• Car Con Carne/Kickstarter
  • James VanOsdol in car, with barbecue

I can think of only one time that I’ve ever been on radio or TV (a small sample, admittedly) when there was really first-class food in the green room. That was at WGN Radio a few months back, and the other guest was Barry Sorkin of Smoque who arrived with the full catering setup full of brisket, so it’s not really a fair comparison. Anyway, we were there as the on-air guests of James VanOsdol, who you may know as the author of a terrific inside look at modern radio (about the life and death of Q101), and is now the “programming maestro” of a startup called Rivet Radio. He’s also a pinch hitter for WGN Radio, and likes to talk about food when he has a slot to fill, so there we were. Apparently, he likes to talk about food so much that he even launched a podcast about it with voice-over talent Mike Bratton: Car Con Carne.

James VanOsdol: My friend Mike had lived in New York for a few years, and I knew he was coming back and we talked for a while about doing a podcast together. And we were having lunch at Smoque and we thought, we should do a podcast together about barbecue. And we thought about how would we do that, and we thought about recording in a restaurant, and besides being hard to listen to from an audio perspective, there’s nothing special about that.

It’s . . . different. Yes, at its most basic level it’s a radio show in a car that’s not on radio. It’s just different. I don’t look at it as podcast vs. radio. It’s highly edited, so maybe it’s a little more polished than a live radio show, I don’t know.

Right now we’re using lav [lavalier] mikes, they’re serviceable, it does have that raw charm, but we could use better mikes. The thing we record it on is this old Zoom recorder that eats batteries, we need better recording equipment. Everything so far has been fine, but if we do this for the long haul we need better equipment.

Now, there’s only so many barbecue places, do you worry that you’re going to run out?

The next morning is always great, it smells like ketchup and every possible sauce component imaginable.