From Food Trucks to Footwear: Daniel Shemtob on Lime Truck and SNIBBS

Dave is joined by chef, food truck lifer, yakitori operator, and SNIBBS co-founder Daniel Shemtob for a run through hearts, food trucks, and what actually keeps you upright on a greasy kitchen floor. They start with skewers and offal: chicken hearts vs duck and beef heart, a Korean beef-heart “Heart & Soul” taco, tortilla engineering, and why overstuffed tacos are a design flaw. From there it’s boiled peanuts, peanut butter nerdery, uncooked cranberry “relish” with horseradish, Thanksgiving recaps from LA, Milwaukee, and beyond, plus British Columbia saffron versus Iranian saffron and how Persian techniques layer saffron, rosewater, and pistachio. Quinn and Dave get into extraction temperatures for mushrooms and saffron, raising kids to eat more than grilled cheese, and where dishes like tofu stroganoff and meat-free mapo tofu do (and don’t) earn the original name. In the back half, Daniel breaks down what 15 years on The Lime Truck have really taught him: why most of the money is in catering, how to design menus that can scale up and down, and how easy it is to gross big numbers and still make almost nothing if you don’t control labor and food costs. He also walks through the origin of SNIBBS—his own career-changing slip-and-fall, working with an orthopedic surgeon, why chefs need firm soles and a small but real heel drop, and how he ended up building a chef-driven shoe brand backed by people like Nancy Silverton, Andrew Zimmern, and Michael Voltaggio. Hosted on Acast.