He Walked 3 Miles to School — Now He’s Redefining Dessert

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

Spotify

On this episode

From three-mile walks to school in Guyana and “punishment baking” with his aunt to becoming the first pastry chef named a Food & Wine Best New Chef, Tavel Bristol-Joseph has never followed the expected path. In this episode, he shares the chaos and music of landing in Brooklyn as a teenager, the quiet ritual he keeps each birthday to honor his late father, and why he believes cooking is just the vessel for something much bigger.

Meet our guest

2020 F&W Best New Chef Tavel Bristol-Joseph is a partner, pastry chef, and director of hospitality for Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group concepts in Austin and San Antonio, Texas. Bristol-Joseph is also a partner in Emmer & Rye Hospitality Group’s Pullman Market in San Antonio, where he leads the 20-seat dessert bar concept, Nicosi. He began his hospitality journey as a child in Georgetown, Guyana, spending Saturdays baking with his aunt for the local church. After moving to the United States when he was 17 years old, Bristol-Joseph attended the New York Restaurant School, then worked in a variety of restaurants in New York and Tucson, Arizona, where he met future 2016 F&W Best New Chef Kevin Fink. The two moved to Austin to open Emmer & Rye in 2015. In 2022, Bristol-Joseph’s Caribbean-focused Canje was awarded Best New Restaurant by Bon Appetit and was featured in the New York Times as one of America’s Best Restaurants. He was also a 2023 James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Texas. 

Bristol-Joseph partnered with the Southern Smoke Foundation and Austin Community College District to launch the Bristol-Joseph Scholarship Foundation, offering culinary scholarships to ACC students, including financial support, guidance, and mentorship.

Meet our host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s Gold Signal Award-winning podcast Tinfoil Swans (currently a finalist in the Folio Awards), and founder of Chefs With Issues. Previously, she was the senior food & drinks editor at Extra Crispy, editor in chief and editor at large at Tasting Table, and the founding editor of CNN Eatocracy. She won a 2024 IACP Award for Narrative Food Writing With Recipes and a 2020 IACP Award for Personal Essay/Memoir, and has had work included in the 2020 and 2016 editions of The Best American Food Writing.

She was nominated for a James Beard Broadcast Award in 2013, won a 2011 EPPY Award for Best Food Website with 1 million unique monthly visitors, and was a finalist in 2012 and 2013. She is a sought-after international keynote speaker and moderator on food culture and mental health in the hospitality industry, and is the former vice chair of the James Beard Journalism Committee.

Highlights from the episode

On falling in love with baking

“As a kid, I would prefer to be outside doing something else other than standing in the kitchen cooking with my aunt, so that was absolutely a punishment. I think for maybe the first year it was like, ‘Damn, I’ve got to do this.’ But then I started liking all the stuff and then I was eating a lot of those things and being in love with everything I was making. And I think that’s when I started paying attention to details. I’m very competitive, so I wanted to make the better version of the thing that she taught me to make.”

On starting a new life in America

“I think a lot of people don’t talk about this, the moment when you take your photo for your visa. To transfer your life from one thing to the next, knowing the future that’s ahead of you, and feeling sad about the future you’re leaving behind. In that moment you are almost born again. You’re a different person. You’re unsure of the person that you were. And you don’t know if you’re going to live up to the standard of the person that you are going to be. And you’re scared. You’re very insecure and you forget who you are in that moment.

When I came to America, I was trying to figure out who I was and adapt to a different culture. I had options. When I went to the grocery store, I had a whole rack of toothpaste to choose from. In Guyana, I got two: Colgate and Aquafresh, that’s it. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to be, where I wanted to be. I held onto the only thing I knew, which was cooking. ”

On his reflective birthday ritual

“I commit to one day out of the year — my birthday — that I give in memory of my father. I do not celebrate, I do not go out and party. I stay at home and just chill and reflect on my life because I want to take that day to always give back to my father. I’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember.”

On knowing his worth

“[In culinary school] it’s very European, very French. They had one cultural day, I think, in the class, and it was Indian cuisine. It was a lot of laminations and nothing that I grew up with and it made me think that the things that I grew up cooking were not worthy to be on that platform. My whole family is Caribbean. We would go to Caribbean neighborhoods in Brooklyn, go to Caribbean restaurants and try different things. But when you go to school, you almost have to shake all that off and become a different person. It made me suppress the way I look at my food and operate as a chef. 

You can only unlearn that when you have worked to gain the respect of your peers and create a platform for yourself where you can have a voice to change that. I wanted to learn and grow in the field, and when I got to a space where my opinion mattered, that’s when I was going to unveil it, because there’s no way I could have shifted that in culinary school.”

On cooking as a catalyst

“I think that I wasn’t put on this earth to be a chef. I think I was put on this earth to inspire and to do something greater than cooking. Cooking is a vessel for me to get to where I need to be. The power of human stories and inspiration can shift the nation and I want to share a lot more of that. I want to really empower the people around me to be better versions of themselves. That’s why I love hospitality so much.”

On finding his power

“The most important thing I would say to 10-year-old Tavel is: Be patient. You are the prize. You don’t have to try to become something that you are not before your time. Give your trust away. Everyone deserves trust and respect. I think you can lose it by your actions and your intentions. As humans, you are the prince, you’re the king, you’re the queen — you are whatever you want to be. You have the power in how you show up in the world. You don’t have to always wait for that validation from outside. You have the power within.”

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry and beyond, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Roy Choi, Byron Gomez, Vikas Khanna, Romy Gill, Matthew Lillard, Ana and Lydia Castro, Laurie Woolever, Karen Akunowicz, Hawa Hassan, Dr. Jessica B. Harris, Wylie Dufresne, Samin Nosrat, Curtis Stone, Tristen Epps, Padma Lakshmi, Ayesha Curry, Regina King, Antoni Porowski, Run the Jewels, Chris Shepherd, Tavel Bristol-Joseph, Paola Velez, Bryan Caswell, Harry Hamlin, Angela Kinsey, Hunter Lewis, Dana Cowin, Edward Lee, Cassandra Peterson (a.k.a. Elvira), Ruby Tandoh, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

New episodes drop every Tuesday. Listen and follow on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Editor’s Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors.