On this week's Special Sauce, seminal food blogger, pastry chef, and author David Lebovitz and I took a trip back into the past. And we had a blast.

David worked in the Chez Panisse kitchen for 13 years before he realized it was time to leave. "I left because I was getting older, and when your body hits a certain age," David explained. "It's hard to stand up for eight and a half hours. It's like, I need to listen to my body, I need to go to the bathroom when I have to go to the bathroom without someone knocking on the door asking where the desserts are."

How was his first cookbook Room for Dessert conceived? "I was kind of burnt out, and I'd had all these dessert recipes in my repertoire, and I had spoken to Alice Waters [about writing a book]. Lindsey Shere wrote the first Chez Panisse dessert book, and I said, 'Well, maybe I should write the second one. Would that be interesting?' And, she said, 'Write your own.'" And so David's first book was born.

That book was the reason why David started his eponymous food blog in 1999; David wanted to give readers an opportunity to ask him about his recipes, which made him one of the first food blogging pioneers. "I had thought my first book's coming out, and I should use this internet thing, and if people have problems with recipes they can contact me. Because, often you make something from a book and you think, 'Oh, well, this recipe, I don't understand what the author means,' or something."

Around the same time, David decided to leave the Bay Area for Paris. He explained that in part it was because his life partner died, which, combined with his leaving Chez Panisse, left him feeling unmoored. Or, as he said, "It gave me the moment to say, 'You know what? I don't have anything here left.' I pretty much lost everything, and it was like, 'What do I do now?'" David continued, "I just realized this recently, that the reason I moved to France was because it was sort of a horizontal move, it is very similar to Northern California, the climate, the food was similar—goat cheese, garlic, wine—and it seemed like a horizontal move to go to Paris."

From Chez Panisse to early food blogger to best-selling author, David's story is full of twists and turns. Which of course makes for an excellent episode of Special Sauce.

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The full transcript for this episode can be found over at Serious Eats.

My guest on this week's Special Sauce is the extraordinary blogger, author, and pastry chef David Lebovitz, whose latest book is L'Appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home. David and I started off our conversation with the early days of blogging, and I asked him about whether he had ever intended to make money from his path-breaking blog. It is a question he frequently fielded at blogging conferences, where attendees would ask how they, too, could make a profit, to which he'd respond, "Do it for free for eight years."

"The whole idea of monetization didn't occur [to me]," David said. "I remember the first there were Google Ads, and you might make like $9 and you were so excited." For some people, it started becoming a business over the years, but that was never the focus of my blog."

David has had a number of interesting jobs in Paris. He was, for a very short time, a fishmonger. "I did that because I wanted to learn how to cut up fish, and because the guys who worked at this fish shop were unusually handsome. Even my straight male friends were like, 'Yes, those guys are really, really handsome.'"

Though L'Appart is ostensibly about his misadventures renovating a Paris apartment, David said it's also about something else. "It's how to live like a local, and be careful what you wish for. Everyone's like, 'I want to live like a local.' I'm like, 'No, be a tourist. Come visit, have a great trip, go home with your sanity intact.'"

As to what he learned renovating his apartment, David says, "Well, I learned if you want to be comfortable, stay home. You know, if you want life to be...you know, you want to watch TV, watch your favorite shows, not have to worry about returning things, stay home and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. You know, you take a chance and that's when...you took a chance creating Serious Eats. It might have not worked out, and it...you know, it happened to have worked out, but you took a chance. If you didn't take a chance, it wouldn't have happened. So taking a chance is usually an okay thing, and it's also okay to fail at things."

I will say, finally, that David Lebovitz is quietly one of the bravest souls I know. Why do I say that? Listen to this episode of Special Sauce to find out.

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The full transcript for this week's episode can be found here on Serious Eats.

Listening to Roads and Kingdom co-founder Matt Goulding talk about the food culture in Italy on this week's Special Sauce was a real treat for me. Matt spent months eating his way through the country for his extraordinary new book, Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture, and he explains that what he found in his travels was a vibrant and evolving food culture, not one that is frozen in time. Or, as he so eloquently says, "I wanted to toss off this idea of this calcified cuisine that's encased in amber, that Italian food is a museum piece...So what this book is really about is, yes, the traditions are beautiful and they shouldn't be screwed with half-heartedly. They need to be taken very seriously, but to say that Italian food is the same as it has always been...overlooks the fact that there are incredible chefs, young and old, and artisans and innovators that are doing amazing things with pizza in Naples or ragu in Emilia-Romagna."

Matt illustrated the tensions between staying true to time-honored traditions even as younger generations are looking to do something new with an anecdote about a burrata-making family in Puglia. "I realized very quickly that within their own family the entire complexity of this push and pull between past and present and future was contained between mother and father and then their three young sons...The mother and father thought the idea of putting matcha powder into burrata was fucking nuts and grandma's rolling over in her grave...These guys were like, 'Well we just came back from Japan. We brought burrata to them and now we want to bring Japan to burrata. Why can't we do that?'"

I do hope you'll tune in to this episode, as I expect you'll find Matt to be as entertaining as he is insightful.

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The full transcript for this episode of Special Sauce can be found here at Serious Eats.