Peter Glatz

It’s 5 o’clock on a cold Saturday morning and I’m at Balkan Treat Box in the St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves learning how to make Turkish flatbreads. A chef friend had told me that Balkan Treat Box was one of his favorite restaurants, and suggested I hang out with them. So I contacted the […]

When my wife dropped me off for my first day of work at The Grey in Savannah, Georgia, and asked “How are ya feeling?” I replied, “Kinda like the first day of kindergarten.” The Grey is one of the South’s top restaurants, and its executive chef, Mashama Bailey, won the coveted James Beard Foundation’s Best […]

It was a cold, windy morning as we took our 40-minute ferry ride from Hilton Head to Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina coast. Daufuskie is a remote and isolated island, inhabited by only 400 people, and accessible only by boat. I was on a mission to learn and write about the culinary traditions of […]

When you live in a school bus, without the amenities of central heat or AC, you become closely aligned with the changes of the seasons. When days are long and the weather is hot, I try to keep the heat out of the bus kitchen and plan my meals around what I can cook outdoors. […]

For the past six months one of my jobs at the restaurant has been making pasta from scratch using freshly milled flour from heritage grain, and the taste is really superior. But unfortunately, many of our guests can’t tolerate gluten so I always make gluten-free alternatives using rice flour and chickpea flour. I’ve worked with […]

The restaurant I’ve been working at serves over 200 guests a day and we go through a lot of vegetables. When the produce orders come in, our prep cook, Alberto, trims off the parts that won’t be used and transfers them into plastic boxes to be put on the shelves of the walk-in cooler. The […]

In early 2020, Nick Kokanas saw the coronavirus catastrophe coming way before the rest of us did. Kokonas is the founder of Tock, an online reservation platform utilized by many high-end restaurants around the world. While looking at Tock data coming in from his 50 restaurant clients in Hong Kong, “we saw reservations go near […]

I know quite a bit about the cuisines of Western Europe, the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia. I’ve studied the celebrated food culture of the American South (which was predominately the culinary influence of enslaved Africans). But I realize that I know next to nothing about the food culture of the Indigenous people who inhabited North […]

My love of bacon has been my biggest deterrent to embracing full-out vegetarianism. When I was attending the University of Illinois College of Dentistry, I had an apartment in Oak Park, home to 25 Frank Lloyd Wright structures. In the early morning I’d go for a run through the historic Frank Lloyd Wright District, and […]

I share a long butcher block work station at Minneapolis’ Spoon and Stable restaurant with Alexandra Motz, executive pastry chef. One of the first people to befriend me when I started my new job, Alex’s appearance is quite striking to say the least. With tattooed arms, stretched ear lobes, a nose ring and hair dyed […]

I’m currently reading Daniel Boulud’s Letters To A Young Chef, a manual written to help neophyte chefs understand what it takes to succeed in this tough profession. Daniel Boulud is one of the world’s most celebrated chefs and restaurateurs. The book was recommended to me by Boulud’s protégé, Gavin Kaysen, who is currently my boss. […]

During the Vietnam War, the CIA ran a clandestine sideshow in Laos. Known as the Secret War, it was the largest CIA operation in history. The CIA built an air base in the mountains of Laos from which it could launch military attacks. This base was so secret that not even Congress was aware of […]