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Five Rules for the Good Life Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Darin Bresnitz
Five rules for the good life and other tips for living well as told by those who made it their business to do so.
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- 4 days ago9 min
Noah Galuten
Noah Galuten has spent years cooking alongside some of the best chefs, pit masters, and grill masters in America, so when it came time to write Grill Time, he wanted to share everything he had learned. He joined the show to share his Five Rules for Better Grilling, covering everything from why gas grills deserve more respect to the flavor advantages of cooking with wood and charcoal. We also get into the surprising power of mayonnaise, why chasing perfect grill marks can be overrated, and the one tool that will instantly make you a more confident cook. Whether you’re feeding a crowd or just trying to get dinner on the table, these are practical rules you’ll actually use.Summer has officially arrived. The days are longer, the drinks are colder, and every meal suddenly feels like a good excuse to be outside. There’s something about cooking over fire that changes the pace of the day. Neighbors linger a little longer, friends show up a little earlier, and dinner becomes the event instead of the thing that happens before it. If you’ve been looking for a reason to dust off the grill, invite some people over, and make the most of the season, this conversation is the inspiration you need to get started.Photo by Kristin TeigJacaranda’s recent opening in Los Angeles has had the culinary community abuzz with Daniel Patterson’s return to fine dining. Opened and owned with his wife, Sarah Lewitinn, this thirty-seat, tasting menu has been years in the making. Read my latest profile for Fine Dining Lovers on them, their love story and their road to opening. IntroductionHello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.Today, I’m joined by Noah Galuten, whose new cookbook, Grill Time, Why You Should Be Grilling for Better, Healthier, Easier, and More Delicious Meals, is out now wherever books are sold, to share his five rules for better grilling.We talk about how there’s no shame in the gas grill game. With that being said, nothing tastes better than smoke in food and how one secret ingredient is the key to better grilling.Summertime is here and if you’re looking to get outside and to do some cooking, there is no better conversation for some inspiration and some rules to get your grill game going.So let’s get into the rules.Why Grilling Is DifferentNoah, it’s so good to see you. Congratulations. Your new book has been out for a little less than a week. Grill time. Thanks for stopping by and making time for the show.Thank you for having me, man. This first week has been so great. Summertime is here. It’s time for grilling.What do you love so much about this season and cooking this way?There’s so many things I love about grilling and the great thing about living in Los Angeles is you can grill 12 months out of the year. I know. I try to be nice to the people who don’t have the weather that we have.That’s true. Grilling is just the way that I actually find myself cooking for my family the most often. It is easier, cleaner, faster, often healthier than you would do it on the stove. There’s stuff that I would never do on a stove in a million years that I will do on a grill a hundred times out of a hundred.To cook a piece of chicken, to put on a salad, who’s pan searing? No one. It’s always grilled chicken at a restaurant. Throw it on a gas grill in the back, charcoal grill. You’ve got something instantly.A lot of people get intimidated by grilling. It’s usually due to one bad experience because they’ve only tried it a handful of times. How do people get back on the horse after having a grilling mistake?It’s like anything. The second time is going to be so much easier. The barrier to entry is basically having a grill. And once you have one, do it a couple times, get better at it.Writing Grill TimeOnce you find that inspiration of what to cook and how to cook it, it just makes you want to get outside even more. With so much of this type of cooking under your belt, how did you select the stories and recipes you wanted to share?When a band has their first album, they spend their entire life creating it and then your second album is two years later and you’re trying to come up with a whole lifetime of stuff.This was this lucky stroke of mine because my first cookbook was so much of my family cooking growing up, my mom’s food, the food that I make for my family at home.And then I have this whole other side of grilling that I’ve been doing forever and learning from amazing men
- 1 weeks ago13 min
Matty Matheson
Matty Matheson has spent the last decade carving out his own lane by doing what most people are too scared to do: making things before anyone gives them permission. On this episode of Five Rules for the Good Life, Matty joins Darin to talk about creating Just a Dash, finding his on-camera voice before “content creator” was even a career path, and why the best ideas usually start with a couple of friends, a camera, and a willingness to see what happens. They discuss trusting your collaborators, investing in yourself before anyone else will, and how consistency matters more than virality. Matty shares his Five Rules for Making Your Own Show, including why you should only cook things you love or hate, why working with friends changes everything, and why originality still matters in a world built on algorithms and imitation.There’s something deeply inspiring about Matty’s journey because none of it feels manufactured. It feels earned. Watching someone continue to create for years, through rejection, uncertainty, changing platforms, and shifting industries, is a reminder that momentum is built through consistency, not shortcuts. The conversation is really about the value of showing up over and over again, trusting your instincts, and building with people you actually care about. There’s a specific kind of joy that comes from making things with friends, from laughing through the chaos, from figuring it out together in real time. Even when something fails, even when it gets messy, the act of creating is still better than standing still. Making something, anything, is how you find your voice.Photo by Sid TangerineFive Rules for the Good Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.IntroductionHello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life.I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.It is always a good time when I get to sit down with today’s guest, Matty Matheson, whose new season of Just a Dash is out on Netflix right now, along with the fifth season of The Bear coming out on FX and Hulu on June 25th.He’s here today to share his five rules for making your own show.We chat about the importance of working with people you trust, that to get everyone to buy in with what you’re making, you need to...So let’s get into the rules.Getting Started in VideoMatty, so good to see you. I love to hear the birds chirping and the sun streaming through in Canada. Thanks for making the time to sit down and chat with me.You’re very welcome. That’s our canary, Waffles, and Waffles is just having a beautiful day it seems.You are no stranger to TV. I’ve seen you cooking across different mediums for such a long time. Not every chef is drawn to that type of pursuit. What made you want to get involved in the first place?Well, great question. The first video I ever made was my cheeseburger video. We made that over 10 years ago now.My era, the beginning of that, when I was 26, 27, 28, if you were on TV, you were a massive star. There wasn’t any middle ground. There wasn’t any content. It wasn’t anything.Some producers at Vice hit me up to see if I wanted to do something. In Canada, we shot a cheeseburger video, and that’s what it was.It’s funny, I look back on that stuff. There’s no persona. There’s no yelling. There’s no anything. It’s just me being funny and talking in my regular voice.I was just drawn to it because they wanted to do something different. It wasn’t some big TV show. It wasn’t a competition show. It wasn’t some thing that was out there that was on some major network.That was what drew me to that, was just hanging out with people that I already hung out with, my friends that worked at Vice. It was still purer then. There was no anything. It wasn’t creating. We just made a cooking video, a how-to video.Finding an On-Camera VoiceYou had a chance to evolve before this new ecosystem of creators. What do you remember about learning that time and finding your on-camera persona before it became such a commodity to do content?I would do a video every two, three months.What a cadence compared to today.I did that and then I did my pancake video and then I did my get-you-laid lasagna video. It was just like a thing where we made it when we made it.I think I got paid 500 bucks a video at that time too, which was kind of nice.Seems about right.It was more money than I ever made in a two, three hour span of time. It was incredible to get that amount of money when I was that age. It was more money than I ever made.There was no references.Building Just a DashWe shot Just a Dash two years ago. It’s amazing. It took a long time to edit. Tort and his crew, w
- 2 weeks ago13 min
Mashama Bailey & Johno Morisano
There’s a certain type of person who dreams about opening a restaurant in Paris. Then there’s the type of person who actually does it. On this episode of Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Mashama Bailey and Johno Morisano of The Grey and L’Arrêt to talk about what it really takes to open a restaurant in one of the most romanticized, bureaucratic, intimidating, and food-obsessed cities in the world. They share their Five Rules for Opening a Restaurant in Paris. We get into neighborhood politics, learning enough French to survive a conversation, battling condemned hood systems, and why your lawyer might become the most important person in your phone. It’s a conversation about hospitality, identity, stubbornness, and understanding exactly who you are before trying to introduce yourself to Paris.What I love about this conversation is how open they are about all of it. There’s no mythology here. No pretending the process was glamorous. They talk honestly about the stress, the delays, the absurdity of getting yelled at over ventilation systems, and the emotional weight of trying to earn trust in a city that takes food very seriously. But there’s also so much laughter throughout the conversation. The kind that only comes from people who survived something difficult together and can now look back at the chaos with perspective. You can hear how much they love restaurants, how much they respect Paris, and how even in the hardest moments they never lost sight of why they wanted to do this in the first place.Five Rules for the Good Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.TranscriptHello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life.I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.Today, my guests join me from all corners of the world, Mashama Bailey and Johno Morisano, whose company, Gray Spaces, made its mark with The Grey in Savannah. Now, their new restaurant, L’Arrêt in Paris, has made a splash in the city.They join me today to chat about their Five Rules for Opening a Restaurant in Paris.They talk about the importance of practicing your conversational French, how to integrate yourself into the neighborhood, and why you should always have a good lawyer on standby. Even if you aren’t planning on opening your own little bistro in Paris, it’s a great conversation for anyone looking to start their own restaurant and understand the mindset you need to succeed.So let’s get into the rules.Opening ThoughtsThank you for crossing continents to be with me today. So great to have you on the show.Happy to be here.Thanks for waking up at the crack of dawn to do it.I got two young kids. I was up hours before we chatted.When the opportunity came to open L’Arrêt in Paris, what were your thoughts about the culinary connection between Savannah and the through lines of both cities?I thought in the beginning, you know what? We’re going to France. Pack our bags. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s do what we’re gonna do.Really trying to figure out what food the neighborhood wanted to do. I think we got caught up in the idea of it all, at least I did, and not really hunkered down and realized, oh wait, we’ve been doing this for 12 years and we should absolutely bring some food from Savannah to France.Also not realizing how nuanced our food is in Savannah and how it doesn’t always read as Southern. When you’re in Savannah, it feels very Southern. It eats very Southern. But when you’re in France, they need the hits. They need the things that overtly reflect Southern cuisine so they can understand what you’re doing because it’s such a melting pot here.Southern food and Black American food is so entrenched in African ingredients that it almost reads African before it reads Southern.That’s how we started off. And now we’re really embracing the fact that we’re coming from Savannah, we’re coming from the South, and we’re cooking grits and using cornmeal, lima beans, all these really delicious Southern ingredients. We’re braising and we’re frying and we’re putting it on a plate.And I think they’re really like, “Oh, okay, I understand what this restaurant is now.” But I think before, showing up as The Grey, it was a little confusing because we weren’t overtly Southern.Becoming Part of the NeighborhoodFor anyone who’s spent time in Paris and gotten to know Parisians, it really is all about neighborhoods and local communities. How did you integrate yourself with the people there beyond the food, showing that you really wanted to be their neighborhood spot?The Seventh Arrondissement is a place where I have been going with my wife for 30 years. I love that.We actually found L’Arrêt because it was just a spot that I frequented called Les Parisiens. I kn
- 3 weeks ago9 min
Shaheen Ghazaly
Shaheen Ghazali, the chef and owner of Kurrypinch, joins Five Rules for the Good Life to share his Five Rules for Getting to Know South Asian Cuisine. Born in Pakistan, raised in Sri Lanka, and shaped by years traveling the world as a marine cadet with his father, Shaheen approaches food through the lens of curiosity, evolution, and connection. This conversation goes far beyond the idea of “authenticity” and digs into how cuisines borrow, adapt, and grow over generations. From why spice doesn’t always mean heat to how curry is often misunderstood in the West, Shaheen breaks down the common language that exists across cultures and why understanding food means looking deeper than labels.What I love most about Shaheen’s approach is that he talks about food the way some people talk about music, art, or family history. There’s a calm confidence in the way he explains flavor, balance, and tradition without turning any of it into dogma. He understands that food is alive. It changes with migration, memory, trade, and circumstance. Sitting with him, you realize he’s less interested in defending a cuisine than inviting people into it. The best meals do that. They lower your guard, tell you a story, and make the unfamiliar feel personal. Shaheen cooks and speaks from that exact place.Five Rules for the Good Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.IntroductionHello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life.I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.Today I’m joined by Shaheen Ghazaly, the chef and owner of Kurrypinch, a Sri Lankan restaurant here in Los Angeles. He shares his five rules for getting to know South Asian cuisine.It’s about the fundamental understanding that food and cuisine is always evolving, that spice doesn’t always mean spicy, and that balance is the key ingredient to any successful meal. It is an incredibly philosophical conversation about cooking and global cuisine, and how anyone out there who wants to know more about what they’re eating should dive a little deeper.So let’s get into the rules.Shaheen, so nice to meet you.Thank you for stepping away from the very busy Curry Pint to sit down and chat with me for the show.Thank you for having me.You were born in Pakistan, raised in Sri Lanka, and spent a large part of your early life traveling with your father. How did that shape your outlook on food?Since I was a kid, my mom is a Pakistani, my dad is a Sri Lankan. When my mom passed away, we moved to Sri Lanka. My dad was taken care of, and since he was traveling, he taught us how to take care of ourselves by having limited ingredients at home to make food.Breakfast, whatever it’s available.That made me be creative and come up with my own way of food.Since I was 10 years old, I fell in love with food, not only by looking at my aunt cook, I just fell in love with it.We were not raised like most Sri Lankans. They go with the spices like heat, but we grew up having flavored and not too much heat going on.That deep love of food, is that what brought you to the United States to open a restaurant?No, the cooking was a hobby. I always enjoyed it. After I finished my college and everything, I started traveling with my dad. He was a captain in a ship. I joined the ship with him as a Marine Cadet officer and then I traveled the world.When we were growing up, we were limited to certain things or knowledge. For example, fish cutlets, that’s a Sri Lankan dish. But when I started traveling, then I learned it’s just a term that we use when it comes to the technique, the method. The ingredients are all very, very similar.This made me dig deep into culture and food.When I said traveling, I have been to many countries. Whenever we touched down at a port, my first thing would be to go and try many different cuisines. Their traditional food.So I wanted to bring, because Sri Lankan food is not that popular in LA, I just wanted to introduce our cuisine in a term people would understand.At the end of the day, the ingredients and the technique remained true to our culture, our background, and things like that.Was there a moment when you realized that enough people in LA, or the people who kept coming back to the restaurant, really understood what you were cooking and learned about the Sri Lankan food and the South Asian food you were serving?Not all of them.Sure.I have had so many times, “Oh, this is not authentic.”I’m like, there’s no such thing as authentic.Sure.Because in Sri Lanka, there are many regions, many parts, many cultur
- May 4, 202612 min
Julianne Fraser
This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Julianne Fraser, founder and CEO of Dialogue New York, to talk about what it actually takes to protect your creativity in a world that’s trying to flatten it. We get into the tension between algorithms and originality, why setting boundaries with social media isn’t optional anymore, and how carving out real time for yourself can unlock better ideas than any scroll ever will. Julianne shares her Five Rules for Cultivating Creativity, from building guardrails around your digital life to creating space for “creative mornings” to trusting your own taste instead of chasing trends. It’s a conversation about getting back to yourself, doing the work offline, and making sure your ideas still feel like yours.What I appreciate most about this conversation is how practical it is. There’s no fantasy version of creativity here. It’s about being intentional with your time, attention, and input. It’s about knowing when to step away, when to go outside, when to talk to people, and when to sit alone with a notebook to actually think. That balance is hard to find, especially when everything online is designed to pull you back in, but it’s the difference between reacting to the world and shaping your own point of view. Once you start to feel that shift, even in small ways, it changes how you show up in your work and in your life.My latest profile for Fine Dining Lovers is on Chef Brad Alan Mathews, the chef and co-owner of Bar Le Cotê in Los Olivos, CA. He shares his lifelong love of food and music, and his journey to sobriety. Thank you to Paul Feinstein for his guidance and support with this piece. For anyone in the industry struggling with substances or looking for options for a different approach to a work/life balance, Ben’s Friends is a good place to start. INTRODUCTIONHello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with Julianne Fraser, the founder and CEO of Dialogue New York, a digital media agency. She shares her Five Rules for Cultivating Creativity.She talks about the irony of her process in setting social media guardrails, carving out time in anyone’s busy schedule for creative mornings, and that by following feelings and not trends will lead you to your best ideas. It’s a great conversation for anyone who’s looking to add more creativity into their life and to ground themselves with daily practices of making space to allow for new ideas. So let’s get into the rules.OPENING CONVERSATIONJulianne, it is so nice to meet you. So great to see someone coming all the way to Brooklyn. I miss my hometown. Welcome to the show.Thank you for having me. Excited to chat. I’m a child of the 80s and 90s. I still remember the DIY punk era of the hard line between creativity and brands. Today’s generation seems not to care about that. Why has creativity come to be such a commodity? Why do you think that shift happened?I think it’s been a slow erosion of creativity over time. I’ve been in my career for 15 years in the digital space. Little by little, the way that social media has grown and the power of the algorithm has just kind of shrunk original creativity over time. This year, in the last five years with AI, it’s compounding a really frightening degree. It’s just the nature of technology and innovation.What’s interesting is as we’re seeing it shrivel away in many facets of social media, I think people are really championing it. Such desire to get back to nostalgic, old ways of analog. I’m hoping for like a renaissance. I’m hopeful that people will go back to kind of old-fashioned ways of sparking their creativity.IAN SCHRAGER & HOSPITALITY INSPIRATIONLooking backwards at people who might be inspirations for that spark, you worked with Ian Schrager, someone who turned the idea of going to a hotel into a story and experience. What did you take away from your time with him?That was my most inspiring brand I’ve ever worked with in my career. What he did with the hospitality industry in the 80s, first with Morgan’s Hotel Group, really just kind of revolutionized the notion of a lobby as a space of socialization an
- Apr 27, 202610 min
Peter Barrett
In this episode of Five Rules for the Good Life, I head to the Hudson Valley to hang out with food writer, photographer, gardener, forager, and fermenter Peter Barrett. He shares his Five Rules for Nurturing a Real Cooking Practice. We talk about why growing even one herb on a windowsill can change the way you think about food, why practice matters more than perfection, how to stop hiding behind cookbooks, and why taking a food Sabbath can make the rest of your week easier. It’s a conversation about cooking with intention, but also about building a life that feels more connected, more grounded, and a little less performative.The best cooking habits are the ones that fit your actual life, not the fantasy version of it. Not everyone is going to mill flour, tend a massive garden, or spend Sunday making twelve jars of pickles, and that’s fine. Sometimes the win is roasting one chicken, growing basil in a pot, or learning three meals you can make without thinking. The point is not to turn your kitchen into a stage set for Instagram, it’s to create a rhythm that supports you. Cooking should lower the temperature of your life, not raise it. It should make your week easier, your table fuller, and your relationship to food more personal. The goal is not perfection. It’s finding a way of feeding yourself that feels sustainable, satisfying, and yours.Five Rules for the Good Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.IntroductionHello and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.Today, I head up to the Hudson Valley to sit down with food writer, photographer, gardener, forager, and fermenter, Peter Barrett, who’s here to share his 5 Rules for Nurturing a Real Cooking Practice.He talks about how growing just one thing can change your perspective on life, that there is no excuse for giving up on yourself in the kitchen without loads of practice, and that being gentle on yourself when it comes to cooking is a real recipe for success.This is a great interview for anyone who’s looking to get started in the kitchen or for anyone who’s hit a lull and looking to find some new inspiration.So let’s get into the rules.Peter’s JourneyPeter, so good to see you.I can’t believe it’s already been a few months. Thanks for making time for the show.That’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.You’ve spent decades growing and foraging and preserving, cooking as much of your own food as possible. What drives you to do this?I was in the artwork. I moved up to the Hudson Valley from Brooklyn 20 years ago now. I put in a garden. It was one of the first things I did.My grandfather had taught me to make pickles when I was a little kid because he was from Poland. And when he grew up, that was a survival strategy. That had nothing to do with hipsters or yuppies or anything. It was staying alive through a long, hard winter.I just got more and more into the growing and the cooking and the fermenting. And I started to learn about mushrooms and other wild edible things.I started writing a blog just as a sort of journal to keep track of my kitchen exploits. And then over the course of the ensuing years, I just did more and more of that.I got one magazine gig, then another magazine gig. I’m working on a book with Dominique Crenn right now. We’re supposed to go to France next month.So it just sort of morphed. As the art tapered off, the food thing sort of rose to meet it.Cooking Across CountriesYou’ve cooked a lot in America, in the Hudson Valley, and you’ve been able to travel to Italy and go into France with Dominique Crenn.Country to country, do you find a difference in this type of approach of growing and preserving and really understanding the food that you eat?It’s simplistic, but I think places that have winter have different fermentation cultures than places that don’t.You can’t f**k around with the absence of food when the ground is frozen, of course.If you think about Korea and Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, the pickle game is strong, and the pickle game is strong because they had to.There’s what they call sottoglio in Italian, which is where they preserve things under oil, or sottaccetto, which is in jars of vinegar.You wander around in most parts of Italy, south of Alto Adige, and everyone has a garden that’s more or less year-round.It’s a different approach to preservation. It’s less mandatory and baked into the cuisine, if that makes any sense.Why Sharing MattersOne of the things I’ve loved about your writing and your storytelling is that you really want to share this knowledge with people across the world and
- Apr 20, 202611 min
Harry Posner & Natalie Dial
This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Harry Posner and Natalie Dial of Tomat, a restaurant that doesn’t just talk about seasonality, it lives it. We get into what it actually takes to grow your own ingredients while running a restaurant, from the early mistakes to the unexpected wins. They break down their Five Rules for Having Your Own Restaurant Garden, including why experimentation matters more than perfection, how to think realistically about what you can grow, and what it means to truly close the loop on waste. It’s practical, a little obsessive, and exactly the kind of conversation that makes you rethink where your food comes from.There’s something deeply grounding about growing even a small piece of what you eat. It shifts your understanding of time, effort, and value in a way no delivery app ever will. You don’t need a full backyard or a restaurant budget to start. A simple planter box with herbs on a windowsill or balcony is enough. Basil, thyme, parsley, things you actually use. You water it, you cut from it, you watch it come back. That loop, small as it is, changes how you cook and how you think about food. It makes dinner feel earned in the best way.Five Rules for the Good Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.IntroductionHello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life.I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with Harry Posner and Natalie Dial, the chef and CEO, respectively, of LA’s Tomat. Located in the Westchester part of the city, Tomat has the distinct pleasure of being here on the LA Times 101 Best Restaurant List and was named one of Esquire’s Best New Restaurants in America.They share their five rules for having your own restaurant garden and talk about the importance of experimenting with the produce you plant, understanding the ratio to reality of what you can grow and consume in the restaurant, and give you the perfect timing to plan for each growing and eating season.It’s a fantastic conversation for anyone who’s fantasized about having their own garden, either at a restaurant or at home, and the desire to grow what you eat. So let’s get into the rules.Meeting the GuestsHarry, Natalie, it is so nice to meet you. Thank you for making the time before your impending bundle of joy comes to join us in the world.We’re so glad to be here. Thanks for having us. Thank you very much.The Origin of TomatIt’s easy to say that most chefs or restaurateurs, especially in California, are driven by farm fresh ingredients from the market. You literally named your restaurant with a nod to one of California’s most famous pieces of produce. Why go all in on this concept.It wasn’t even really inspired by the piece of produce itself, other than Harry and I both have that nickname, had it growing up serendipitously, independently of each other, because we turned red in the sun and looked like tomats or tomatoes. However, the official, the initial line before we were like, actually, the fun reason is a way better explanation, was that we are going to grow our own stuff.We’re in California. We’re using as much local farmer’s market produce as possible. And our logo is a slice of tomato with a stem, the seeds. And we’re trying to show you we’re growing, we’re getting the best stuff. That’s why we’re Tamar.Why Grow Your Own IngredientsThe dedication to the bit is something that we are very big on here at Five Rules. You guys are also very dedicated to growing your own produce, vegetables. Why is it so important to you to go that early and deep into the process of the ingredients you bring into the restaurant.We work with some of the most amazing farmers, and there are some absolutely amazing people here that really work alongside us, especially when curating a menu.My upbringing, being born in LA, then moving to England, my parents wanted to grow all of their own vegetables. I remember as a kid, we would go around and pick all the loquats and we had a loquat tree where we used to live. And it’s just so much fun. Now that we’ve got kids, you want to indoctrinate them in growing to show you what produce you have and how good it can be.The Value of Growing Even One ThingRestaurateurs these days are faced with so many challenges. Some might not even be able to make it to the farmer’s market while they’re spinning all these different plates in the air. The idea of starting and making your own garden can seem even more daunting than just running a regular restaurant. Why do you think it’s important to grow at least one thing so it can supply at least one thing to a restaurant.It shows you how much effort goes into producing that one thing. I love that.In the grand sch
- Apr 13, 202612 min
Ella Quittner
This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with journalist, screenwriter, and author Ella Quittner, whose new book, Obsessed with the Best, digs into what it means to care deeply about what you make. We get into her Five Rules for Telling a Good Story, from finding your angle to chasing the emotional gut punch, and why approaching every subject with humanity is non-negotiable. Ella breaks down how she moves between journalism, fiction, and food writing without losing her voice, and shares the practical ways she builds stories from scratch, even when the idea isn’t fully there yet. It’s a conversation about process, discipline, and the reality of making something worth reading.I love this episode because it cuts through the romantic version of writing and gets into the actual work. Ella is deep in it, doing the reps, figuring it out in real time, and she’s generous enough to explain how it actually happens. There’s no posturing here, just three rats in a trench coat sharing clear, usable insights for anyone who wants to write and not just talk about writing. If you’re trying to find your voice, or even understand what that means, this is the kind of conversation that gives you a way in and makes the whole thing feel possible.Five Rules for the Good Life is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.IntroductionHello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with journalist, screenwriter, and author Ella Quittner, whose new book, Obsessed with the Best, is out now on HarperCollins wherever books are sold. She shares her five rules for telling a good story. She talks about the importance of approaching each story with humanity to narrow in on the gut punch of every narrative and that when you find your own voice in your own words, that’s when you’ll find real success in your writing. It is a great conversation for anyone looking to share stories they love, to elevate the words they write, and for anyone who’s thinking about writing something for the first time. So let’s get into the rules.Meeting Ella QuittnerElla, it is pretty crazy that this isn’t the first time we’re meeting because I feel like we have all of the same colleagues and friends in the food scene. I agree and I feel mad at them for not introducing us. I’ve been reading a lot of your work for years. What I’ve always found is that storytelling is such an essential part of what you do and what you write about.Early StorytellingDo you remember the first story outside of your own life that you wanted to tell? When I was a child, my sister and I used to make comic books, my older sister Zoe and I. She would illustrate Mm-hmm. really uproariously funny. Love it. That was the first story I wanted to tell, which is just being a young child, feeling humiliation, but also delight at my grandma ordering a knish at a deli.The Emotional Duality of WritingSo much of personal writing can be humiliating and exalting. empowering and lonely. There really is this duality in that act of creativity, especially when it comes down to just you and either a computer or a pen and a piece of paper. How do you balance those juxtaposed emotions and stay motivated?The emotions of wanting to quit and give up and feeling like a failure and self-doubt, but then also that egotistical, maybe I keep going or that thing where you have this inflated sense of the importance of what you’re doing. All those you mean? Your words, not mine, but yes.the older i’ve gotten and the more i’ve written professionally across different fields and genres whether it’s journalism screenwriting fiction food writing cookbooks etc the more i’ve been able to learn to separate my expectations from the outcomes and not seek external validation but just try to create work that i’m proud of that goes a really long way toward letting you feel less tortured in the process because i remember being in my 20s being like oh my god i wish i was Helen Rosner i wish i was David today i’m sorry i wish i I wish I was all these people and I’m just some f*****g idiot in the East Village trying to write 400 words.Once you embrace, why am I doing this? No one’s making me do it. It doesn’t pay well. I don’t have to be doing it. So there must be something that I think I’m uniquely bringing to it. and try and separate yourself from the outcome of anyone reading it. Is anyone going to care? I mean, you do want to add something to the conversation, but I think separating yourself from
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