This week on The Go-To Food Podcast, we’re joined by one of the most important voices in pizza culture: Frank Pinello. The founder of Brooklyn’s legendary Best Pizza, host of The Pizza Show and now Pizza with Frank, Frank joins us fresh from a huge week eating across London — and gives an unfiltered verdict on why the city has quietly become one of the great pizza destinations in the world. From Vincenzo’s and Dough Hands to New York aesthetics taking over London, Frank explains why British pizza makers are now genuinely earning respect from New Yorkers.

But this episode goes way beyond pizza rankings. Frank tells the unbelievable story of almost becoming a stockbroker straight out of school — working in a real-life Wolf of Wall Street-style boiler room on Long Island, standing all day cold-calling strangers about fake IPOs while managers shouted slogans like “motion creates emotion.” He talks about turning up in suits thinking he’d made it, only for the entire operation to eventually get raided by the feds. Before pizza fame, before Vice, before Williamsburg — there was Frank trying to survive among future federal inmates.

We also go deep into old New York food culture: growing up in Bensonhurst, the smell of Sunday sauce hitting the hallway before you even reached his grandmother’s basement, annual tomato canning traditions, animal heads in the kitchen, Sicilian cauliflower pasta with cinnamon breadcrumbs, and learning early that food meant love. Frank opens up about his first pizzeria jobs, burning his leg so badly on his first day in a serious kitchen that the skin peeled off — but hiding it for 12 hours because he didn’t want chefs to think he was weak. He talks about culinary school feeling like military training, becoming obsessed with Thomas Keller and Ferran Adrià, and then slowly realising pizza could be treated with the same seriousness as fine dining.

There are incredible stories throughout: consulting on pizza at Chiltern Firehouse before it opened, meeting Nuno Mendes and Patrick Powell, seeing Roberta’s completely change global pizza culture, and building Best Pizza during the wild early Williamsburg years of artists, hipsters and old Italian families living side by side. We get Frank’s thoughts on Dave Portnoy, hot honey, pizza dips, New York slice etiquette, why ketchup should never touch a hot dog after the age of 10, and the exact technique for folding and attacking a slice. Plus Ben cooks a full Sunday sauce for Frank on the studio floor — ribs, sausages, chops and meatballs included — while the conversation descends into debates about crust strategy, baguettes, greasy pepperoni cups and whether pizza should ever be taken too seriously at all.

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Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is a multi-award-winning British chef, writer, broadcaster and campaigner, best known as the creator of River Cottage. He joins the Go To Food podcast fresh from the release of his new book, High Fibre Heroes, before settling into a gloriously wide-ranging conversation full of stories from a life spent cooking, eating, questioning and occasionally causing national outrage.

Hugh looks back on childhood in Gloucestershire, learning to cook alongside his mother, helping make shepherd’s pie from leftover roast lamb, and later becoming the “pastry chef” for her 1970s dinner parties. He shares tales from Oxford dinner parties, smoked haddock obsessions, and his time at the River Cafe, where he made lemon tart for Rose Gray and secretly doubled the chocolate in Elizabeth David’s chocolate cake — only to be politely rumbled by Elizabeth David herself.

The conversation also revisits Hugh’s early television years, from Cook on the Wild Side to TV Dinners, including the infamous placenta pâté episode that earned an Ofcom complaint and became part of British food TV folklore. He reflects on the beginnings of River Cottage, moving from London to Dorset, learning from farmers, foragers and local characters, and building a world that helped change the way Britain thought about food, farming and self-sufficiency.

Along the way, there are stories of roadkill rumours, wild boar charcuterie, Gordon Ramsay’s pigs, Jamie Oliver, school food, restaurant culture, barbecue hogget, decorative garnishes, and why you should never put an oyster shell on mashed potato. Funny, thoughtful and occasionally surreal, this is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall at his storytelling best.

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Honey & Co founders Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich join us for a brilliant, chaotic and deeply honest conversation about food, marriage, restaurants, reinvention and the realities of building one of London’s best-loved hospitality groups.

From opening the original Honey & Co in 2012 without proper recipes, to turning family cooking, Middle Eastern flavours and sheer instinct into a restaurant empire spanning delis, restaurants, cookbooks, classes and podcasts, they tell the story of how it all began — and how it nearly broke them.

We get into the rebirth of Honey & Smoke, the closure of the deli, floods, wine, tablecloths, growing older with your customers, why London restaurants are having to change, and how they’ve built a business around care, quality and the refusal to cut corners.

Plus: childhood food memories in Israel, Ottolenghi, brutal old-school kitchens, the second-site nightmare, Greece, burrata backlash, banana hatred, vomit stories, legendary cheesecake and why hospitality needs to start respecting itself a lot more.

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Order The Greatest Meat In The Country From HG Walter Here & Have Restaurant Quality Meals From Home - www.hgwalter.com

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