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Kerry Nolan: It's All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kerry Nolan. The trailer for the new NatGeo TV series, Restaurants at the End of the World, shows chef Kristen Kish navigating her way up a Panamanian mountain, first in a Stick Shift Jeep, spoiler alert, it stalls out. Then hiking through a rainforest, all for a meal at a restaurant at the summit. Now, we'll talk more about that in a moment.

You may remember Kristen as the 10th season champion on the show, Top Chef. She also has a life story that would make for a grand movie or maybe a TV series. She's been an executive chef in Boston, a line cook in Michigan, a rudderless 20-something, and is an adoptee from Korea. Her gorgeous cookbook, Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques, came out a while back, we'll talk about that as well. Kristen, welcome to All Of It.

Kristen Kish: Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here.

Kerry Nolan: You say in the trailer for Restaurants at the End of the World that you wanted to be pushed out of your culinary comfort zone. Well, what was that zone, and how did you instinctively know that you needed to be pushed out of it?

Kristen Kish: I don't have a word. The easiest way to put it is like you're bored a little bit in life or maybe stagnant. Not saying that you don't enjoy everything you're doing, but certainly, there is this next gear that is worth exploring to help your creativity, to fuel some inspiration. I think regardless if you're in cooking or not, it's always really important to step into that space. For me, I knew it was time. It's long been time. I know how to cook, I know how to cook in my kitchens and places. It's all over the world, but how to do that while also being able to learn about someone else. Well, we traverse mountainsides, and we really actively pursue these ingredients.

Kerry Nolan: Let's talk a little bit about your journey from a kid playing in the kitchen and turning everything into sawdust, as you say in the book, to where you are now. You said that you felt you felt like you finally belonged when you first went to culinary school in Chicago. How did that feel? How did you know?

Kristen Kish: I always loved cooking. I loved watching television shows about cooking, and I knew how to use a knife at five years old because I've watched them cut and chop and I knew how to do it. I think like a lot of kids and young adults, this process of trying to find yourself and where you belong and what you feel like you're good at, because growing up, from the moment you hit middle school, it's like, "Well, what do you want to do for the rest of your life?" That's a really daunting place to be, especially with me, a kid with a lot of uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety, all the things that make for a great TV host were challenging me.

I think finding a sense of belonging and the fact that you felt good at something, because for a long time, I just never thought I would be good at anything. To feel good at something was a really wonderful place to be. I hadn't yet found that outside of the kitchen, but to step into it in a kitchen was really necessary for me.

Kerry Nolan: Let's do a little thumbnail about where you went after you graduated from culinary school.

Kristen Kish: After culinary school in Chicago, I had a lot of challenges. Again, this idea of feeling good in school, but also then going into the real world, I hadn't yet figured myself out. I was closeted at the time, very much openly gay now, but I was definitely hiding a lot of me and trying to understand what the world was going to do for me. That's where I looked at it instead of thinking, "Well, what can I do for myself and for the people and things around me?"

I had a rough go for the next four months. It was pretty tough for me. I ended up moving back home after Chicago, living with my parents because they refused to support a deadbeat child, basically. Not really doing anything for myself. Then I figured it out, and they were like, "Well, where do you want to go next?" I said, "Boston." They were like, "You get one more shot at this, we hope that you do well, just get a job and try to do something." I had to step outside of my then comfort zone to find out who I was and what I wanted to become.

Kerry Nolan: We'd love to hear from you, listeners. Give us a call, we've got a lot to talk about. This NatGeo show, Restaurants at the End of the World, this beautiful cookbook, and a very loquacious guest. Kristen Kish is our guest. Our number is 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Once you got to Boston, you hooked up with a very successful chef. Let's talk a little about that.

Kristen Kish: Going to Boston, still feeling a little bit lost. I had a series of couple jobs before I found my way to Chef Barbara Lynch. She is a pioneer. She is an icon, certainly, in a lot of people's eyes, mine included. The greatest thing about a mentor, I feel, is that, you weren't looking for it, and it's exactly the person you need in your life at that time.

I've always said, she never taught me how to cook, she taught me how to believe in myself and understand that being me was actually the best thing for me. She did that simply by being herself in every way possible. Just by watching her, I was like, "Gosh, that looks freeing. Just to settle into who you are, without any kind of hesitation, or guilt or insecurity." I was fascinated by this woman. I worked with her for about four and a half years, and she's the one who put me up for Top Chef.

Kerry Nolan: Okay. Anthony Bourdain once said that of all the competitive cooking shows that he felt Top Chef was the most honest.

Kristen Kish: It is. It's very honest. Anxiety is real. [laughs] You go through a whole slew of emotions, but it was one of the greatest pleasures of my life.

Kerry Nolan: You've hosted or co-hosted three shows on various channels. How did Restaurants at the End of the World come about?

Kristen Kish: It started with a seed of an idea in 2019 by a woman named Julia. She had this idea about family meal. In restaurants, we have this thing called family meal. Everyone eats together at the restaurant before you go into work. We started exploring that, 2020 happened, everything came to a screeching halt.

Then what happened was we picked it up at the back end of 2020, and National Geographic then got ahold of it through pitches and things and they showed a lot of interest. National Geographic and the president of Nat Geo, Courteney Monroe, they saw something in the seed of an idea and then completely expanded it for National Geographic. This is why now we are traveling to the ends of the world, and why I'm rappelling down waterfalls, because it's an iconic brand.

Kerry Nolan: I have to ask you about rappelling down a waterfall to get a handful of watercress. I need to know more.

Kristen Kish: A lot of people are like, "Well, did you have to do that?" Certainly not, but how do people forage, and how do they get things from their environment when they live in a rainforest? This is what he does. He has been rappelling down that waterfall for, I don't know how many years, Rolando, and that's just the way he did it.

Does he do it because he needs to do it for watercress? He could probably find a watercress somewhere else. However, he loves the adventure too. It's like mixing these two things together and saying, "Well, you don't have to, but you can, and it's available to you." Being able to go on this adventure with him was incredible.

Kerry Nolan: Let's talk a little bit about this first episode, which by the way, airs tonight on Nat Geo, and this series will be available, starting tomorrow in Disney+. The cloudforest kitchen, it's Hacienda Mamacelo?

Kristen Kish: Mamecillo.

Kerry Nolan: Mamecillo?

Kristen Kish: Yes.

Kerry Nolan: Tell us about this restaurant. How did you find this? You took your Jeep as far as you could take it and then had to hike to the restaurant.

Kristen Kish: Yes. Luckily, we have a really wonderful casting department that leads us into wonderful creative zones. There's a lot of things that come into play, obviously, pre-production, but eventually, I did find my way to Rolando and his family. This all started because, well, Rolando was an airline pilot for Copa Airlines in Panama City.

Him and his wife had this dream of raising their children in a slightly more organic way and out of the city. They bought this plot of land, he built this house with his own two hands, and why not start farming because you have this breadbasket of beautiful Caribbean mist that's coming in? You have the most perfect climate and soil to grow stuff on. He just started experimenting. Through his time, he found mentors and people that knew a lot more about this stuff to teach him, but ultimately, it was his family home that he convinced his wife to start feeding people during adventure tours.

Kerry Nolan: How big is this living room/restaurant?

Kristen Kish: They typically sit around, you can do 2 people or you can do 15 or 16, but for my time there, he was feeding the largest group yet to date, which was 30 people.

Kerry Nolan: That's a lot.

Kristen Kish: There's a lot of people for-

Kerry Nolan: A home kitchen.

Kristen Kish: -a home kitchen without an oven, and a husband-wife team that have never worked in restaurants before.

Kerry Nolan: My jaw just literally dropped. What was on the menu?

Kristen Kish: Oh gosh. It's a farm and they have happy animals and they feed their family these chickens from their chicken coop and goat milk from their beautiful goats. We had homemade goat cheese they had made. Coffee, obviously, in Panama is gorgeous, and he has his own coffee, so we made this thing called coffee bread. We had the most deliciously organic chicken that I've ever had in my entire life, which was stunning with, of course, watercress. He has citrus trees out in his front yard and gorgeous wild berries just hanging around in his backyard. We used everything and everything we could.

Kerry Nolan: My guest is Kristen Kish. She is the host of the brand new Nat Geo Series, Restaurants at the End of the World, drops tonight at 10 o'clock Eastern here on Nat Geo TV, and it will stream starting tomorrow on Disney+. She also has this beautiful cookbook out that came out a couple of years ago called Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques. If you have any questions for her, you want to know about foraging for watercress down the side of a waterfall or something perhaps a little closer to home, give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You also went to Norway in this. Tell us a little bit about that. Tease that out for us.

Kristen Kish: We say Norway, but yes, technically it's Norwegian territory, but it's between mainland Norway, the northern part, and the North Pole. There's a little town called Svalbard, which is 78 degrees north, if I remember correctly, and in a place where there are said to be more polar bears than there are humans. That certainly was an incredibly new place for me that challenged a lot of who I was, being in the Arctic and having to have a polar bear guard with you at all times. You couldn't leave the hotel, this hotel that we were in-

Kerry Nolan: Wow.

Kristen Kish: -without a guard. When we went diving in the Arctic for one of the scenes, there was a polar bear on the coast and we had to switch locations because it was too close.

Kerry Nolan: What were you foraging for under the sea?

Kristen Kish: Well, the original dive spot had beautiful sea urchins. Since we had to then come up with plan B and go to another spot, there were no more sea urchins there. In real-time, we're trying to find stuff that's not there. At the end of the day, we got a little bit of seaweed, but the biggest part about that was the fact that I got to go swimming in the Arctic. I was in a 7-millimeter wetsuit. If you've ever had to put one of those on, it's more challenging than the dive itself.

[laughter]

Kerry Nolan: Now, you go from a rainforest in Panama to, within a stone's throw, if you have a good arm, of the North Pole. Then what seems like a return to normal, a palate cleanser, an island in Maine.

Kristen Kish: Yes. I think the beauty of visiting domestic places. Obviously, the show will go international, so our little island off the coast of Maine will feel like the most end of the earth for somebody watching somewhere else. For me, being a New England kid and having grown up for 10 years of my professional career in Boston, being able to go to places that are seemingly in your own backyard, and you are constantly surprised by.

I had never heard of North Haven. I had never heard of Turner Farm, and the luxury of travel, it is a true luxury. Not everyone can just jet out on a plane to the middle of nowhere. I think it's a nice reminder to say that there are places worth exploring that are just so close to you and that have something so magical that it is worth going to.

Kerry Nolan: Let's talk a little bit about your book. I have not stopped thumbing through it. For some reason, the universe is telling me that I have to make the halibut recipe in here.

Kristen Kish: Oh, sure. Yes.

Kerry Nolan: Literally, every time I've opened this book, it opens to that page. What I find about the book is that it's elegant. It's fine dining, but it's not fussy. Everything seems very, very clean flavor-wise.

Kristen Kish: Sure.

Kerry Nolan: Obviously, that's your style. What led you to do this particular cookbook?

Kristen Kish: The cookbook started, Top Chef obviously opens up a lot of doors, especially if you win. I was very fortunate to have a lot of opportunities come my way. A cookbook, it just seemed like a really fun project to do. I had never done it before and I was always intrigued by having something that you could give to your friends and family that is a tangible tactical item that you can say, "Look at what I did." It's a really proud moment.

This book came about, and it was so heavily focused on technique with my food story involved. At the end of the day, I hope, because we lay out techniques, that people can take these recipes and start to swap ingredients in and out. They might not like it, they might not find something that is at their local grocery store, but at the end of the day, I give you the basics. Then from there, it is up to you to create your own food story based off of the roadmap that I gave you.

Kerry Nolan: That roadmap is so clear and so well defined in this book that, I don't know, if you follow the recipe before you feel confident enough to swap things out, if you follow the recipe, it's going to work. It just seems like this book was so thoroughly tested.

Kristen Kish: It was. We had a lot of great people involved. I will say there was one mistake in the book, which I have no problem calling out that I made a mistake. There's a cake in the back. It's like this pecan coffee cake kind of thing. It's a 8-inch round cake. What I forgot to mention was it's 8-inch, I didn't mention the depth, I just mentioned the width. You do have a lot of batter if you were to pick a 2-inch deep cake pan. When you go to make that, you want to use a deeper one. In restaurants, often, we have the deeper ones because you can make thin cakes, you can make thick cakes. I did not mention that small thing.

[laughter]

Kerry Nolan: Also, the pink peppercorn ice cream, that's--

Kristen Kish: Delicious.

Kerry Nolan: Yes. Going back to the Restaurants at the End of the World, what was, for you, the most impressive off-the-beaten-path place you went to?

Kristen Kish: I've had the great fortune of eating a lot of fantastic food in my life and going to really beautiful locations. The thing that I find the most impressive is a person. It's not about the place. It's not about what they're feeding me. It's not about any of that. It's about who the person is. That is the seed and the start of a great food story and a great food journey.

I'm impressed by things that I eat, sure, but I will say that when we were in Svalbard with a chef named Regiere, he was taking parts of the animal that I had never tasted before. I've had stomachs, I've had brains, I've had eyeballs. I've eaten all the things that one can eat. He took this from a ptarmigan, it's a grouse, and he took this feeding pouch where they collect a bunch of seeds and stuff to collect. If they can't feed themselves over the winter, they'll regurgitate it and swallow it, survival, basic survival.

He took that feeding sack and he infused it in a gin. He took me out to get glacier ice at this gorgeous glacier we pull up, and I'm just in awe, and we make a cocktail out of glacier ice and this feeding sack cocktail. I can't say that it was the most delicious thing I've drank, but I was the most impressed by his innovation, his creativity. I always say you want to eat all parts of the animal. We've heard that so many times.

Kerry Nolan: Sure.

Kristen Kish: This one was like, do you actually need to have that in order to honor the animal? I don't know, but he did, and it was my first taste of something like that.

Kerry Nolan: I'm trying to remember it correctly, but you also talked about a dish made with antelope tongue. Was it antelope?

Kristen Kish: Reindeer.

Kerry Nolan: Reindeer.

Kristen Kish: Yes. They have a Svalbard reindeer, and they're everywhere. It's like you know how people hunt maybe for deer in the States and we're used to hearing that. Over there, there's these reindeers just roaming everywhere. Naturally, it's a game meat that is super tasty and he was doing a reindeer tongue pastrami. I've never had reindeer and I had never had reindeer tongue before, so that was a new experience. It was delicious.

Kerry Nolan: I was just going to ask you, what can you compare it to?

Kristen Kish: It tastes like a venison or a lighter version of a game meat. Tasted like something very familiar. It didn't feel out of the ordinary for me.

Kerry Nolan: Who in the culinary world now impresses you?

Kristen Kish: Gosh. God, there's so many. All my friends. I know it's a different project, but when I was co-hosting Iron Chef on Netflix, I got to watch my friends, peers, and colleagues do what they do best. I got to have the vantage point. The greatest part of that job of co-hosting, yes, I don't want to have to competitively cook anymore but to have this podium where I could watch my friends and people do what they love and do it so well. That is one of the greatest, greatest job pleasures I think I've ever had because that was incredible. My friends impress me. They do, I'm inspired by each and every one of them.

Kerry Nolan: They by you, I'm sure.

Kristen Kish: I hope so.

Kerry Nolan: Yes. The show is Restaurants at the End of the World. It starts tonight on Nat Geo TV. If you want to stream it, you can do that starting tomorrow on Disney+. Kristen Kish, I'm so delighted to meet you. I can't wait to see the entire series, and I can't wait to start cooking from this book. The halibut is definitely on my shortlist.

Kristen Kish: Good. Good. It's a really great dish.

Kerry Nolan: No doubt. Before I let you go, as I said earlier, you wanted to be pushed out of your comfort zone. What was the least comfortable thing you had to eat other than the feeding sec?

Kristen Kish: The thing about food is whether it's new to me or it's something I've had before. I approach new things with the understanding that it is a normal for somebody else. I think in the food world, there's been this term exotic cuisine thrown around, which really bothers me. I think it implies that something is not normal, but it is normal to somebody. It just might not be normal to us. I love trying new things. I love trying familiar or new or different and all the things because I think that really sparks inspiration and also a level of education to learn what somebody else eats.

Kerry Nolan: Thank you so much for coming in. This has been such a pleasure. So nice to meet you. Kristen Kish, again, the host of Restaurants at the End of the World, starts tonight on Nat Geo TV and is going to be streaming tomorrow on Disney+. Thanks again.

Kristen Kish: Thank you for having me.

 

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