for people who are new in town and she holds court once a week at a coffee shop and people and just come in and meet people.

And it's just usually one to three hour conversation depending on the group.

And I love that she does that.

That's outstanding.

Yeah, that's outstanding.

He's a wonderful woman.

He was the co host.

We met because we were co host on.

On the first radio program I had in Berlin.

I used to host the talk show in Berlin and she was my co host and that's how we met.

That's very cool.

Now she just can't continuing it from a different perspective.

That's pretty slick.

She still does that week.

I mean doing the show was, you know, it's so much work and we had to be live on the radio, you know, for two hours a week.

And with my travel schedule, it quickly became impossible.

I managed to keep it up for about two years and then we'll break and to repeat.

So, you know, I'll be finally sitting too much.

I don't have to.

Also I've got a. I know you're going to get into this, but I've got a contract to write 11 novels in the John Evans series.

Three have been published so far.

So I have to pick a lot of time, you know, work on that.

Yeah.

And that takes time.

Creativity takes time and patience.

It does.

You need to connect with the music.

Need to, you know, go in a different headspace.

Exactly, exactly.

I got to ask you one more question before we go start going into that Part I watch a lot of shows.

We watch somebody feed Phil.

We watch Eva Longoria finding.

I don't know if it's Finding Spain.

I think it's called Finding Spain.

Finding Mexico.

She did Eva Longoria finding Mexico.

When she was down there, she was talking about.

And I thought about this earlier when you were talking about how that grandma had made those different moles.

And Ivara was talking about growing up in Texas and, you know, always eating at taco stands in Texas.

But when she went to Mexico, she said it was a whole different experience when she went and ordered tacos, for example, tacos from a taco vendor in Mexico City, than it was even in Texas, where she grew up with a kind of a Texican, or they call it Texican.

Yeah, it's Tex Mex or Texican, depending on, you know.

And California has their own version Mexican food.

Yeah.

But neither one of them composed of what's offered here.

And she may have discussed this, but one of the things that I find fascinating is that we have a branch of cuisine Mexico that is American.

Really?

Because we're asking what.

So, for instance, the burrito.

The burrito began as a humble little bite, cigar shape.

In Guadalajara, Mexico, it was little burro, donkey deep and pickled on the concert.

But in San Francisco, it became this meal in what they called altera gringo, flour tortilla, with literally everything.

Well, people kept coming to Mexico City and asking for a burrito.

No one really knew what it was.

So they started investing in faith on what Americans love.

And what you get down here now as a burrito is very much like a Philly cheesesteak.

It's cheese and meat melted together on the grill.

Sometimes a little beans, sometimes a little sauce, and a flour tortilla.

It's a lot like a cheese.

Delicious, but completely different than the San Francisco monolith.

The same is true for Nacho.

It was named for San Diego.

The margarita, which came from Las Vegas.

It all been reiterated, interpreted.

Down here.

The spirits are asking for them, and they're very, very different than what you would find in the United States.

They're the Mexican interpretation of the American interpretation of Mexican food.

That's wild.

That's crazy cool.

Actually, she didn't touch on that, but that's pretty cool.

I mean, you would never think.

You would never know unless you were educated and got an understanding of that.

You would think that the American reader was born in Mexico.

You would think that a burrito was born in Mexico kind of a thing.

That's pretty Slick.

It was but it was donkey in a quinto tan.

Whole different than what's here.

That's slick.

Excuse me.

You're not just a chef and a guide.

You're also a writer.

You're having in post piece your detective novels a comic novel called Filthy Blonde.

Your work is a voiceover.

Dubbing or artists.

How do all these creative lives connect?

How.

How do they all connect?

Oh boy.

Well, I. I mean I have a voice.

You can hear it.

I have a big, big voice.

I was.

I've had this voice since I was a child.

I could do a lot the art but it's very flexible.

And I can do a number of other voices and add this is that picturesque.

At one point was the hub for BO checks production.

Those one minute nine, seven, eight recordings.

And I met a couple that were involved in this and I started writing scripts and doing voices for both male and female characters.

Oh Mr. You know that kind of stuff.

And it was, you know, not.

He didn't take it on the talent.

He just up being able to read these ludicrous words.

You couldn't get to talk about sex without imprinted.

But sound engineers kind of discovered me that got me working on some classic where you know, the vocal thing had been destroyed and they needed, you know, whatever it was, you know, Betty boop or Jeanette McDonald or this guy or that guy.

And I could imitate the voices very well.

And I worked on that and got a pretty good reputation.

Then there was a gentleman who Joe and Vic.

Who may or may not have been part of a New York family.

I was never completely open about that.

Who were taking every piece of crap ever made both pornography and legitimate movies.

You know, the bad vampire movies, the horror movie, the kiddie movies or Showtime After Dark.

And they were dubbing them.

I was very flexible boys.

So I was doing all kinds of dubbing for them.

And then I went to culinary school while I was doing that because I could afford culinary school because of that work.

And I then booked a two week vacation to Italy that ended up lasting for years.

And I was passed from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant.

Oh, Tomas is having a baby.

Go to Verona.

Oh, the opera.

Go back to Rome.

They go to Rome.

They're taking a vacation.

You're cooking out for too much.

And I was past all over the country.

I became a real expert in regional Italian cuisine.

At the same time I had these dubbing that I was doing.

So I got.

I called Joe and I said, you know, he said, no problem.

Get.

I got people all over Italy, wherever you are, we'll get your studio.

We'll keep with the movie because I was really good at it.

And he was making a lot of money off the, you know, Blockbuster and the porno shops.

So I continued to double moving up the movie.

I think I dubbed about 7,000 going up a record.

And then I got some Eric between they're involved in doing some of them.

I brought in other people.

So it was all happening at the same time.

Here I am cooking in Italy.

I would be say in making lobster ravioli in the afternoon and recording in the morning in and then cooking steaks over the fire for a live audience.

It just kind of became this one thing.

And it did come together in a very strange way.

That's what the novel Filthy Blonde was based on.

And it's called Filthy because most of the movies were in fact filthy.

And I'm not quite blonde and I'm not quite brunette.

Although in this slide she can tell.

So I was doing all of this that at one time.

And it's all creative work.

It was all fun, it was all a big joy.

And that's kind of the story of Filthy Blood, which I found a publisher for.

They gave me a big advance and then they went out of business.

So looking for a new agent, then a new publisher for that novel.

And you didn't have to pay the advance back.

So that's a good thing.

Not only that, but they very kindly had legal return to rights to meetings.

They wouldn't stop Company on top of some lost.

Somebody owns the rights.

They bought a business and you can't publish it.

It's bad.

But they returned the right.

That's pretty cool.

That's cool.

That's cool.

Let's talk about.

Look, I. I told you, I'm a retired police sergeant.

So this, this what we're about to grab a hold of right now is right down my alley.

Your detective novels, the John Evans trilogy.

And it's a deep departure from food.

Where'd that idea come from?

I mean from cooking and food to detective.

You know, I was in Paris and I was during Wine Food.

I was reading Europe.

I had six months in Paris.

So I have.

I don't have a pd.

I haven't had a PD since built up or collect designing with it.

You know, I didn't think it was Enrique to have a PE after that.

And I don't have that leg.

And I will occasionally watch something but for the most part, no.

And so I was looking to amuse myself.

And I remember hearing on a radio broadcast that because of a political thing that was happening, people are starting to lose hope.

And in my brain I went to a time where America had hope.

It was 1945 when the war had just ended.

And so I started to ride.

What was a time travel novel where a government experiment brings this gentleman who changes into Jonathan to sound like the gun.

He had a British last name and he time traveled and he finds himself in 1945.

I didn't have any idea that it was going to be a defective novel.

No idea.

He's just in 1945.

And what happens to him when we get to the point where he's getting a driver's license?

The woman on the phone costume to Chicago where he pretends to be from, says something the name, oh, oh.

And she says he's a private detective.

He decides to just go, you know, he's there in 1945, he's a private and insurance company claiming everything had been stolen from his locker at the New Orleans Athletic Club.

And now he's respected.

He has no idea what he's doing.

He's the worst detective on earth, but he just stays with it.

He's stubborn.

He can't.

He just keeps doing what he's asked to do.

Oh, take photographs of this guy in his office.

Okay, we'll do that.

But his big case is in fact a murderer.

Not always murder.

There's a few cases in the first book, but he just is dogged.

He's determined.

He won't give up.

And I thought that's what I have in common.

He can't throat.

He has a coffee and an exercise addiction and he won't give up.

Those are my qualities.

I have a coffee and an exercise addiction and I won't give up.

I just won't give up.

So he eventually gets to the solution.

And that made me so happy because I know the reader probably reach it before he does.

That's okay, because it's not a mystery.

It's a detective novel.

How he gets to where he gets.

And then in book number two, us, he gets shot.

And at the end of the book, I'll give something away.

He marries the woman who shoots it.

That which is you have to stop and think why?

Because he falls in love with her.

Once he gets to know her, he wants to go out of jail.

I guess love has no bounds, right?

You know, love has.

And it's a great story for book number three, you know, how did we meet?

You know, well, I shot him.

And so when you ask me why or how this is what I. I sort of believe in and use when I sit and type.

Things just sort of happen, you know, they just sort of happen.

I don't know what's going to happen.

The disappearance of Jean Spangler in book four and she was a real actress who disappeared from Hollywood in 1949.

We're now up to 1949.

And I used the time travel element to help her disappear because I've always wanted this woman to have a happy ending.

My belief is that she did not.

But I decided to give hope.

So that is based on a real story and I get a lot of research or kids in Hollywood and what was going on at the time and what Jean's life was, everything that I could find and what happened to her daughter who unfortunately died at the age of 50.

And I really delved into it to try to make this fantasy grounded in reality.

And it's been so much fun because something happened halfway through the book that I was.

And now I've got to deal with free escapees from Alcantara.

I think that's interesting when you start creating like that in and things sometimes will take you where you didn't think it was going to take you.

Especially.

Especially in writing or especially in developing a story.

That's what I like about it.

My father was a journalist.

I grew up in a newsroom with my dad and he was writing early on in writing a novel and he used to love to write and you know, he said that was one of his favorite parts as well.

Because he said sometimes it doesn't always tell me where it's going to take me.

Which I thought that kind of works.

When you look at your life, the kitchens, the tours, the writing, the travel.

What ties it all together?

Curiosity.

Curiosity, that's what.

I don't know if you.

I have never stopped being curious about anything.

I want to learn.

I'm learning a fifth language right now.

Fifth language.

And I am curious.

I always wanted to learn.

I always want to find the next thing.

I always want to live in the next place.

And the way I'm doing the expansion of the company is to spend six months living it.

You know, you can't see my apartment here, but it's not glamorous at all.

It's a tiny little studio.

I have a one burner kitchen.

I have a toaster oven.

I carry my water up like there I am living with Mexicans surrounding me in a little studio apartment in a working class industrial neighborhood.

That's how I want to live because that is connecting you to the people that are this city.

They're not the people you know.

Speaking floods out I was talking about the city.

Oh my God, I just thought about Stockholm.

They're the people who are genuine and who are connected to everything going on and people can take my hand and hit me somewhere I never would have found.

And that's the way I like to live.

So curiosity is the driving factor for everything.

What if I write this novel?

I write the devil.

Can I find an eight?

Yes.

Can I find a publisher?

Oh my God, I did.

And it's also, well, I, you know, I'm going to do 11 in the series.

So I.

It's always curiosity as my driving force.

I want to learn everything, I want to see everything, I want to taste everything and I want to meet everybody.

That's a wonderful driving, driving aspect to how you want to live your life.

Curiosity should take you where you need to go and where you need to be.

And sometimes it may not always be what we think it's going to be.

And it opens up doors and windows.

That's pretty cool.

Before we go, I could talk for another hour.

Carl.

So again we talked about it earlier, we'll have to come back.

But before we wrap up, where can people find you?

Where can they book a tour?

Where can they read your work and all that good stuff?

Okay, well my publisher is in Ferris, so if you're in the United States and you want to read one of my books, you probably have to order it.

But Barnes and Noble on the east coast has stock eight stores and a couple of Air force, et cetera.

So you may happen to find them and you may not.

But Barnes and Nobles place to order them as well.

We purposefully did not set up for through Amazon the self publishing area.

Even though they resell you the book, go to Barnes and Noble, they're independent bookstore and they don't have it in stock.

They'll order it for you.

And then what would be other things

basically how you, how it brings it all together?

I mean, I mean.

Well, no.

Oh, your book tours, your book tours.

Book tours.

Write me www.chefstour.com and you can do my email address there.

You can write the operations and it will get forwarded to me.

That's where I am.

That's where you can read about what I'm doing, you know, you know all about me.

My bio is on the site, everything.

So that's the place to find anything.

And I'll make sure that this in the show notes, everybody can just click it for Those that are listening, they can just click it and go to it that way, make it easy for everybody.

Carl, this is one more thing before you go.

So before we leave, could you give leave our audience, our community with one final insight?

Something about food, travel, identity, or the power of human connection.

What would it be?

One more thing before I go.

Most of the problems in this world would be a lot smaller if more people stack them together over good food and a decent bottle of wine.

Brilliant, brilliant words of wisdom, Carl.

Thank you, honestly, for being.

I'm so happy we got connected.

I'm so happy.

I'm gonna have to write Nicole a letter and an email back and say, hey, this is.

Thank you for connecting us and I look forward to having another conversation with you.

I think we got a lot to talk about.

Any trouble,

that's great.

In the meantime, have a great day and we will be back.

We'll be back on the air soon.

All right then.

Bye bye.

Food is a memory.

Food is migration.

Food is identity.

Food is the story of who we are, who we are becoming.

And when we travel with intention, we listen.

When we taste what, when we let a city reveal itself, slowly we discover that the world is full of people doing extraordinary things in tiny spaces.

Sometimes all it takes is one bite, one story, one moment to change the way we see everything.

So that's a wrap for today's episode.

I hope you found inspiration, motivation and a few new perspectives to take with you.

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In the meantime, I'm Michael Hurst.

Have a great day, have a great week and thank you for being part of our community.

Thanks for listening to this episode of One More Thing.

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