Tag: BGS Podcast Network

The Shift List – Ramael Scully (Scully, Ottolenghi) – London

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

A veteran of chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s venerable Ottolenghi and Nopi restaurants, Ramael Scully opened his first restaurant, Scully, back in March 2018 with the backing and support of Ottolenghi himself.

Listen: APPLE MUSIC • MP3

Given that Ramael Scully was born in Malaysia to a mother of Chinese and Indian descent and an Irish-Balinese-Malay father, his palate was destined to be informed by mixed influences. Add a move to Australia as a young child, where he was ultimately raised in a multi-ethnic neighborhood, and you start to get a sense of how he eventually found his culinary voice.

Utilizing a range of ingredients from homemade spices, pickles, preserves, oils, animal fats, dairy, and sprouts, his food can only be described as his own, like the arepa stuffed with eggplant sambal and bergamot labneh. It’s neither Middle Eastern nor Colombian — it’s just Scully’s.

Theme Song: Jamie Drake – “Wonder”

The String – Rodney Crowell

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

The String launches a new year with a conversation with Rodney Crowell, one of the legit icons of Americana music.

LISTEN: APPLE MUSIC

The Texas born, Nashville based songwriter was one of the artists around whom the format was created 20 years ago, and indeed he won the Americana Music Association’s lifetime achievement award for songwriting in 2006. He’s a valued collaborator, earning a Grammy Award for his recent work with his longtime friend and colleague Emmylou Harris. He became an acclaimed author with his memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks in 2011. Recently he’s released a first-ever Christmas album and a volume of stripped down “Acoustic Classics” from his extensive catalog. We cover a range of times and topics. Also in the hour, Maya de Vitry talks about her difficult but necessary departure from the beloved acoustic trio The Stray Birds. She’s set out on her own with the album Adaptations.

The Show On The Road – Sunny War

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Z. speaks with folk/blues guitarist and singer/songwriter Sunny War.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS

Turns out that while Sunny War was playing her poetic brand of punky blues on the rowdy boardwalk in Venice Beach, host Z. Lupetin was living just up the block and walking past her every day without noticing. She’s come quite a long way since those days, having released three albums since 2014, culminating with 2018’s breakout, “With the Sun.”

The Shift List – Honey & Co, London

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Itamar Srulovich is an Israeli-born chef who co-founded Honey & Co with his wife, Sarit Packer, back in 2012. Itamar is the music lover between he and Sarit, so he sat down for this interview, which includes music from Israel, Egypt, Nigeria, the UK, and the US.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

A cozy spot located in London’s once sleepy Fitzrovia neigborhood that serves homey Middle Eastern fare directly across the street from their amazing food shop, market, and culinary boutique Honey & Spice, they also opened Honey & Smoke in 2016, a big and buzzy grill house serving everything from lamb kofta and chops, whole fish and slow-cooked octopus, charred cauliflower and amazing drinks.

Itamar and Sarit racked up impressive resumes before going into business together with Honey & Co, both serving as alumni of the venerable Ottolenghi restaurant and cooked together in restaurants around Tel Aviv before their time together in London.

Three restaurants and three bestselling cookbooks later, family is the through line that brings everything together at Honey & Co, and not just because Itamar and Sarit are married. It seems like Itamar knows every staff worker, diner, and shop customer intimately, exuding a warmth and friendliness that surely brings people back.

Theme Song: Jamie Drake – “Wonder”

The Show On The Road – Lindsay Lou

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Host Z. Lupetin talks with the honey-voiced singer/songwriter Lindsay Lou. For over a decade she has been making slow-burning soulful roots music, first with her Michigan band the Flatbellys and now with her Nashville crew billed simply as Lindsay Lou.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

They talk about how she joined the “Great Americana Band Migration” from Michigan to Nashville, as well as the nuances of pleasing her punk-rock mom with her evolving music. They also try out some new lullabies, because it seems like all of their friends are having babies.

Song: “The Great Defender”

The String – Single Lock Records and Muscle Shoals

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

How and why this humble collection of towns hugging the Tennessee River in northern Alabama became a historic musical hot spot is an improbable, wonderful American story. More and more, roots and rock and roll musicians have been traveling to Muscle Shoals to record.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS

A string of remarkable bands and songwriters, including Jason Isbell, John Paul White, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, Dylan LeBlanc, and The Secret Sisters, have had projects emerge from the area in recent years. Half a dozen studios are in demand and busy. It’s become clear that Muscle Shoals is no museum. It’s a scene. So the only thing to do was to go there and listen.

The Show On The Road – Tim O’Brien

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Starting in the late 1970s with the pioneering string band Hot Rize, Tim O’Brien has trailblazed a quietly powerful and influential solo career that includes 16 albums and multiple Grammy awards, writing what many consider to be the new standards of bluegrass music.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Now that he’s a bluegrass elder statesmen, O’Brien has made the time to produce albums for a new crop of festival headliners like Yonder Mountain String Band and the Infamous Stringdusters. He’s recorded and toured with Mark Knopfler and Steve Martin, had his songs covered by the Dixie Chicks and Garth Brooks — not bad for the small, bespectacled kid from Wheeling, West Virginia who dropped out of college and headed west with the idea that maybe, just maybe — if he learned enough songs — he could make it.

The Breakdown – Punch Brothers, ‘Antifogmatic’

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

It’s a festively boozy week on The Breakdown – Emma’s been at the drinks cabinet and so, it seems, have the Punch Brothers. Is their wild and woozy Antifogmatic even a bluegrass record? We join Noam, Gabe and Critter in London to find the answer – then track down Chris Thile in New York to steal his cocktail recipes.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Featured Songs
“You Are”
“Don’t Need No”
“Alex”
“Rye Whiskey”
“Me And Us”
“Missy”
“The Woman And The Bell”
“Next To The Trash”
“Welcome Home”
“This Is The Song (Good Luck)”

The Show On The Road – The Mammals

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Mike Merenda and Ruth Ungar of The Mammals talk to Zach about their devoted activism, big-hearted protest songs, and how music can still make a difference.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3


Presented by Nomad Goods. Head to hellonomad.com/bgs and use code “BGS” at checkout to receive 15% off any full-priced items through the end of January.

The Shift List – Nonesuch, Oklahoma City

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Colin Stringer and Jeremy Wolfe are two of the three chef/founders of Nonesuch in Oklahoma City, an intimate, 22-seat restaurant that focuses on cooking with ingredients that come exclusively from their native Oklahoma.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

In a landlocked state that rarely gets national recognition for its culinary ambition from any organization, Nonesuch was named Best New Restaurant in the country by Bon Appetit back in August, ahead of nine other concepts from food capitals like Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington D.C.

The inventiveness and inspiration for Nonesuch were set in motion when Stringer and Wolfe started running a supper club back in 2014 called Nani, in the 100-year-old Victorian house that Stringer also lived in near the heart of Oklahoma City.

Word grew around town about the semi-legal restaurant operation in Stringer’s home, and it was eventually shut down by the city for operating without a license. When Nonesuch opened back in October 2017, it wasn’t a coincidence that the dining experience felt intimate, familial, and hospitable.

As Bon Appetit’s Editor in Chief Andrew Knowlton wrote in his review of Nonesuch, the best analogy to describe the young chefs that run it are like “three guys in a band, heads down, making incredibly beautiful music together — that they doubt anyone would ever hear.”

A little over a year after their opening, Nonesuch is booked solid for the foreseeable future, and the guys are poised and focused to take on the newfound attention with a unique sense of artistry and a killer playlist.