The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters
Aug 28, 2026 · 56 min · 18 segments
This week, former bartender turned culinary historian Bobby Hicks joins us to talk about his passion for retro cooking. He gives us a history lesson on how recipes evolved thanks to industrial…
Bobby HicksGuest
Francis LamHost
Gabriella MoriniGuest
Davide RissoGuest
Um, it seemed like you were really well on your way in your career in the sort of culinary world, and then you found this passion.
How did you get into these old dishes and recipes that frankly may never be served in a restaurant ever again?
[laughs] Well, my hope is that actually after this cookbook comes out, we might actually start seeing a resurgence of some of these dishes.
After working at Milk & Honey, um, which is a really famous cocktail bar in New York City-
... you know, that was kind of like this, this almost, uh, gateway into this, this idea of kind of understanding a little bit more about myself, you know?
Which is actually realizing that I had almost like this, uh, superpower ability to kind of hyper fixate and memorize details that I think other people really struggled with.
Uh, we actually made everything customized based off of classic cocktails for other people based on the parameters that they were looking for.
And so we had to know somewhere around 200 or 300 drinks, just in case you wanted to give somebody an option with, let's say, something spirit forward stirred with like a, you know, a rum or something, you know?
And I was the psychopath that ended up knowing more, like 800 to 1,000 different cocktails.
You know, like I, I really fell in love with the idea of studying the history and the dates and everything else because I always felt that there was a story to be told as well as the experience of just enjoying the product.
And this is something that I was able to kind of bring into what I do with Retro Recipes Kitchen, you know, which is basically like finding this fixation of understanding history and, and just this, this passion for wanting to deep dive into something that I think a lot of people really don't think about, and kind of showcasing some of these really unique nuances that, that came from that period of time, but also showcasing some of the parallels and similarities that we're actually experiencing today.
Um, it seemed like you were really well on your way in your career in the sort of culinary world, and then you found this passion.
How did you get into these old dishes and recipes that frankly may never be served in a restaurant ever again?
[laughs] Well, my hope is that actually after this cookbook comes out, we might actually start seeing a resurgence of some of these dishes.
After working at Milk & Honey, um, which is a really famous cocktail bar in New York City-
... you know, that was kind of like this, this almost, uh, gateway into this, this idea of kind of understanding a little bit more about myself, you know?
Which is actually realizing that I had almost like this, uh, superpower ability to kind of hyper fixate and memorize details that I think other people really struggled with.
Uh, we actually made everything customized based off of classic cocktails for other people based on the parameters that they were looking for.
And so we had to know somewhere around 200 or 300 drinks, just in case you wanted to give somebody an option with, let's say, something spirit forward stirred with like a, you know, a rum or something, you know?
And I was the psychopath that ended up knowing more, like 800 to 1,000 different cocktails.
You know, like I, I really fell in love with the idea of studying the history and the dates and everything else because I always felt that there was a story to be told as well as the experience of just enjoying the product.
And this is something that I was able to kind of bring into what I do with Retro Recipes Kitchen, you know, which is basically like finding this fixation of understanding history and, and just this, this passion for wanting to deep dive into something that I think a lot of people really don't think about, and kind of showcasing some of these really unique nuances that, that came from that period of time, but also showcasing some of the parallels and similarities that we're actually experiencing today.
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