“I'm a late bloomer… I opened my first restaurant at 34. Today I would start from scratch between AI and Google. I'm a chef in two years.”
The Go To Food Podcast · Food & Beverage · October 2026
Vongerichten says ingredients and information are far easier to get than when he started. Then he had to go to the library for cookbooks and travel the world to learn; now you can look up tamarind, find where it grows, have it shipped, and get thousands of recipes for it.
Transcript
But I think ingredients are better today. So I feel cooking. I mean, at my time, I had to go to the library to look at cookbooks. I had to travel the world to learn something new. Today you click tamarind. Not only if you have, you know, where it grows, where to find it, they ship it to you.
Yeah.
Only have a 50,000 recipe for it. So it took me, I'm a late bloomer. It took me 16. I opened my first restaurant at 34. Today I would start from scratch between AI and Google. I'm a chef in two years. Yeah, yeah,
you're away. Social media as well.
So I think the youth today is all lucky. I mean, it's amazing. Yeah,
the information. Available information. How many
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