Travel, Spice and Life, with Chef Tyler Henry
“That's a beautiful trend that this time has kind of created. People want warming food, they’re fucking stressed out!"
Episode 005 of the Trippin Podcast brings a little spice into your life. Tyler Henry is a spice-forward chef, not so much fusing cuisines from around the world, but more smashing them together in his molcajete (the traditional Mexican pestle and mortar). At age 24, Tyler found himself in a comfortable but unfulfilling career in finance. In this podcast, he shares how he flipped the tables from finance to food. Born in DC, his quest for in-your-face flavour has taken him around the world, from New Orleans to New York, Lima to Chiang Mai and now, Mexico City where he resides and plans to open his first restaurant, Choza.
Tyler shares some of his best and worst chilli experiences, his views on the future of small and independent restaurants, how he's keeping business going and to top it all off, his easy go-to comfort food recipe for you to try at home.
"Sharing food is my passion, that's what I wanna do every day, every hour of my life. I do not need to sleep if I can share food all the time."
“I think the world, or at least my preference for food, is heavily moving away from fine dining and more towards sharing, eating with your hands, and being smacked in your face with flavour."
“Look, a 12 course fine dining meal is a beautiful experience, it’s almost the same as going to an amazing museum, but it’s hard to have a conversation with whoever's across from you outside of anything to do with the food. It’s super planned and it takes so much work - and I have a lot of respect for that - but the meals that stuck with me are for example, a whole fried fish from Chamicos - 40 minutes outside of Tulum - salt from the fucking sea is coming in your nose, and it’s salty and crispy and you’re crushing it with an ice cold beer and your feet in the sand, and you don’t give a fuck about anything apart from the person across from you and the breeze, you know? And you’re eating with your hands, you’re certainly not using anything other than your hands or a tortilla to scoop stuff up. These type of meals… that’s magic for me, that’s how I want people to eat.”
“You don’t need to use tablespoons, you don’t need to wear an apron. I want you to roll a joint, crack a beer, put on your favourite music and work with pinches, work with your hands, and taste things. Cooking is intuitive.”
Listen to “Travel, Spice and Life, with Chef Tyler Henry” on the Trippin Podcast channel via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Mixcloud.
