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Welcome back to Pizza Quest!      Marco Pacelli is doing something wonderful in Redondo Beach, California at his pasta shop, Fatto a Mano’. After a lifetime of working for Michelin-level fine dining restaurants, he and his wife, Arlene, decided to open a small pasta and Roman-style pizza shop showcasing the foods inspired by Marco’s Aunt Concettina, the woman who shaped his culinary passion during the summers he spent with her…Read More…

Hi Everyone, We’ve been busy recording new interviews for the upcoming season, which will launch soon. Meanwhile, I wanted to bring back some of the fun webisodes from the past, especially for those of you who are new to Pizza Quest. Our friend Tony Gemignani is all over the news these days, having just thrown the world’s biggest pizza party (simultaneously, on a number of Princess cruise ships), opening his…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!  We are joined this week by Charles Wekselbaum, owner and head salumeriest for Charlito’s Cocina, makers of fine charcuterie. Is it salumi or salami? We’ll find out, as Charles guides Peter through a tasting of three of his most popular Spanish-influenced products, and explains how he transforms fresh meat products into cured and fermented dried meats in which his goal is to evoke the full…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! This week’s guest is a long time friend of mine (we go back to 7th grade together, circa 1963), Tim Lorsch, Nashville musician/sideman, who has created a one-man performance piece called, The Suitcase.  The show was inspired when Tim unexpectedly received an old suitcase that had formerly belonged to his great uncle before being sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed by the Nazi’s. The…Read More…

Hi All, As many of you have already figured out, not all of the interviews we do here on Pizza Quest make it onto this website. We only post the Zoom video interviews here (and also on YouTube) because they are, well, videos.  But many of our shows are conducted on audio tape only, such as when we go to Pizza Expo and the Atlantic City Northeast Pizza and Pasta…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!     Our guest this week is Inja Radman, co-founder of New Culture Food, a company with a mission to provide the world with animal-free cheese, beginning with mozzarella, that actually tastes and performs like the milk-based originals. Even those with lactose or dairy sensitivities have a love-hate relationship with the current options of faux cheese, usually made with nut and seed milks. New Culture’s…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! I haven’t seen Ronnie Costello in 53 years, since he was the catcher on our high school baseball team, and 60 years since we attended Belmont Hills Elementary School as kids. We lived on different sides of Mary Watersford Road, the street that, like the Maginot Line, separated the mostly Irish and Italian kids of “The Hill,” from the mostly Jewish kids of Penn Valley….Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! This episode features a conversation with Chef John Ash, who for the past 40 years has been known in Sonoma and Napa as the Godfather of Wine Country Cuisine. His restaurant, John Ash & Company, helped to define that regional aspect of what later became known as California Cuisine back in the 1980’s and 1990’s. He, along with chefs like Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower, Joyce…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart. In this episode, we catch up with the biggest rock star in the pizza universe, multi-time world pizza champion Tony Gemignani, owner of Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in SF, Pizza Rock in Las Vegas, and many other restaurants, bakeries, pizza schools, and even a new bagel shop, Dago’s Bagels.  In today’s episode, he also tells us about his biggest project ever, the launch…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest. In this episode of Pizza Quest we take a tangential detour away from pizza (as we often do in our ever-expanding celebration of artisanship wherever we find it) with one of our longtime, favorite guests, Meathead Goldwyn.  Meathead (yes, that’s his name, the origins of which he explains in this conversation), is the creator and host of the hugely popular website, AmazingRibs.com, where for many…Read More…