Podcast Canon: Richard's Famous Food Podcast is a delightful pickle

For one thing, Richard’s Famous loves to play with words and their repetition as a sort of incantation. It’s something that makes itself instantly endearing, but which resists easy translation into the written medium. For example, in the show’s cover art, Richard is depicted as a vaguely humanoid, mustachioed pickle (a Pickle Richard, if you will; never you mind that this predates the Rick & Morty episode by a good two years), and quite quickly the word “pickle” becomes a sort of repeated totem, particularly in a sort of faux-French pronunciation, like “peeklay.” Whenever the word comes up in an episode, it is not simply said, but often yodeled out into the echoing void. Along the way, the word “podcast” becomes pood-cast thanks to Richard’s sentient pickle nephew Jimmy (I did mention that this all breaks down a bit when you try to explain it), and whenever its pronunciation is questioned, it results in a rhythmic restating that just digs into your brain over time. The same logic applies to the invocation of the words “dope,” “anyways,” and “actually” as well. The spaces where one would expect to find ad breaks are often just filled with Parks chant-singing the word “money” over and over. 

That’s not the extent of the show’s strangeness, though. This is a production continually threatening to go off the rails. Clips of a drunk Orson Welles hawking cheap wine haunt the show. Every episode is larded with catchy songs and lush original music. It has a scrappy, inclusive spirit as well, like when a security guard Parks randomly encounters at a natural wine festival provides such good tape that he ends up becoming a regular fixture on the show. 

Lest this give the impression that it’s all just an exercise in maximalist aesthetics, it should be noted that Parks’ interest in food is genuine. Outside of the podcast, he has co-authored several cookbooks from restaurants in his native Los Angeles, like The Boba Book, written with the Boba Guys, and Guerrilla Tacos: Recipes From The Streets Of L.A., written with chef Wes Avila. His stature means that the show has hosted restaurateurs like Wolfgang Puck, Danny Trejo, and Ludo Lefebvre. Episodes dig in on a diverse range of topics, from entomophagy to truffles (with perhaps future star of this column Avery Trufelman, former producer of 99% Invisible and creator of its spin-off Articles Of Interest), to natural wine and the Americanization of the michelada. Maybe the standout episode is “#10: Chamoy,” which I featured here back in 2019. 

Perhaps at the heart of it, what makes Richard’s Famous your favorite podcaster’s favorite podcast is the way it so fully embraces the punk ethos that colored the first decade of the medium, when shows were made for the love of the craft and experimentation was at its highest ebb. This is the kind of program that speaks to the very best of what podcasting could have been, had it not been sucked into the tractor beam of capitalism and bled dry in the name of advertising dollars. Some shows were just too pure for what the medium required of them. It’s why something like Mystery Show is still passed around like a Daniel Johnston tape. But if we’re following this outsider musician thread, Richard’s Famous Food Podcast is more like Wesley Willis, a rowdier, more rollicking ride that wants to make you smile. And, much like Willis, for better and for worse, RFFP wasn’t conceived with massive commercial success as its aim.

In the decade since arriving on the scene, the show has only produced something like 21 proper episodes in total. This is a show that takes a great deal of effort to make, and not the sort of thing that can be turned out en masse (and with video to boot). Over two years elapsed between the release of the first and second episodes of the show, and nearly a third year came and went before its third episode dropped. For a moment in the early going, episodes felt akin to going to a Replacements show in the late ’80s and early ’90s; there was always a somewhat uneasy sense that each one might be the last. But Parks found his creative stride in 2019, buoyed, no doubt, by increased critical praise and attention, and locked in for the next two years, before eventually moving on from the show. 

In the years since the show went on hiatus, Parks has worked to streamline his style a bit, in hopes of threading the needle of obsessively produced and commercially viable storytelling. His highest-profile gig was producing, editing, and sound-designing Storytime With Seth Rogen, the rare celebrity-hosted podcast that tried to do something entirely different, beginning with hiring Parks to bring his magic touch to the show. It lasted only one season and, given the professional tear Rogen is on now, is unlikely to return, but it’s definitely worth checking out. Following Storytime, Parks began Dodger Blue Dream, an audacious podcast project to document the 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers baseball season in real time. The resulting show was an absolute thrill ride from start to finish, a kind of lightning-in-a-bottle gamble that paid off in ways that Parks could hardly have dreamed (the Dodgers ended up beating the New York Yankees in the World Series that year), and which was among the best things I listened to all last year. The series’ first three episodes, “Normal Japanese Woman,” “The Talented Mr. Ippei,” and “The Case Against Ippei,” form an unmissable miniseries on their own.

Parks is a testament to what podcasting simultaneously can and can’t be. The reality is that these sorts of works are not easy to make, but listeners yearn for them all the same. What are we to do in a landscape where labors of love aren’t treated like actual labor? There is still money in the medium, but the prevailing winds are telling new creators that video must be part of their content strategy, and often, major advertising contracts are written with it being an explicit component as well. It serves to speed along the banalization of the medium, where production is kept to a minimum for the benefit of a harmonious workflow across visual and audio channels. But shouldn’t we wish for better? For a world where audio wizards are able to ply their trade to the maximum? One where strangeness is allowed to thrive and inspire, and not just from the margins?

As always, we recognize and celebrate the producers who helped the show along the way. Variously—in addition to Parks’ work—the show has had help from Bennett Barbakow, Caitlin Esch, Matt Frassica, Jessica Glazer, David Weinberg, and Nick White.