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LOS ANGELES, Aug. 29 (UPI) -- Chef Stephanie Izard said Season 2 of her show The Curious Chef, premiering Tuesday at 7 p.m. EDT on the Tastemade streaming channel, explores the hidden cuisine of Los Angeles. Izard meets chefs who create pop-up restaurants or serve food out of their homes. "It's really all focusing on this underlying food scene in the Los Angeles area that's outside of restaurants," Izard told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "It's this secret hidden food scene."
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Izard said that the chefs she meets in Season 2 include "some folks that have left the restaurant industry because they wanted to do pop-ups, some folks that do it in addition to other careers, some folks that are trying to get into the restaurant industry and therefore are doing pop-ups as a startup."
Season 1 episodes focused on chefs creating menus specific to their cultures, including West African, Thai and Jamaican cuisine. Izard said the idea for Season 2 grew organically as the chefs she met referred her to other chefs.
"We went and found this husband and wife that cooked whole goats behind a tire shop," Izard said. "For now they have this pop-up tent where they have amazing whole goats that they turn into so many different dishes."
Izard runs goat-themed restaurants Girl & the Goat, Little Goat and Duck Duck Goat in Chicago and Los Angeles. Izard said she was impressed with the unique goat dishes she sampled.
"The wife makes all these great salsas and avocado toppings," Izard said. "The husband makes soup and flautas and this amazing sausage from all the innards too."
While Izard does not serve any dishes she learns on The Curious Chef, meeting the chefs does inspire her. Izard said she often continues to experiment after filming an episode.
"Something that clicks in my mind is 'Hey, I have not used that ingredient before,'" Izard said. "Or, 'I haven't used that in a while.' Or, 'I love how they use those combinations together.'"
The Curious Chef is not Izard's first television show. Izard competed on cooking shows Top Chef, of which she became the first female winner, and Iron Chef Gauntlet, winning Season 2.
Izard says hosting The Curious Chef is "definitely less stressful" because it is not a contest.
"I don't have a timer going," Izard said. "I can just enjoy myself and talk about food."
Izard said she got her love of cooking from her mother, Sue Izard. Stephanie remembers growing up with Sue exposing her to international cuisine.
"We would have moo shu pork for dinner one night," Stephanie said. "We'd have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding another night. We'd have tempura so it was always things from all different parts of the world."
Some of those recipes inspired Stephanie's restaurant items. Her Chinese-American restaurant Duck Duck Goat uses Sue's mandarin pancake recipe for moo shu pork and has adapted other Sue Izard staples.
"It was like a giant biscuit wrapped around a tuna salad with a cheese sauce," Stephanie recalled. "I actually took inspiration from that for an open-faced tuna melt when we first opened our diner, Little Goat."
Stephanie said she found herself citing her mother a lot when she trained her staff.
"I heard myself so many times say, 'because my mom used to make, because my mom used to make...'" Stephanie said. "It was fun to realize how much inspiration she's had on me."
Stephanie did not consider becoming a professional chef until after college. Stephanie graduated from University of Michigan with a degree in sociology.
Stephanie credits her father with suggesting culinary school after graduation, so she enrolled in Scottsdale Culinary Institute in Arizona.
Stephanie hopes watching The Curious Chef can inspire viewers to, if not become chefs themselves, taste the specialties their local cuisine has to offer.
"Either try new flavors that they want to do in their home kitchen after seeing what we're cooking, or just to get out into their own cities and explore the secret hidden non restaurant food popups and such," she said.
New episodes of The Curious Chef air Tuesdays at 7 p.m. on Tastemade.
