About

How this started

My grandmother taught my father to look after himself, and cooking was part of what that meant. He'd been a short-order cook on a beach in the summers as a teenager and stayed a serious amateur his whole life. It got passed on.

It became important to me in New York, in my twenties, working in banking and then private equity. Those jobs take your time and your attention and give you very little you can hold at the end of the day. Cooking had all three: time, attention, and something that exists when you're done. It was also how I stayed connected to people, which mattered more than I understood at the time.

New York meant I could eat at the best restaurants in the world, so I did. Masa, Daniel, Eleven Madison Park, Philippe Chow. I got obsessed with Alex Guarnaschelli, who was running Butter then. Later, in Chicago, I got to see Girl and the Goat and Alinea and Next at the peak of their powers.

Some of that was about the food and some of it was about watching people who had decided to be extremely good at one thing. That never really wore off.

What made it possible

For years the gap between what I'd eaten and what I could make was mostly equipment and information. Both closed at once.

ChefSteps was the watershed, because of sous vide. I wasn't going to spend fifteen hundred dollars on a Polyscience circulator, and then Joule and Anova showed up and suddenly the technique was available to anyone with a hundred dollars and a pot. Between that, YouTube, America's Test Kitchen and Kenji, an entire world opened up that had previously been behind a professional kitchen door.

Then I moved to Texas and smoking became a real part of it. Different discipline entirely, and it taught me something the coffee never could: that there are things you cannot solve with a number.

What I've learned from cooking for people

I've cooked for two and I've cooked for twenty. I've cooked for people with real allergies, which meant learning whole cuisines I'd never have gone near otherwise, and which made me better at all of it.

The thing I keep coming back to is that cooking is a way of paying attention to people. The food is the excuse. What you're actually doing is spending hours on something whose only purpose is that other people will sit down and enjoy it.

Coffee is the one that's just for me

Everything above is about other people. Coffee isn't, and that's why it's on this site as much as the food.

It's a ritual I control completely. At a time when my days were long and mostly decided by other people, twenty minutes in the morning with a scale and a kettle was the part that was mine. Nobody else had an opinion about it. Nothing about it was urgent. It went the way I decided it would go, and some mornings that was the only thing that did.

I'm precise because I like precision. I've spent a career in finance and it suits how my head works. But the reason I weigh coffee isn't that numbers are correct, it's that they let you change one thing at a time and taste what happened. The grind settings on this site are mine, not the right ones. They're where I landed after enough mornings to know what I like, and yours will be somewhere else.

That's the part people miss about measuring things. It isn't rigidity. It's the only way to have a preference you can actually defend, and then change your mind.

Why the site exists

I've moved back into working for myself, and with AI tools I could finally build the thing I'd wanted for years: somewhere to put all of it down properly.

I co-founded a golf club, No Bunkers No Bogeys, and I've come to realize it's the same project. Golf and cooking both look closed from the outside. Both have people who'll tell you there's a right way. And in both, the distance between standing at the edge of it and actually doing it is much shorter than anyone lets on.

That's what this is. Not a place to be impressed by what I make. A place to find that the thing you assumed was beyond you is a weekend and a thermometer away.

What I actually care about now is opening space for people to find something of their own. Cooking is unusually good at that. It works for the extrovert and the introvert, the beginner and the person who's been at it thirty years, the enthusiast and the skeptic who came because somebody dragged them. You end up doing something real and tactile with your hands, and then you sit down with other people and eat it. It's one of the oldest things we do together and it has never needed improving.

The space between people is getting wider, and most of what's filling it is a screen. A table is the opposite of that. I like using technology as a way into that room rather than a reason to stay out of it: the site, the timings, the tools I'm building here are all in service of somebody putting the phone down and cooking for someone else.

What you'll find here

Recipes written in grams, with real temperatures and real times, corrected when I find I was wrong. Coffee with the actual grind settings and drawdown times. What's in the cellar and what to pour it with. The restaurants worth the drive. And a journal, where I work out what I think about all of it.

Everything is free and will stay free. There are no ads. Where I link to gear, it's gear I own and use, and I say so on the page.

The thing underneath all of it

Precision when it matters, fire when it doesn't.

Coffee gets weighed to the gram, because at that scale the difference is real and you can taste it. Barbecue doesn't, because a full smoker adds two hours and no number on a screen will save you from that. Knowing which situation you're in is most of what cooking well actually is.

It's a skill you never master. That's the best part. Twenty years in and I'm still finding out what I had wrong, which means there's always something left to get better at.

Come and cook something.

Matt Kennard · Bulverde, Texas

Say hello