Starcast Join the waitlist
This Is TASTE

This Is TASTE

855: Ayesha Nurdjaja on the Line: Burns, Swollen Knuckles, and Stolen Kunz Spoons

Oct 19, 2026 · 1h 5m

Coming soon to iPhone. Already have it? “Listen in Starcast” takes you straight there.

On this episode

About this episode

Ayesha Nurdjaja grew up in Gravesend, Brooklyn, with an Indonesian father, an Italian mother, and a grandmother who walked her to Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue. After years in Italian kitchens like Felidia, she talked her bosses into a Middle Eastern New Year’s Eve menu that became the wildly popular Shuka and later Shukette . We discuss her debut cookbook, Mediterranean All the Way , a legendary onion dip, and her collection of stolen spoons. Also on the show Matt has a great conversation with Zola Gregory . Zola is a TASTE columnist and worked on The Pasta Box , a just-released recipe deck from TASTE featuring 50 pasta recipes that transform any dry pasta into tomato-y, cheesy, and creamy…