fever4flavor

There's an age-old maxim in branding: do one thing, and do it really well. Mac Mart, the mac & cheese-focused food truck and kiosk from the mind of owner Marti Lieberman, is one of the premier mac & cheese places in Philadelphia. In this episode, Evan & Marti talk about how she got her start, what the most important ingredients of a mac & cheese are, the difference between a creamy mac and a baked mac, whether mac & cheese is a side or a main, what it's like working in the food truck business, and more.  

Endeavoring to create cuisine that is both wholly authentic while at the same time staying modern and original and fresh is not an easy task. Set against a rich backdrop in Philadelphia of excellent restaurants featuring cuisines from all over the world is Stina and chef/owner Haralampus Saritsoglou, who also goes by "Bobby." A proudly, boldly Greek chef and restaurateur, in this episode Chef Bobby discusses the depth of thought, care, pride, and consideration for his heritage that goes into the menu at Stina.    

Let's get into some wine! What's the best way to enjoy wine? As it turns out, according to Jamie Harrison Rubin, Wine Director at Philadelphia's Southwark and Ambra, wine does not need to be overthought, overwrought, or overanalyzed. It can simply be enjoyed and, even better, be enjoyed with friends. Jamie and I talked about California cabernets, chianti, what wine is and what wine shouldn’t be, and just for the hell of it, we talked about Budweiser too.

The experience of flavor can be created, changed, and improved by a host of design choices that restaurateurs make. Whether it's the weight of the cutlery, the lighting, smells being piped out onto the street, your ability to see the kitchen at work or a dozen other factors, everything is a choice to be made that hopefully builds your dining experience into one that aligns to what the restaurant is trying to accomplish. In Season 2, episode 2 of fever4flavor, Evan sits down to talk about all of this with Rafael Larue, partner and Chief Creative Officer at Livit Design...

Season 2 is BACK, starting with a great conversation that I had with Chef Antimo DiMeo at Ezme, just one of his restaurants in Wilmington, Delaware. 

So by now I think you know that I’m very into food and very into flavor. What I don’t talk about too often on this podcast is that I’m also a total nerd for all things sci fi and fantasy. Listen as I connect the dots for you from my love of the Matrix—including one very specific scene in that movie—to my conversation with Chef Antimo about steak. 

Season 2 of fever4flavor is coming soon! 

Are there five basic tastes?

At this point, I can tell you only two things definitively about flavor and the pursuit of unwinding exactly what it is and how we can all appreciate it more. Thing one: Flavor is complex. And thing 2: I’m going to keep asking questions of the people who inhabit the world of flavor for a long time to come.

Which is my way of saying… season 1 has come to an end. BUT there will be a Season 2 of fever4flavor. I can’t tell you exactly when that will be or who...

You’ll hear me reference my travels quite a bit on this podcast. I always feel a little bit strange talking about the places I’ve been; I don’t want to sound like some kind of elitist, jet-setting, wealthy 1% kind of person who spends his weekends in Bali. I’m not that.

But I did have the luck in my 20’s—which was a couple of decades ago for me—of falling backwards into an opportunity to live in Bangkok for a few years. As the travel hub in southeast Asia, I also had the luck, or the guts ma...

I don’t quite remember when I started drinking coffee, but I suspect it was at some point in college. When I needed to stuff as much caffeine into my underslept and over-hangovered face to make it through midterms.

But back then, coffee was simply a vehicle to transmit as much caffeine into my bloodstream as I possibly could. Now, coffee is an entirely different source of joy. I set the machine every single night; it’s among the first things I wake up to every single morning. A nice dark roast that slaps you awake with a da...

As a working professional, my very first day at my very first corporate job, I stuffed envelopes. But the job was at a medical publishing company, and eventually, I worked my way up the ladder to spend a whole bunch of years there as a medical journalist. And if that sounds sexy to you, trust me, it’s a lot less sexy than it sounds. The good news is that eventually, I went on to other even less sexy-sounding jobs that we need not get into.

But while I didn’t love being a journalist, per se, I wi...

I have a wicked sweet tooth. As a kid, I’d take every single quarter or dollar I earned from raking the neighbors’ leaves, and I’d cut through the woods down the street. On the other side was an Acme, the Ritz theater where I saw Tim Burton’s Batman four times in the summer of 1989, and a 7Eleven. At the “sev,” the money would get spent on exactly two things: a Gauntlet arcade game, where the Warrior was my character of choice… and giant chewy Sweet Tarts.

My sweet tooth was insatiable; I once stuffed an entire vani...

In one hand, imagine I’m holding a slice of cake; in the other, a slice of pie. I’ve got a pair of reflective glasses on, and I’m asking you to choose. Which one are you going with?

For me, it’s going to be cake all day. I’m not a discerning person when it comes to cake; I’m going to eat whatever you put in front of me for dessert, and I’m probably going to enjoy it. But if it’s a one and a half pound slice of German chocolate cake from 4th St...

Do you have a relationship with social media? Because I do, and like all relationships I’ve ever had throughout my life with people, places, and things, it’s not a simple one. On one hand, I think that humanity is someday going to look back at this age of social media that we’re currently in—assuming we haven’t nuked ourselves into oblivion or heated up the planet to an impossible degree, or both—and very firmly recognize that social media was an absolute evil that drove a whole lot of divisive, mind-warping, polarizing spikes into our brains.

Let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way: I’m a meat-eater. I love a filet mignon and the smoked buffalo wings over at Ice Line. But I’ve often wondered how vegan or vegetarian restaurants approach their food. I’ve always kinds of assumed that they try to approximate the flavors and textures that us meat-eaters experience on a daily basis. Meaning, they’re probably trying to make a portabello “cheesesteak” taste just like an actual Philly cheesesteak made with beef…

Or are they doing something very different? Are they unabashedly creating from a flavor pl...

I’m an obsessive food label reader. As a human concerned with my health and my longevity, and as a consumer trying to make sure I’m limiting the amount of hyper-processed garbage I put into my body, I’ve taken to reading the label on just about everything I buy. I do still buy and eat junk food, for sure. I love Oreos and Nutter Butters and don’t plan on not eating them anytime soon. But I also try to avoid unnecessary additives whenever I can.

And without a doubt, there are a lot of additive...

Simply put, chocolate is one of the most important substances in the known universe. To say that I love chocolate is an understatement, and I know I’m not alone. You know you love chocolate. And everyone you know loves chocolate too. Or at a minimum, they don’t hate it. But what do you actually know about chocolate? And what do you actually know about the way that fine chocolates are made by a chocolatier—or actually, it’s chocolatier, if we’re to believe Melissa Crandley.

I stopped into Mecha Chocolate, one of Melissa’s stores, and...

There’s something to be said for that feeling when you’ve unearthed a kickass tucked-away neighborhood bar. Where you can belly up to the rail with your friends, get a beer, watch a game, and grab a bite to eat. There’s something even more unique about that same neighborhood joint when it doubles as a hidden gem of a restaurant and has a regularly changing dinner menu driven by complex flavors.

That’s what I found when I visited Bad Brother, a converted 3-story corner restaurant in the Fairmount section of the city. So I sat down...

There are five basic tastes. You've probably heard of them: Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, and Umami.

But there's an incredibly vast world of food and flavors. So what exactly is flavor? And can I, just a regular guy, really figure out how to understand and enjoy food even more than I do? So I talked to some experts and it turns out that I can, and so can you. But you have to start somewhere. I'm Evan Young, and this is Fever for Flavor.

Season Premiere on 10/8/2025!