Welcome to F&BQ&A

What is F&BQ&A? As briefly explained on the About page, what’s on the label is what’s in the can: question & answer interviews with people in the food & beverage space—defined very generously for our purposes.

I’m Chris Mohney, former editor of Zagat Stories. While working on Stories for almost three years—starting right before the pandemic up to June 2022—I produced and edited hundreds of as-told-to interviews with chefs, restaurateurs, cooks, designers, executives, entrepreneurs, managers, and many others working in and around restaurants. I discovered that I really liked interviewing people in a wide-ranging, wandering, and discursive way to get them talking and telling their own stories, rather than just rattling off bullet points about whatever they’re hyping at the moment. So I decided to keep doing it.

Who will I interview for F&BQ&A? Not just big-name chefs and owners and operators, though I’ll talk to them in the hopes of hearing something cool. In fact I’d love to interview more people who are not famous or well known at all if they have something compelling so say. I’m especially interested in those working in restaurants and hospitality who we almost never hear from—line cooks, servers, host staff, bussers, expediters, you name it. In other words, the people who do 99% of the labor of hospitality.

I’m not particularly interested in dishes and techniques and products and new openings as such. I’m very interested in candid stories of concrete experience where those things might appear, but are not the main subject. Past and present and future, positive and negative, success and failure, politics and causes and effects, desperate and dramatic or contemplative and serene. I’m looking for sincerity and personality over buzz and polish.

I can talk to almost anyone about almost anything. But I’m particularly interested in promoting the stories of women, people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ and nonbinary communities, or others with under-represented voices in their industry or in media generally.

If you’d like to talk—or know someone who might—tell me about it at [email protected].