Phil Rosenthal Believes That Diners Might Save America

Tinfoil Swans Podcast

Spotify

On this episode

Phil Rosenthal is living his dream life as a newly minted restaurant owner who gets to work alongside his family and one of the greatest chefs in the country. In this live podcast taping from the 2025 Food & Wine Classic in Charleston, the Somebody Feed Phil star, Everybody Loves Raymond creator, and bestselling cookbook author talks about his childhood culinary awakening at 7-Eleven, dragging his parents kicking and screaming to a fancy meal, why he believes diners might save America, and what he wants to do with the rest of his days on earth.

Meet our guest

Phil Rosenthal is the creator and executive producer of the long-running sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, and the star of the PBS travel series, I’ll Have What Phil’s Having. and its Netflix successor Somebody Feed Phil, where he explores cities around the world through their food and the people who make it. Rosenthal is the author of the memoir You’re Lucky You’re Funny: How Life Becomes a Sitcom, as well as the cookbooks Somebody Feed Phil and Phil’s Favorites. Rosenthal and 1990 F&W Best New Chef Nancy Silverton are the co-owners of the newly opened Max & Helen’s, a nostalgic American diner in Los Angeles’ Larchmont neighborhood.

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 and Folio Award-nominated podcast Tinfoil Swans, 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 his childhood culinary awakening at 7-Eleven

“It wasn’t until I was nine that I went anywhere other than New York. We went to a cousin’s bar mitzvah in Atlanta. It was my first time on a plane, and my cousins took me to a new kind of store that I had never seen before. It was called 7-Eleven. They had a space-age machine there that turned sodas into slushy drinks. I had one sip of this Coca-Cola Slurpee and I went, ‘I have to travel more.’  That launched my wanderlust.”

On the shock and awe of garlic 

“I talk to great chefs. Some of them tell me that their parents weren’t fantastic cooks. It’s like music, and when you’re coming of age it becomes your music. For these chefs, and I guess me, my coming-of-age thing came when I went to college and we went to a little, crappy Italian restaurant. We had just pasta with sauce — that’s all we could afford. I was devouring it because it was the most delicious thing I ever had in my life. ‘Why are you going so wild?’ ‘Because this is fantastic.’ They said, ‘What? It’s just pasta and sauce.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. What are these chopped up little white bits in there?’ And they said, ‘What? Garlic?’ And I said, ‘Yes, garlic.’ I’d never had garlic until college.” 

On winning his parents over to fine dining 

“I would save up so once a year on my birthday, I would go to one of these magical places that I read about in The New York Times calledfour-star restaurants. Because you read these reviews, and you’re like, ‘A place like this exists?’ It was like another planet that you could visit if you had — this was in the ’80s — $100. When my parents heard that I spent $100 on a dinner, they thought I was selling drugs. When I got a job in Hollywood and I had money, I took them to Lutèce. They were kicking and screaming the whole time. Then the food comes and my mom takes a bite and says, ‘Well, now this happens to be very good.’”

On having had his fill

“I’d rather have a great hot dog than the four-hour French tasting menu. My back hurts just thinking about it. I’ve had it — I don’t need it.”

On saving the world through a diner mindset

“Diners are disappearing from America, but I see them as the centers of community where rich and poor alike can come. We all enjoy it no matter what our tax bracket is. Maybe we’re losing these centers of the community and then maybe we lose the country. So I’m going to fix everything with my diner.”

On what he still wants out of life

“I want to keep living exactly how I’m living right now. I’m so lucky. Gratitude is everything. I wake up in the morning and right away I’m grateful that I woke up, that I have my wife of 35 years next to me, that my dog Murray’s at the foot of my bed, that both my kids found the loves of their lives and got married and they all live close by. It’s like Everybody Loves Raymond except now we are the parents. It’s a dream life. And to have the family work on the diner together and be so happy doing it, to work with my brother on my TV show and be so happy doing it — I just want this life to go on, and I’m going to try to do it as long as I live.”

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 and Joshua Snyder, Hunter Lewis, Dana Cowin, Edward Lee, Cassandra Peterson (a.k.a. Elvira), Ruby Tandoh, June Rodil, Phil Rosenthal, 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, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, TuneIn or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.