830: Editing at The New York Times to Veg Everything with Tanya Sichynsky   

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
So good, so good, so good.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:01)
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**Tanya Sichynsky** (1:08)
I did the newsletter while I was still an embedded audience editor, which is so in the weeds. It was a meal planning newsletter. After I did that newsletter, I applied for the newsletter's editor job at The Post while I was also applying for a job at Bon Appetit, which I ended up being a finalist for but did not get.

**Matt Rodbard** (1:25)
Yeah. Sliding doors, baby.

**Tanya Sichynsky** (1:27)
You want to talk about sliding doors? Truly.

**Matt Rodbard** (1:30)
Yeah.
This is TASTE. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard. Tanya Sichynsky isn't a vegetarian, but as the editor behind NYT Cooking's newsletter, The Veggie, she spent years making the case that vegetables belong at the center of the plate. Her new book, Veg Everything, curates 100 recipes from NYT Cooking's deep bench of recipe developers, including Melissa Clark, Eric Kim, Hetty Lui McKinnon, and many more, for weeknights, parties, and everything in between. On this episode, I speak with Tanya about her unlikely path from sports media, Go Dawgs, to food editing, curating from an archive of 24,000 recipes, and why she thinks vegetables open a multiverse instead of a life of side dishes. This is such a great conversation. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
Tanya Sichynsky, welcome to This Is TASTE. It's so great to see you.

**Tanya Sichynsky** (2:33)
It's so good to see you too. I'm so excited to be here.

**Matt Rodbard** (2:35)
I'm a huge fan of your work.

**Tanya Sichynsky** (2:36)
Oh, please.

**Matt Rodbard** (2:37)
No, for real.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:38)
Don't flatter me.

**Matt Rodbard** (2:39)
No, it's true. I haven't had you and I've had many of your colleagues throughout The New York Times. And you serve many roles. You write this terrific newsletter, The Veggie, which I subscribe to. I get the blue bags. I'm all on board. But you also top-edit some of our favorite writers here. So you're top-editor, story editor. And you wrote this great cookbook, Veg Everything. Damn, busy.

**Tanya Sichynsky** (3:01)
Busy, busy, busy lady.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:04)
I love it.

**Tanya Sichynsky** (3:04)
It's been a good year, but it's been a productive, productive year.

**Matt Rodbard** (3:08)
Well, I want this conversation to hit a couple of areas. I want to hear about your history in journalism and some of your work at The New York Times. I want to hear about this great cookbook and maybe we'll talk restaurant. So let's actually start there. You know, New York City, you're out, you're editing Luke Fortney and like, you know, I love Luke and he's out a lot. You have to be going to some restaurants.
What's been good recently for you?

**Tanya Sichynsky** (3:33)
I don't think there's a single person that I dine out with more than Luke. He obviously writes for me, but is also a dear friend. And we recently went to actually it was Luke, Becky Hughes, who's our social media editor, and Brian Gallagher, who's our restaurant's editor at The Times. We went to Woo's, Wonton King, which I haven't been to in God almost two years.
Went there. Luke and I also went to Bark Barbecue, which just opened in Bushwick, which I hadn't been to before.

**Matt Rodbard** (4:02)
So cool.

**Tanya Sichynsky** (4:03)
Fired. That space is massive. You ever go to a place where you forget that you're in New York because the space is so suburban?

**Matt Rodbard** (4:12)
Absolutely, I do.
And it's like, what's the math here? How's the math working?

**Tanya Sichynsky** (4:18)
I feel like I should walk out of that restaurant and be in one of those suburban shopping complexes where there's an AMC across the street and an ice rink.