When I was doing a food podcast, I would start worrying I was exhausting my listeners if an interview with one chef pushed past the ten-minute mark. Yet for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to a podcast called In the Weeds in which a chef named Ben Randall talks with his friend Steve Kadwell about places he’s worked—for an hour to two hours in each episode, of which there are 30 so far. That’s like the equivalent of Breaking Bad in running time, and I’m nearly as hooked.

Ben Randall: The reason I record came from listening to other podcasts and thinking, that’s something I can do. It cost me about forty bucks to get started. I have a writing background, I’m trying to reconvince myself that I can write a novel—I have a full time job and have a podcast and two kids, so we’ll see. But I realized that I was losing those memories—take the Dirty Duck, I realized I couldn’t remember what my station setup looked like. So I thought, I’ll write all this stuff down.

    Because they control the supply line?        



If you’re looking for generalizations . . . the felonious and half-drunk dishwashers, the notoriously unreliable and easily replaced dishwasher crew. When I was at the Creole place in Houston, INS came through and cleaned us out of prep cooks and dishwashers. And we had the whole area restaffed with busboys and bussers’ cousins in about half an hour. And it wasn’t necessarily any different—they were selling drugs and stealing stuff and snatching drinks within about an hour. It’s rare to come across a dishwasher you can trust, and if you do, you just keep them close. There’s an echelon of 45-year-old guys who’ve been clamped onto by a chef who says, “I’m going to take care of you because you’re the best dishwasher I’ve ever known,” and you train them to do some prep and give them all the days they want off and keep them close, because they’re a diamond in the rough.

    Have you worked at any really high-end restaurants, and is that different from the more everyday places?        



    Ultimately, why do you think people are interested in what goes on in restaurants now?