Entrepreneur, restauranteur, chef, and broth proselytizer — meet chef Marco Canora. His critically acclaimed restaurants include Brodo (one of my favorite NYC spots), Hearth, and Zadie's Oyster Room, and he won the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef NYC in 2017. He's been on the television series The Next Iron Chef, Chopped, and Top Chef and is the author of three books. We sat down togegther to discuss the intense lifestyle of a working chef and how bone broth changed his life. Listen here.

ON THE CHEF LIFESTYLE

It’s a very party lifestyle. You’re surrounded by food, you’re surrounded by booze, everyone’s young and you’re in the entertainment business and it’s very conducive to a not healthy lifestyle. It does wreak havoc on you and it’s fine for a while but then it catches up to you. The thing that triggered it for me was my inability to manage people, I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I think I was exhausted and I think I was generally very unhealthy and that plays into so much of where your mind is at and where your psychology is at.

ON HOW BROTH BECAME A TURNING POINT

Being healthy and being well is a very big picture and there’s a lot of buckets involved. In the bucket of food and nutrition I think that Broth has a very big role to play. One of the things I did was replace my coffee with broth... It really had an impact on so many things. It made me eat less so I lost weight. It kind of calmed [me] down, I wasn’t jacked up on coffee all day. I believe the habit of drinking broth every day healed my very damaged gut. Once you have a healthy gut, everything falls in line.

ON WHOLEFOODS OVER SUPPLEMENTS

My belief is that our bodies and food are both very very complex and when you integrate them both there’s stuff that goes on that allows us to absorb it and utilize it in a way that like distilling beta carratin out of a carrot and putting it into a tablet and then putting that into your body is not the same thing. I'm a huge advocate of traditional food and this [broth] is like the traditional form of collagen.

I’m on a mission to get people cooking in their kitchens again. I want to have Brodo branded fats and I want to have Brodo branded Sofritos of the world. If you can have different Sofritos, and different fats and different broths in your kitchen, you can make delicious foods in, like, lickety-split.

ON THE ONE THING YOU CAN DO TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE…

Tip 1: If you have a cooking practice home, at the end of the week you have a bunch of random tidbits of stuff in your refrigerator, chop them all up, and throw them all in [a pot] and then add good broth. Let it cook. Finish it with some good olive oil, black pepper and parmesan cheese and it’s amazing.

Tip 2: For 10 minutes a day, put down everything, take your glasses off, close your eyes and just breathe. It’s so easy to find 10 minutes and it’s so meaningful.