Welcome to Shut Up ‘n Eat, where we are all about the visceral pleasures of eating. We love restaurants, and the chefs, cooks, bartenders, and designers who make delicious food and entrancing environments. We love our fellow diners — catching up with old friends over a meal, meeting new ones at a bar, encountering fascinating strangers in an hourlong pizza line. And we love taking everything we experience at restaurants to our own kitchens and dinner tables, where we recreate that joy and fun at home.

Okay, so what does that actually entail? We’re doing three things right now:

A podcast: Appearing biweekly, in mini-seasons of 4 episodes, the podcast is anchored by interviews with chefs at some of the most innovative, influential, and just plain fun restaurants, in New York City and around the world. The idea is to dig in to how they think about food, tour their kitchens, and understand what makes a restaurant exciting. Where can you hear it? Right here — or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or your favorite pod platform.

A newsletter: The newsletter will more than just a podcast update: This is the place where we’ll talk about, say, the history of Caribbean restaurants in New York City, details cool finds from Chinatown to Tokyo and beyond (with Google Maps!), share restaurant playlists, and basically do all the word-based food journalism that doesn’t fit easily into a podcast format. It’s its own whole standalone thingamabob!

A shop: Yes, we have a shop, too! Our awesome graphic designer, Matt Timms, has adorned T-shirts, hats, tote bags, and more with the adorable little Shut Up ‘n Eat monster logo, and we are hoping you’ll proudly sport our work on your own body..

Who Are we?

We’re a small group of food-media veterans who saw something missing from that food-media landscape: fun! That’s what got us into things in the first place — the joy of eating, and cooking, and making new friends — and we wanted to create something where you could feel that right upfront.

Co-founder Cathy Erway is a James Beard Award–winning food writer and the author of The Food of Taiwan (2015), the first Taiwanese cookbook from a major U.S. publisher. She’s also written the acclaimed cookbooks Sheet Pan Chicken and, with Trigg Brown and Josh Ku, Win Son Presents: A Taiwanese American Cookbook. She has written about topics like bitter melon and Chinese takeout for The New York Times, snails and soy sauce for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and fermented tofu and jiggly textures for Food & Wine and she writes an IACP-award winning column for TASTE. She has hosted the IACP award-winning podcast Why We Eat What We Eat? and the podcast Self Evident: Asian America’s Stories. She lives in New York City with her family and too many open Google Doc tabs.

Co-founder Matt Gross has been writing about food and travel for 30 years. His bylines have appeared everywhere from the New York Times (where he was the Frugal Traveler from 2006 to 2010) and Bon Appétit (its web editor from 2012 to 2014) to Food & Wine, Afar, Travel + Leisure, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Esquire, Runner’s World, Outside, and many other publications. His travel memoir, The Turk Who Loved Apples, was published in 2013. For roughly the last seven years, Matt was the vice president of digital initiatives for the parent company of Sunset Magazine, Military Times, TechCrunch, and other brands. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

Co-founder Peter Cheng, a digital media and tech executive of 25 years, is in charge of business development and partnerships for Shut Up N Eat. Prior to Shut Up N Eat, Peter led BD and Publicity for Static Media, a comScore top 100 media company with food sites like Tasting Table, Chowhound, Mashed, The Daily Meal and more. Before that, Peter helped Condé Nast and its iconic brands like Bon Appétit (where he met Matt), Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ transition to a digital powerhouse with global partnerships with Apple News, Google, Microsoft and more. Peter is an investor in Clear Matter, an atmospheric water generator technology by Moses West, which converts air into clean drinking water. Peter also serves on the advisory boards of MOONJI / Studio X Beyond, Mars Reel and Ubermonster Productions (Anthony Francisco, former Marvel Studios artist and Baby Groot co-creator). He loves sushi and Taiwanese street food — which means Tokyo and Taipei are his favorite food cities in the world! He lives in Los Angeles.

(Want to know more about us? Email [email protected].)