The Splendid Table Live with Francis Lam Celebrates 30 Years!

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LAist

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Join us for a special live taping of The Splendid Table, your weekly audio companion celebrating the intersection of food and life, presented in partnership with APM Studios in honor of the program's 30th anniversary. Host Francis Lam (he/him) and his special guests will dig into L.A.’s rich culinary scene, with a look back at the past 30 years and look forward to the future of delicious things to come. And we’ll have something tasty for everyone after the show from local favorite Far Bar, because nothing brings us together like good food!

SPECIAL GUESTS

Gab Chabrán (he/him), LAist’s associate editor of food and culture

Evan Kleiman (she/her), host of KCRW’s Good Food

Uyên Lê (she/her), chef/owner of Bé Ù restaurant

Tejal Rao (she/her), New York Times food critic at large

Elvia Huerta (she/her) and Alex Garcia (he/him), chefs and co-owners, Evil Cooks

Keith Corbin (he/him), chef, author, entrepreneur

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The Splendid Table can be heard on LAist 89.3 Fridays at 11 p.m. 

ABOUT THE SPLENDID TABLE 

The Splendid Table, hosted by award-winning food writer Francis Lam, is an original weekly companion, celebrating the intersection of food and life for more than two decades. A culinary, culture and lifestyle program, it hosts our nation's conversations about cooking, sustainability and food culture and introduces us to generations of food dignitaries.

ABOUT FRANCIS LAM 

In 2018 Francis took over the program from founding host Lynne Rossetto Kasper. The Splendid Table explores different cultures, cuisines and ideas, as well as the small personal stories that come out of the expansive world of the table. As a former restaurant cook and culinary school graduate, Francis can handle virtually any food query and loves taking listener’s calls. He is keenly interested in people and their stories and believes that one of the keys to understanding people better is to learn what they cook and how they eat.

Francis is Editor-in -Chief at Clarkson Potter, a division within Penguin Random House that is a leader in cookbook publishing. For two seasons, Lam was a regular judge on Bravo’s hit show, Top Chef Masters. An award-winning writer, Lam has written for numerous publications, including Gourmet, Bon Appetít, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Salon, Men’s Journal, and the Financial Times. He graduated first in his class at the Culinary Institute of America and holds a bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan.

ABOUT GAB CHABRÁN 

Gab Chabrán is a lifelong resident of Southern California. He grew up in Whittier, where he attended Whittier College. He began his journalism career writing for the local music rag L.A. Record where he wrote album and live music reviews. He became a regular contributor at L.A. Taco, where he was part of the James Beard Award-winning team. His monthly music column "Taco de Sonido", profiled up-and-coming artists from the Latinx community. He's been a regular contributor to LAist, Eater LA, Thrillist, Los Angeleno, KCET Artbound, and The New York Times.

My approach to coverage is to discover how food connects us to the ever-so-layered social fabric of Southern California and how food tells the region's story. Every dish has its historical significance. A taco is not just a taco; it's a window to the Mexican Revolution. Pizza is not just pizza; it's the vehicle for immigrants to enter the restaurant game. Noodles aren't just noodles; it's the personification of generational conflict and perseverance. My framework for writing and assigning stories aims to highlight the rich cultural histories of the L.A. region and broaden the LAist platform further to include, but not exclusive to, previously overlooked populations that exist beyond the confines of the city-area proper yet remain vital to its existence.

ABOUT TEJAL RAO

When people hear the words “food” and “critic” together, maybe they imagine Anton Ego from “Ratatouille,” sitting all alone, ready to hate something. But I write criticism because I love food culture in all its forms. This includes restaurants and truck stops, home cooking and cookbooks, videos on social media and scenes on film and television, along with the more unexpected places that food and culture tend to collide in our everyday lives. I’m interested in what food says about us and how it illuminates the different ways we live. I also believe there is meaning in pleasure, and I’m always trying to find it.

My Background
I was born in London and grew up there and in Kuwait, Sudan and France before moving to Atlanta. (Yes, my accent can get pretty weird.) Belonging to these places as a child, living with two parents who loved to cook, dining out on special occasions, spending time with grandparents in Nairobi and Pune, reading cookbooks like they were novels — all of this informed my earliest sense of taste, which is continuously growing and evolving.

After college, I cooked in restaurant kitchens and later ran a supper club out of my apartment in Brooklyn to supplement my work as a freelance writer, copy editor and translator. I got my start writing full-time as a restaurant critic at The Village Voice and worked in New York for more than a decade before moving to Los Angeles. I joined The Times in 2016.

ABOUT EVAN KLEIMAN

I learned early on that I was much more comfortable hanging out in the kitchen and cooking for people than I was sitting at the table and making small talk. Which was good, since my mother was a terrible cook but a wonderful talker. We made a good team. As an only child of a single parent growing up in the 1960s I was expected to help shop and make dinner. Eventually I found out that cookbooks not only showed me how to make a dish, but many of them put that dish in context, whether it was historical, cultural, personal or technical. And for some reason I was voraciously interested in places that weren’t Los Angeles. I fell in love with reading cookbooks which made my mom very happy because she didn’t have to spend as much time in the kitchen anymore. I grew up in the Los Feliz and Silverlake areas of Los Angeles at a time when grocery stores were small and butcher’s and specialist delis and cheese shops dotted the neighborhoods. Mom would call in the orders and I would drop by the shops after school to pick up fodder for meals. We would spend Sundays cooking for the week. It wasn’t long before my identity as “the one who cooks” was firmly entrenched.

The books with their recipes from far away places led me to study languages with the goal of traveling to Europe. I earned money for my first trip in 1970 by selling chocolate chip cookies to stoners at my high school for fifty cents apiece. I was barely seventeen when I left on that first trip with a backpack and Eurail pass. There were weeks and months spent in France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece. It changed my life. Food became even more linked with cultural experience and that way of seeing illuminated every part of my world. Upon my return after a hesitant foray into Music Studies at UC Berkeley, I ended up at UCLA where my studies in Italian Literature and Film allowed me to plunge into Italian food culture with trips to Italy on scholarship every summer. That period created a foundation for understanding and a belief in the role of a food-centered life. I ate, I cooked, I read. But it turned out to be just the beginning.

I started cooking for people for money when I was fifteen. First, on my own doing little jobs here and there for my mom’s friends. Then I worked for a Hollywood caterer through my senior year of high school and while I was at UCLA. It was inevitable that I would find myself in a professional restaurant kitchen. It felt like putting on a comfortable suit of clothes. It just fit. After a few years cooking for others, in 1984 I opened Angeli Caffe. By serving rustic, regional Italian food in a space designed by cutting edge firm Morphosis, it seems that I created a restaurant archetype that inspired imitations all over the country. My first cookbook, Cucina Fresca, came out that year too. By the time Angeli closed in 2012 the place was an L.A. institution known as much for the warmth of the welcome as for the food. I came to think of it as the Cheer’s of L.A. Italian restaurants. Ruth Reichl said of Angeli upon its closure “It’s hard to remember now, but when Angeli opened nobody was doing that kind of food in the US. Marcella Hazan said it was the most authentic place she’d been – high praise from someone who doesn’t hand it out lightly. I think I was in love with it from the first bite, the spare simplicity of the food.”

Several other cookbooks were to follow, as did more travel, more writing and a lot of cooking. In 1998 I was asked to host KCRW’s Good Food. It was the first time I could bring my lifelong food nerdiness and love of reading and research together with my expertise as a chef and restaurateur. Since 1998 the radio show and eventual podcast Good Food I’ve been exploring every aspect of food and how it intersects with human (and sometimes animal) life through conversations with writers, cookbook authors, farmers, chefs and more. The show airs on KCRW, an NPR station in Southern California and has a worldwide audience on the web.

Thousands of interviews later, I tell people that hosting Good Food has been like taking a PhD in food studies. I certainly never realized that this nerdy child who was only comfortable while reading a book or in the kitchen would end up talking to people for a living. In 2017 I was inducted into the James Beard Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America.Good Food received Best Audio Series award from the IACP in 2012. Over the years I’ve been a member of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council and was the founder and leader of the L.A. Chapter of Slow Food for many years.

ABOUT UYEN LE

Uyen Le is the Founder & Chef-Owner-Operator of Bé Ù, a Vietnamese street food and comfort food restaurant in Los Angeles, CA. While her path to restaurant ownership was not a straight one, every job and volunteer opportunity she pursued on her journey has been focused on creating sustainable economic opportunities in communities that are often under-served and under-resourced.

Uyen previously worked in high volume Asian food kitchens, namely Cassia (Santa Monica, CA) and Button Mash (Los Angeles, CA) before opening Bé Ù in February 2021. She also has extensive experience as a private chef, private caterer, and event caterer over the last 7 years.

Uyen is a graduate of The New School of Cooking Culinary School, and The New School of Cooking Baking and Pastry School. Prior to pursuing her culinary career, Uyen graduated from UC Berkeley (Undergraduate) and the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (Graduate) and has worked for over two decades in community development, immigrants rights and advancement, worker rights and advancement, economic development, and environmental sustainability.

ABOUT EVIL COOKS

Elvia Huerta was born in El Sereno in LA, She has 17 years in the industry, graduated from Le Cordon Bleu, and is the co-owner of Evil Cooks, a pop up created to innovate and think outside of the box and break the rules.Alex Garcia was born in Mexico end up in the kitchen 25 years ago, falling in love by accident, and wanting to create an outlet to be more artistic and go against anything and everything in the culinary industry. Came up with a great idea and named it Evil Cooks because he thinks the devil is in the details.

ABOUT KEITH CORBIN

Chef Keith Corbin is the two-time James Beard Award nominated executive chef and co-owner of Alta Adams, executive chef and co-owner of Locol, the Los Angeles Times bestselling author of “California Soul”, and a sought-after public speaker.
During his youth growing up in the Jordan Downs housing projects in Watts, Corbin was involved with gangs and drug dealing, which eventually lead to his incarceration. It was in prison when he first started cooking and working in kitchens, which eventually led to a job with the LocoL restaurant group run by celebrity chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson. From there, Corbin partnered with Patterson on Alta Adams, a "California Soul" food restaurant utilizing local produce and healthier ingredients to put Corbin's own spin on the food he grew up cooking and eating with his grandmother. Alta was named one of the best restaurants in the country by Esquire, Thrillist, and the Los Angeles Times, and called "Black Hollywood's top restaurant" by The Hollywood Reporter.Corbin’s bestselling memoir, “California Soul: An American Epic of Cooking and Survival" was published in 2022 by Random House, named the LA Times Book Club pick of the month for August, and quickly optioned by a major studio to be made into a television series. Since the book’s release, Corbin has appeared on Dr. Phil, The CBS Morning Show, and many other national programs to share more about his incredible story and inspire others. His words have been featured across multiple media outlets including KCRW, The Grio, ABC7, Salon, Shondaland and Thrillist. In 2023, the book was nominated for a James Beard Media Award in the Literary Writing category.
Consistently giving back, Corbin regularly mentors youth from underserved communities and speaks at colleges and educational programs across the nation. Corbin has been invited to share his story from coast to coast with readers and food-fanatics alike on book tours, festivals and other inspirational events including the 2023 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Tucson Book Festival, and San Diego Writer’s Festival. In 2023, Corbin was included in the Philly Chef’s Conference, The Food Network South Beach Wine & Food Festival and most recently, the 2024 Pebble Beach Food & Wine.
In May 2024, Corbin appeared on the hit Food Network/HBO MAX show “Selena + Restaurant” in a featured episode and also appeared on the national talk show “The Jennifer Hudson Show”. In September 2024, Corbin re-opened Locol in Watts along with Chef Daniel Patterson. The duo now operate the fast casual restaurant as a non-profit.

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