Celebrated chef and culinary pioneer Peter Hoffman is the author of the new book, What’s Good?: A Memoir in Fourteen Ingredients. He was chef/owner of Savoy and Back Forty West; he is a writer, food activist, and trailblazing locavore; and, he is the recipient of a Slow Food NYC Snailblazer award. In a recent conversation that we hosted with award-winning home cook and author Cathy Erway, Hoffman expounds on the seasons of SoHo and his life, his personal and philosophical differences with “Tony” Bourdain, and why the best apples he knows of come in 35 varieties on an uptown stretch of Second Avenue once called Hungarian Broadway. He reveals what makes a Back Forty cocktail, what he’s been cooking from the market, and why the bigger, more complex story behind Rick Bishop’s cool Tri-Star Day Neutral strawberry is the whole reproductive life of plants, their fruiting cycles and their relationship to the sun.

In What’s Good? Erway hears echoes of the naturalist’s journal, Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, and Hoffman is by turn seasoned chef, curious observer, and culinary historian. The book’s fourteen ingredients were chosen as essential in describing the story of a full year in the New York growing season. Woven through appreciative meditations on ingredients’ botanical and cultural histories, annual celebrations and recipes are personal stories from decades lived training in and running restaurants.

You can watch the recording of the full conversation between Cathy Erway and Peter Hoffman at this link and below—plus be sure to buy a copy of the book here.

Written by James Mather, Slow Food NYC Volunteer