YouSaid · the spoken record

Amanda Hesser

lines on the record: 114
first: 2023-03-20
most recent: 2023-03-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, one of the takeaways that came out of Sea Winkle was that I felt I could see that there were two kinds of founders. There were founders who were just great at selling an idea. And the idea might not have much substance or they might not know a lot about whether or not it can work, but they can really just like spin a yarn, get people engaged. And then, you know, they have the confidence that they'll figure it out as they go.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So once the sea winkle idea kind of fizzled out, it sounds like it sort of dovetailed into this new idea of a food website. With this new company, you were going to be going in a completely different direction than you had been going with Seawingle.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already knew how to make a pastry dough, so you just had to write a shorthand instructions. And we thought, oh, well, that's so fascinating. It's kind of like history repeating itself. And it made us talk, you know, we talked casually about like where do like what sites we like and where we're going online and kind of just what's happening in the food world. And I had this idea about a way to crowdsource and curate. And I told Merrill about it and got her thoughts and then decided, you know, I think there's something in this. And so I went to her and asked her if she'd like to, you know, start this company with me.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were talking, you know, we spent a lot of time testing recipes, which meant just being in my kitchen, cooking. And there was a lot of time sort of in between steps to just chit chat. And one of the things that really interested us in the times was the old archive and how the parallels between what was happening on Twitter and what was happening in the newspaper in the 19th century was really like fascinating to us because it was user-generated content. Recipes were written in a very tweet-like form in the 19th century because people...”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this idea is just not going to work. While you had this idea, you are still working on, I mean, you let the times, but from what I understand, you're still working on this Times cookbook, right? You were still kind of working on that project. With your partner who you are working with on this cookbook, Merrill, were you guys starting to talk about a business idea or were you really pretty much kind of focused on the seawinkle thing and just doing that”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. You know, it was not an easy year, you know, because, of course, I was feeling sort of nervous about what I got myself into, but I was also so energized. I felt like, oh, I found my people, right? I was surrounded by people who had ideas and the sort of guts to pursue them. And, you know, I just felt like, oh, I know I'm on the right path, whether or not this is the right company. We ultimately kind of came away at the end of the year feeling like, well, this is a really interesting project. We don't see where the business is. And this is, and to really build what we're trying to build is going to take a really big technology team. And we're not really the team to raise the money to do that. And one of my co-founders had to move to California. And it just became this kind of like natural, actually kind of seamless parting of ways.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We very quickly realized this is a big thing to bite off, especially with just the state of technology then. I mean, I had almost nothing to add on the technology front. I was really focused on the sort of concept business side. But at that point, there was no business side because there was really no business. It was just about trying to get people interested in the concept. sort of trying to learn what we didn't know and help kind of pave the way so that we could build this prototype and maybe raise our first round. So that was the way I was thinking about it. And, you know, I look back and I, you know, I met with BetaWorks. I met with Fred Wilson. I met with all these amazing investors who you could never get access to now.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I just essentially just funded it with my savings I look back at that year as sort of my startup grad school year because I did nothing but spend money.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just was feeling frustrated, and I think I was at a point in my life, you know, where I was no longer the young kid on staff. If I wanted to have the interesting career that I had yearned for, I needed to make it happen. You know, I love reading obituaries and I always love the obituaries of people who have, you know, Done like multiple distinct things in their career because it takes that leap. It takes that bravery and also that sort of belief in yourself. And yeah, I think there was just something inside of me that instinctively knew that I wasn't going to be happy if I stayed and I didn't know what was going to happen on the outside. It was worth taking that risk.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he's a New Yorker writer, and we really had no safety net, but he understood that I wasn't going to be happy if I stayed. And I think he was totally right that about, you know, my time and attention. And so I decided to do the buyout. And of course, it was totally lucky because it helped kind of help keep us financially stable for a few months while I went down this path.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you know, I talked a lot probably ad nauseam with my husband about it, about what I should do. And, you know, he felt really strongly. And this was such great advice. He said, you know, because there's such a strong pull when you're at the time. So it's so hard to leave. And he said, you know, you're never going to give anything like the time and attention it deserves unless you just cut the cord. And I just, I so love that he had that bravery and trust and belief because, you know, here we were. We had twins who were like one and a half. You know, he's a writer.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really kind of cozy, and people were friendly, and you could get meetings with people pretty easily and people were generous with their time because they were everyone was just kind of like figuring it out. And there wasn't the kind of like intensity that there is now.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you zoomed out for a year, you know, and maybe it would show you like the most important what were deemed using technology, the most important sort of five photos of the year or the five songs that you listened to most or important moments, seemingly important moments based on distilling the data, right? So it was a very like a big sort of data play. And I became fixated with this idea. I decided to pursue it. So I started going to start up meetups and I, you know, I used my reporting skills, right? I just started calling people and New York's tech culture then was kind of like a small neighborhood.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was going to be a dynamic timeline where you could hook in your Twitter feed, like now you could hook in your Instagram feed the news sources that you read and you could like, you know, zoom into a day, you could zoom out and it would highlight like.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fragmented, and I felt like at the time, well, you're going to want to have this all pulled together into some kind of seamless package that you can so that you can distill your, you know, you could look back on, you know, a year or a day and see what music were you listening to, what were the photos, what were like get a fuller picture of your life history. And it was a very big idea. And so I left the time in 2008.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think that there was a piece of me that felt limited by being defined by only like my food expertise. And I felt like I wanted to do something more. And there's a thread in my writing that's about documenting time and history. And, you know, it came up in my first book, you know, documenting this year with this gardener. Certainly is a huge thread in the New York Times cookbook, which is this sort of document of cooking over time. I've always been really embraced technology. And so I was really fascinated by the fact that our lives were being recorded in really intense detail and the way it never, you know, in ways that had never been done before, like whether it was the music we were listening to or the messages we were sending to each other, the news we were reading, the photos that we were taking and sharing. But it was very...”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So once I started, once I realized, oh, I have a full time job and I've just signed up for this giant book project, I'm going to need help. I asked around, you know, if anyone who had some cooking experience, who could help me with recipe testing and research and a colleague of mine at the New York Times introduced me to Merrill. And Merrill had, she had gone to cooking school in London. She'd gone to Le Cour d'Anble. She had had her own catering business. She had worked at a flower bakery in Boston. And, you know, we had some parallels in our training. And she had just moved back to New York and was looking to figure out what she wanted to do next. It was this kind of amazing timing. I hired her to help me with the research and recipe testing. And we spent, you know, five years working together on it.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there were just a lot of sort of surprising gems in there. What I didn't realize at the time was just how the depth of the archives and that it would take five years of work to cook really through the archives. And the first thing I did was ask readers in the New York Times what their favorite, we called it your most stained recipes. That was the headline. And we asked people to send them in, like, let us know. And I got thousands and thousands of emails and then people actually sent me in their yellowed. You know, newspaper clippings, or the clippings that they had marked up and then photocopied for me. And that became the foundation of what I used for recipe testing for the book.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. The Times has been writing about food since the 1850s. And in the 1860s, 70s, 80s, they wrote about food all the time. And it was actually mostly crowdsourced from readers. And it was really detailed and really just like filled with personality and also very surprising. There are things like there's a recipe from the 19th century for Dulce de Lecce. There's a recipe for raspberry granita, which honestly will rival the river cafe strawberry sorve. It's so good.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a young person in a hurry. You know, I again came from a background that was very different, but also, you know, I worked, I had worked in kitchens and bakeries where, and in a very different work environment where you really had to kind of ask for what you wanted and you had to be direct and you had to just kind of go and get things done on your own. So it was very outside of my understanding and comfort zone to like like to realize that if I wanted to do something like quote the proper way, I needed to talk to a bunch of different people first and kind of get their buy-in and sort of let the process unfold in the way that it does. I just, yeah, I really didn't have patience for it because I felt like whenever I see kind of a good opportunity, I want to go after it.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I like that version. I look back. You know what? I think my perspective now is, you know, with some distance is simply that The New York Times is this storied institution, but it's also a corporation. And corporations, most corporations, you know, things are done with a lot of, you know, there are a lot of layers. There's a lot of bureaucracy. Things take time. And this is, you know, this is none of what I, you know, what I had understood.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've done a fair amount of therapy. And so actually, when I saw that comment, and I really like Ruth, and I think that people make these kinds of, you know, have this sort of subtext in what they're saying often. But, you know, I felt like frighteningly ambitious, well, maybe it is frightening to older who sees someone come along who's doing things differently and who isn't, you know, isn't conforming to the kind of norms of how they express themselves around their career. And I really have empathy for that. I understand that it must have been sort of strange. Like, why is the Times hiring somebody like this who seems really so focused on success? And, you know, is it, isn't she going to kind of like wait for her turn?”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. But I think it goes back to things that I picked up very early on in my life, which were that where I grew up, you know, and I don't say where I grew up, it's really like in my, I would say my family. It wasn't women were not necessarily celebrated. And there was a lot of sexism. And I picked up on it really early and felt like I'm not going to let this hold me back. And so, you know, I just very quickly, you know, as a child, I didn't want to play softball because girls played softball. So I played hardball with the boys. And I, you know, I just was, I felt very determined from a very early age that I was going to prove them wrong. So when it came time for my career, I guess it was just ingrained in me that I felt like it was okay to be ambitious.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't love it, obviously, because everyone in the food world wants to be liked by Ruth Reichel. But I also understood it. It was true, you know, I was ambitious. And I think I've been that way since I was, you know, I started talking. I don't think I've been shy about it.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are ultimately you're an observer. And then actually over time, what happened was I became more of an editor. I moved to the magazine, I started editing there. And editor, you're kind of helping nurture the observers who are observing the doers, right? And I finally came to the conclusion correctly that I'm a doer and I needed to get back to it.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think people were interested in the fact that I had an unconventional background. And so. I didn't mind. I actually don't think of the times as a particularly snobby place about your. They're really focused on like what you're producing. It is incredibly competitive. It's not warm and fuzzy. And that was a little bit, that was challenging because not only was I not like there was everyone was like much older and had like, you know, kids and just different, you know, they were in a different stage of life. And so it was hard to feel like you were really fitting in. But on top of it, no one was really mentoring you. You know, I like we never had team meetings. I can't think of like a formal one-on-one that I had with anyone. It was very much like sink or swim. It was a little bit of a tough love culture. And you were pushed to raise your game, right? So there were good things too. And I think I guess I'm a fan of some struggle. But I think for me, like what I found over time was that, you know, when you are writing about other people.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he literally just slapped his forehead and turned back to his computer because I think he was like, oh my God, what have we done? You know, we've hired this person who knows nothing about this business. And that was true. But again, it was sort of liberating because I just. Figured it out and also kind of found my way towards like, you know, writing the kinds of things that I felt like I as a consumer wanted to read about. And the Times hadn't really been doing up until then. I did product reviews. I did these intense tests of like how to cook duck a million different ways. And it was a dream job.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was 24, and all of a sudden I started a job in an office and I had a cubicle. And, you know, the New York Times, you know, the first day I had an assignment, they were like, yep, you're going to write about mushrooms. And so I just was like, and I had never written really a news story before. And I remember after I handed in my first story, Rick Flast was editing it and he said, well, where's your nut graph? And the nut graph is that paragraph, if you look in a newspaper story that's usually like, you know, the second or third paragraph in that's basically what the story is going to be about. And I said, what's a nut graph”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely not in 1997. Oh my gosh. So we walk in and it's like. These like it's this tiny little entryway. And so I had to call up and say, you know, can I brought my mom? Can I bring her? And so I ended up, you know, they ended up sitting, welcoming my mom and being completely gracious about the fact that I was bringing my mom to my job interview.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. She joined me to New York. And then because I thought I had this idea that, oh, the New York Times, it's probably has this like beautiful lobby and there are sofas and she can like hang out down there while I go upstairs and do my interview.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And so they were really, they were staffing up. They were really investing in it. And I did the interview. And then I moved because I thought, like, I'm not going to get this job. And so about a month later, they said, you know, we'd like to fly to New York for a day of interviews. And so they did that. And I needed, you know, help from like I didn't have a car. I didn't have, you know, so my mom drove, you know, drove me to the city.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Move to LA, yeah. Wow. And I, it was a warm spring day, like an unseasonably warm spring day. And I didn't, the only nice clothes I had were wool pants and a suede jacket that I'd bought when I was a student in London. And so I wore them and I just poured sweat the entire time because I was so nervous.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And, you know, I explained I was moving to LA, and he said, well, could you come before? And so the date, I think it was the day before I went.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opportunities because the woods of Pennsylvania was not going to do much for me so I started making a plan to leave and four days before I left I got a phone call from the New York Times from an editor at the New York Times you know saying that he had heard about me and was interested in talking with me. Which was quite a shock.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, while I was working on the book, and I think even leading up to the proposal, I had started pitching newspapers and magazines. And I think that what I was imagining was going to happen after I finished my book was that I would then become a freelance writer. And I actually moved home to Pennsylvania and I lived in my mom's house for a year and wrote my book. And towards the end of that, I decided I was going to move to Los Angeles because I had a boyfriend who lived there. And I felt like that would be a boost to my freelance.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I looked up cookbook agents, and then I wrote a proposal and sent it to all of them and followed up by facts and phone call. And one day a fax came through from an agent named Doe Coover who's based in Massachusetts. And she said, you know, I'd love to work with you. I love your proposal. I soon had a contract. And had the realization of like, okay”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and I didn't really think there was anything necessarily innovative about it. I was really focused on the preservation aspect. But, you know, it really is. It was one of the earlier cookbooks that celebrated seasonal cooking and kind of made a point to say that it matters and that it's a better way of approaching cooking.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just follow Monsieur Malbert around and get to know him and what he does and continue cooking. And she agreed to it very nicely. And Mr. Milbert reluctantly agreed to it. And then once I started, you know, following him around and just keeping notes, and I could very quickly see that there was a story to be told. And I felt like there was a story that like I wanted to preserve. I wanted to preserve in some tiny way this way of life. And I felt like my sort of understanding of how to put at that point, of how to put together a cookbook as a way, a framework in which to tell the story made sense. So developed this idea to write a book that was, you know, each chapter was a month of the year. And I told stories about Monsieur Melbert and like what I was learning from him and what I was cooking in the kitchen.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And like how it influenced what you know, if you cooked seasonally, genuinely seasonally, like what that really would look like. And so my idea was to write about getting to know was, well, basically my idea was first just a”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was a walled garden. Had been there actually, I think, even longer than the chateau. The foundation of an old ice house, it just was this whole place was like this museum of French life from hundreds of years ago. And he also seemed like this relic of the past. You know, he rolled his own cigarettes. He'd planted according to the moons. He was this very kind of cranky, grumbly gardener who had this tiny little dog named Poose who would follow him around. I just loved him. I just thought, well, this is the France that I've been looking for. These are the people who like I want to get to know. But at the same time, I was also really cognizant of the fact that even though I grew up with the upbringing I had where my mom cooked seasonally, we ate a huge variety of food and everything was homemade from scratch. I didn't understand fully the cycle of the seeds.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt like my attraction and interest in it started intensifying. But more importantly, I felt like I was getting to a point where I felt like I had knowledge to share and I had stories to share. And I had one in particular that I really wanted to tell, which was her gardener, Monsieur Melbert, who also lived on the property. He grew many of the vegetables and fruits that we used in the kitchen.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, she had a giant chateau in Burgundy that it was sort of wonderful in that it wasn't that fancy. It was actually kind of falling apart, but this very beautiful old 17th century chateau. That she lived in and that the cooking school was also in. And so, yeah, anyone who worked there also lived there. And I stayed there for two or three years. I had only intended to stay for kind of a few months, but then she worked, she was working on a new cookbook. And so I decided to stay on and help her with that. And it was during the course of that project that I started to really see how food writing worked.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a muscle that I was forced to develop, I was very lonely and I could, this was my sort of lifeline to people who I cared about.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I, you know, this again, this was a time that was not that long after, you know, my dad had died and I was doing this thing that no one I knew was doing. And because communication was so different then, the only way that I could really stay in touch with my friends and family was to write them letters. And so that's what I did. It awakened this part of me that I didn't even know existed and that I think I would say I actively resisted previously. I really never liked writing. I never really liked my English courses or I never valued them. And suddenly I was just writing all of the time and really enjoying it. And also getting interesting like sort of positive feedback from it. And again, it was just a seed that was planted, but I wasn't really intent on doing something about it. It just happened to be something that I was really...”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so I would sleep there with these kind of giant animal shadows looming and when the head baker would come in and turn on the oven, the whole building vibrated. And that was my wake-up call to get downstairs. And I would say it was not the most pleasant place to work, but it was really, you know, I learned how to make pretzels and all sorts of different grain breads. And also it was such a weird place, you know, the owner had a very fierce temper. And if things didn't go the way he wanted them, he would often come in shouting and sometimes he would hit people over the head with a loaf of bread. And, you know, it was. These are the sort of beginnings where I feel like I was the sort of writer part of my soul was. Starting to come alive”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My first stop was in Germany, in a small town in the Black Forest called Weingarten, and I worked in a bread bakery there. And I worked there for a few months, and it was a very old school bakery in the sense that in the front, the people who sold the bread were all women who wore these kind of like nice dresses. everyone who worked in the bread bakery was a man and so I and I lived above the bakery in the bakery owners he had a spare apartment up there that was filled with his taxidermy From his trips to Africa. And so”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it was an alternative way to really become a chef, but also to immerse yourself in a cuisine. And I spent my spring break actually traveling. I went to Europe and I knocked on doors because, you know, not to age myself, but at this point, there was no email. And, you know, the only way, I mean, I wrote letters to these restaurants and bakeries and said, hi. You know, like I really want to come Work for you, and either I got a response or I didn't. And so I showed up on the doorstep to say, like, hey, you know, I was the one that wrote that letter and I really do want to come.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This food history course at Radcliffe, and I was so in over my head. But what was fascinating about it and so lucky was that in my class, whereas Corbycummer, who's a longtime food writer and just editor and writer at The Atlanta. The food editor at the Boston Globe. And, you know, I was just like this kid in the class and they took me under their wing and kind of showed me the way. And it was really the first time that I saw that, oh, food writing is actually a job.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wrote letters. I wrote to my favorite chef in Boston, Jody Adams, who at the time ran a restaurant called Michaela's. And I, you know, I just said like, I'd love, like, I'm really interested in working. I'll work for free. I just want to learn. And so, you know, she hired me and I was like a kitchen runner, basically. You know, I got ingredients for the line cooks. I helped plate desserts. I strained stock. I did whatever. I was just thrilled to be there. I also worked at a bread bakery and it was like three women. And I was one of them. And we would, you know, get the ovens heated. We would mix the bread, shape it, bake it, and then I would drive a truck around Boston in the middle of the night or like in the early hours, I would say, delivering the bread to hotels and restaurants. And so, and then also I took.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was so unhappy and really wrecked by it that I just in a, you know, odd way, it freed me up because I just wasn't. I wasn't driven to please anyone. You know, I was really, I think I understood that I had to find my way and that I had to find my way to happiness, even if it meant following an unconventional path. And I remember a bunch of my college friends were getting ready to like do interviews and they were all buying kind of work clothes. And I just thought, oh, that's the last thing I want to do right now. And it was just one of the many signals to me that I needed to push myself to find what interested me.”
2023-03-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Food52: Amanda Hesser (2021) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT