Snacky Tunes | Darin Bresnitz
Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main Ingredient
By Darin and Greg Bresnitz with Khuong Phan
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Darin Bresnitz: Hello, I'm Darin Bresnitz. I'm the cohost and coauthor of Snacky Tunes: Music is the Main Ingredient, which is our new book that I did with my brother, Greg and our business partner Khuong Phan. Now it is a perfect gift for the holidays. And if you have kids, you will look like the coolest parent in the room.
Suzy Chase: Darin, I've known you, I think since like 2004 or five, when you used to play squash on and off with my husband, Bob, and now you're married and expecting your second child. I can't believe it. Time flies.
Darin Bresnitz: I mean, it's pretty wild. I remember when you used to DJ at Trophy Bar. Oh my gosh. Back in the day, what a great spot.
Suzy Chase: And then around 2007, you developed TV's first music and cooking show called Dinner with the Band an award-winning series. You and your brother, Greg are legit OG food media guys. So then in 2009, you went on to create Snacky Tunes, the first food and music radio show and you just mentioned Trophy Bar. I feel like we've kind of led parallel lives. Cause I had my soul music podcast that started in 2005. I had my DJ residency at Trophy Bar in 2010. That's when Brooklyn was the epicenter of the food and music explosion and all while I was creating this cookbook podcast. So I'd love to hear about your evolution in Brooklyn, from Dinner with the Band and your podcast and now the book with some stops along the way at Refinery29 and Tastemade.
Darin Bresnitz: Oh man. Well, you know, I'll go back to 2001. When I was at school at Boston University and I gotten into television and I opened up the phone book to find myself an internship and the only show listed was The Phantom Gourmet and it was a restaurant review show on NECN, which was their local like a New York 1, but for all of New England and I called them and we chatted and that was my first foray into food and you know, this is like I said, 2001 and so explaining to people that I was working in food TV or working in food media, some people just raised their eyebrows, politely. Some people needed a larger explanation, but you know, from back then, I just really felt that that was really, where the greatest stories lied with greatest people lived, I felt that this was the path for me to really explore the world and I really haven't taken my eyes off the prize. You know, I really have never stepped completely out of the food media world. As you mentioned, I spent a little time at Refinery29, but even there, I was always bringing food into the events that I was doing there, but we were still doing Snacky Tunes, the radio show. We were still doing our barbecue blowouts in Williamsburg, where we had high-end chefs come to Williamsburg and pair them with a DJ. You know, it was always just traipsing along in the different types of media forms and in college when I had the idea for dinner with the band, I thought that if I was going to get into this business that I didn't want to ever just work on other people's show that the whole idea was to create your own thing, which I had taken from a lot of the DIY basement sort of punk rock shows that we were going to as kids, whereas you didn't need anyone's permission. You just went out and you built something and it was yours. And some people came, most people didn't, but at least you made something. And so that building of the show, building of Dinner with the Band in the late aughts is what was sort of the backbone for the first part of my career in TV. And then that ultimately went away and around that time, 2009, when we were sort of making the show and it was also sort of ending is when we started, Snacky Tunes, which Greg and I started at Heritage Radio Network, which was an absolute blast. You know you couldn't get more epicenter right? In the back of Roberta's 2009. I mean that's it. We were just in the heart of it and you could feel it was special at the time. You know, you could really just feel the ground shifting and you could see what was happening, post recession and all the new food ideas, you know, Roy Choi's Kogi Truck coming out of LA and the national, international effect that was having on restaurants and what could be considered a restaurant or a food truck and the accessibility where you didn't need to be in Manhattan or even Williamsburg, you could just be out anywhere and that was what Roberta's was teaching us and stuff. It was just great to be at the center of it. And then, five, six years later, 2015, I just felt the winds shifting for me a little bit and came out to LA and have been lucky enough to be part of the food movement that's happening out here. You know, I would argue that LA is one of, if not the most exciting food cities in the last few years, obviously the pandemic upended not just LA, but a lot of places, especially as we head into a second shutdown right now, but you know, I've been happy enough to be at Tastemade overseeing a lot of our original series for the networks. I just found in my lane early on. I think that's the best way to really describe it is that I found my lane and my lane was food and I never wavered. And there was a lot of setbacks and it's easy when you say the highlights like this to be like, Oh yeah, I went from this and that. And that, the other thing, you know, there was also bankruptcy and taxes owed and ideas not getting picked up and hunting for jobs and being freelance. But at the end of the day, I just never wavered. And food has just sort of been my guiding light, my North star, and I've loved all the food people I've met and all the chefs and the stories that have gotten told, and we've gotten to eat and where it's taken me all over the world and how I met my wife and how we're raising our family and just, it always comes back to food.
Suzy Chase: I honestly, think you made that lane and you made it a really hip lane.
Darin Bresnitz: I don't know if I would claim to say that I made it, you know, I think that I was happy to be in that lane with some people and I'm happy to be considered when anyone does that I'm a part of that. What I love about my role in this is, and this is where the weird thing is about being on the podcast and having the book is that we're not really front and center. You know, Greg and I have really worked to make the show as a platform for other chefs. And when I go back and listen to my interviews over the last decade or so, what I personally have worked to have done is taken myself out of the show as much as possible. It really is like a setup, a question, and then get out of the way. So, you know, it's doing this media talking about the book, which I so happy that we got to do and to curate and be a part of in many ways. It's like, you know, we wrote the intro and then we got out of the way and we let the chefs tell their stories.
Suzy Chase: Okay. So will you sing your Snacky Tunes jingle with me?
Darin Bresnitz: Oh man. Uh, let's see. Can I tell you the story about it before we sing it?
Suzy Chase: Yesss!!
Darin Bresnitz: So we were deejaying at the time and we didn't have a theme song and we're like, okay, we should have a theme song. And the original idea was to have different people. Cause we were having all these bands on and uh, you know, we had all these different musicians that were in our lives at the time and we're like, okay, we'll have people do different theme songs, like one every season or something like that. And then, uh, we were touring with Ricky Reed, AKA wallpaper, AKA Lizzo's producer. And we said, Hey man, can you make a theme song for us? And he was like, yeah, no problem. And then he sent over the theme song that is still the theme song today. And we heard it. And the reason why it's still the theme song is because he nailed it. He wrote the lyrics, he'd wrote the music, he sent everything and it was just like, okay, we're done. And that's, that's it. But yes, you know, tried to remember.
Suzy Chase: All right, here we go.
Suzy Chase: We talk about food we talk about music with musical dudes, finger on pulse, Snacky Tunes!
Darin Bresnitz: Then it has like the NBC ring out like bomb, bomb, bomb. But no, it was great. It was like, Oh my God, uh, you nailed it. We don't need to ask anyone. And then Freelance Whales who was really the first live band that we had on that changed everything. Greg had found them busking in Brooklyn and they came in live and played a five song set. And that was really what changed the way that we did the show. We switched from DJ's to live bands somewhere on one of the episodes they were on they did a cover of, of it which is, you know, you have to dig up in the archive.
Suzy Chase: I have to find that. So you and Greg wrote in the book, one of the most important ways people define themselves is by how they connect both to themselves and to the world at large, for us and many of the chefs who have appeared on our podcast, Snacky Tunes, those connections have been expressed by their lifelong intertwined relationships with food and music. I think the only way you could do that podcast and this book is to also have a deep connection to food and music. Can you talk a little bit about your personal connection?
Darin Bresnitz: We grew up surrounded by food and music, both aware and unaware of how unique it was to our family. You know, our grandparents on my dad's side were Auschwitz survivors. My grandparents on my mother's side from Poland, for your Russia, a DP camp in Italy came to Brooklyn. And so in many ways we were second generation American Canadians. Our dad's parents wound up in Canada and a lot of the food we grew up eating was a harken back to this old European Eastern style of cooking, you know Hungarian on my grandmother's side and my dad's side and, and Polish on my grandmother's side. And so the idea of us eating food from scratch, being cooked from the kitchen, my mom carried on the tradition as well was just second nature to us, you know, and taking it for granted is maybe a weird way to say it, but just being unaware, that, that wasn't how everyone ate like we didn't eat fast food. We rarely went out to restaurants, not in a bad way. We just, you know, we're always cooking at home. And if we did go out to eat, it would be Chinatown or, you know, Jewish deli or something like that. And so food really became something that we were excited about. And then for music, you know, my father played guitar and was really into music. He was in Montreal growing up and he would go see all the Motown bands that would come over from Detroit and sneak into the bars when he was like 16. And he would also come to the States when he and my mom are dating and bringing back LP's that hadn't been released in Canada and have people over and share music with them. And so, you know, growing up, you'd always share music with us and there was always music on in my house, you know, every weekend morning, wake up to music and food and things like that. And so it just became ingrained in us that listening to music and eating food was just central to bringing people together, connecting with family, taking time to listen to a record or eat a meal together. And then as we got older and we started going out into the world, we weren't cooking as much for ourselves and this was the late nineties so food really hadn't taken off the way it had, but music, you know, we were super into the music scene and we'd go out of the suburbs of Philadelphia and into the city itself or go to our friend's shows and see emo bands and indie bands and punk rock bands and things like that and just the idea that you could create your own show, you could create your own t-shirt, you could make your own songs that just sort of gave us the definition of making things on our own to us, the food and the music itself is how we connected with people.
Suzy Chase: So this book is complete with all new interviews, recipes, and playlists from 77 chefs from around the world who share how music has shaped them and its influence on the culinary world. When I first saw this book, I was like, yay, it's a compilation of your podcast interviews from over the years, but it's not, it's all new. Describe how you chose the chefs for this book.
Darin Bresnitz: Greg had the concept to do a book and I believe the original idea was go back, pull this out of interviews of chefs that we had on the show. But to be honest, you know, if you go back and listen, like music pops up, but not every chef really goes into depth. And the stories that we're asking are not really the stories that we asked in the book. So we quickly realized that we needed to do a whole new format. Dale Talde, Nyesha Arrington, and Marc Vetri were the three chefs we reached out for the pitch whose stories wound up in the book and they helped us formulate what we would ask and things like that when we were doing our proposal for Phaidon, you know, knowing that this is gonna be a national international book, we sort of said, okay, half-ish of them were going to be North America, the rest will be international and then we kept going along the lines of how do we want to make this book diverse, right? Because we thought that you could easily fall into a very specific type of chef who do these compilation books and then you're not getting any variety. And we knew that we wanted to have some heavy hitters, you know, your Dominique Crenn, your Curtis Stone, your Asma Khan, your Ben Shewry but then we also wanted to have some new chefs that people may be had never heard of like Loic Dablé or Manu Buffara, or Monique Fiso some chefs who might be on our radar but might not be known at a larger level if you didn't know chef in general. And so we just went to work. I mean, we gritted it out to be honest, like we really were really disciplined and diligent in the type of chefs would reach out to and the diversity which was really key from us the beginning and we didn't want to have the thing where we're doing all this work and we wake up six months, seven months, eight months in and we go, oh my God, we didn't stick to our guns you know, we sort of fell short in who we wanted to be in this book. And so, you know, after the friends and after the colleagues when we started looking at who we saw, it still needed to be in the book and where we wanted some representation, you know, we have all six continents represented, we started just doing research and some of them were cold emails some of these people, the only interaction we've ever had with them was hi, how are you? You don't know us. Would you be a part of this book? Here's the questionnaire? Do you want to get on the phone? Let's talk things out. And people were really gracious with their time and their stories and the communication I have now, dozens of cities and chefs that I want to visit all over the world and eat their food and meet them for the first time.
Suzy Chase: You just mentioned Manu Buffara, is that how you pronounce her last name? Yes. A chef in Brazil, but I love that you gave a voice to emerging chefs. Can you talk a little bit about her?
Darin Bresnitz: Manu's incredible. In doing our research and what I personally know about chefs all over the world, I would say South America is one of my weak points. I don't know a ton. I haven't had the pleasure of visiting there yet and we knew that Brazil has one of the best culinary scenes in the world. It's super diverse they have a great amount of history and cultural representation ingredients. And what we love about Manu is that she really is at the forefront of this new type of cooking, where it's both paying homage to Brazilian cuisine, but at the same time, moving it forward. I mean, the fact that she picked Feijoada, which is I believe the Brazilian national dish, as her dish, but then modernizes it with some of the techniques. And some of the ingredients really shows the culmination and is really a perfect example of the type of food she makes. Feijoada. It was created by African slaves who came to Brazil and it's beans and it's beef and it's pigs ears. You know, it's a lot of, sort of like the bits and ends of food, but the culmination of the dish is something that's absolutely incredible. And then it just creates this gorgeous stew and you serve it with white rice and you have all these great garnishes. And it's just this very comforting, very soul hugging type of dish. Manu just works with local communities, she transforms abandoned sites into urban areas, she's a teacher, she's a chef. She's just one of those people who I go, can I hang out with you? How do we get to hang out more? And we reached out. She said, yes. And she gave us some incredible stories, a great playlist, and introduced, at least me personally, to a lot of artists who I didn't really know anything about. And I would say, and I probably butchering the name of this, but Céu, she was one of the artists on her playlist has become one of my favorite artists of 2020.
Suzy Chase: Can you describe the look of this book and how it's all organized? It's super stylish.
Darin Bresnitz: Oh, sure. Well, I cannot take really any credit for it. Phaidon paired us with an incredible set of designers Omnivore and they absolutely knocked it out. Now, the way that it works with the process is that we delivered the text so then they were going to parents with the designer and originally we were going to have 50 entries, right. And when you have 50 entries and you have X amount of pages and design costs, that allows for one type of design, well, Greg and Kuhong, and I had a very specific idea about who we wanted in the book and the amount of diversity that we wanted to represent the stories we wanted to tell. So we wound up delivering 77 entries with 86 chefs and restaurateurs. We had quite a few duos and so when you hand in that amount of information, I believe, I want to say the original amount of words we handed in maybe 200,000 words, and we got it down to maybe 110,120 thousand. But you know, when you have that much text, there really isn't that much room for illustration. And when you have that much text, you also think, like you said, how do you organize it? And so Omnivore really just knocked it out with the layout, the way that everything's presented, the way that we have different pull quotes. And we were involved a little bit in the feedback process, along with Phaidon, but I got to give credit where credit's due and they just do absolutely amazing work.
Suzy Chase: Kendrick Lamar is in this book 12 times. What do you think that means?
Darin Bresnitz: Well, I mean, so none of the chefs knew what any of the other chefs were submitting and when we did the interviews, we did not give any restrictions. We had a list of questions that we asked and we would ask the questions and then sit back. We didn't tell anyone what recipes to make, what songs to pick, which ours to lean into. And when you do something like that, you get some really fun coincidences such as this one. Let's be honest. Kendrick Lamar is one of the most prolific artists in the last half a decade, decade, right? But also he's got that same mentality that all great artists have. And a lot of the chefs we've talked to are great artists into themselves. It's inspirational. It's pushing yourself. It's, you know, looking at a tough situation and persevering. And I think when you're just in the kitchen, you're grinding it out and you're making a name for yourself and you're working really hard. You know, someone like Kendrick Lamar is a perfect ally when you're listening to music and looking for that type of inspiration
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called last night's dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.
Darin Bresnitz: So I finally was able to unpack all of my cookbooks and I didn't want to fall into the, these are ornamental only. They look nice, but I wanted them to be both form and function. And so what I am made was The Phoenicia Diner's Chicken and Dumplings. You take a whole chicken, you boil it, you break it down, you pull the chicken off. Then you add all these root vegetables with some cream and little cornstarch to thicken it up and you just let that cook. And that's just absolutely incredible. And then you make these little biscuits with fresh chives and buttermilk, which are their take on the dumplings, which actually I really liked because I do like the texture a little bit better. And then you serve it up in one bowl and there's just so much in this recipe, but actually gets better each day. So day three of the chicken and dumplings was absolutely fantastic. And my daughter loved it. My wife loved it. It's, it's a very comforting dish when, when it gets to be, I guess, cold out here is below 50, but it does make me feel like I'm back East. It doesn't have like a lot of those flavors.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media and tell us about your virtual book tour.
Darin Bresnitz: So you can find everything you need to know about us at snackytunes.com. You can also go to heritageradionetwork.org or phaidon.com is where you can buy the book but also if you want to support independent bookstores, we are huge, huge, huge advocates of that so you can go there and personally you can find me at Instagram, Darin Bresnitz. The virtual book tour. Greg had the idea of doing a virtual book tour and started putting it together and then Khuong and Phaidon and myself also helped put that together but we did over 10 stops. And the idea was in each city, we paired a different chef with a band and usually the chef of the band knew each other but, you know, look, we wanted to talk with people. We wanted to get the word out. We wanted to at least somewhat celebrate the book and some sort of physical presence. And the response we got was really good, hopefully sooner than later, at least hopefully for the second half of 2021 people will get back to physical tours.
Suzy Chase: In the book you wrote, we hope you'll find a piece of yourself somewhere in these stories and be moved to create something of your own to share with the world. It was so great chatting with you, Darin. Thanks for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Darin Bresnitz: Thank you so much for having me really appreciate it and stay safe. Have a great holiday season, and we will see you in the new year.
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