Jamie Lynch, the executive chef of the 5th Street Group, is launching a podcast. Eating Habits will make its debut today in a five-episode drop on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

The 5th Street Group was born with Uptown restaurant 5Church, now Church & Union, before expanding to include Sophia’s Lounge in The Ivey’s Hotel and La Belle Helene here in Charlotte, as well as restaurants in Nashville and Charleston with an expansion to Denver in the works. Lynch now spends his days working on menu and staff development across states and concepts. He’ll also be the primary host of Eating Habits, with fellow 5th Street Group owners Patrick Whalen and Alejandro Torio as frequent guests on the podcast. The podcast was spurred by the shift towards negativity in diner attitudes during the pandemic, something Lynch hopes to counter by sharing stories from inside the restaurant industry.

“A lot of it came from as we started to reopen, the shift in some of our guests’ perspectives and their criticisms and just unreasonable craziness that people would start leaving as reviews on restaurants or bitching about on social media,” Lynch says. “We were like, ‘We need to we need to have a voice in this fight.'”

Lynch and crew had the idea for a podcast years ago, but with the rapid growth of the restaurant group, put the idea on hold. It was only during the pandemic that the idea came back to prominence. His hope is that by hearing from industry professionals, diners will be more understanding of the reality restaurants are facing right now and more realistic in their expectations.

“With the age of social media and Yelp and all that stuff, everybody’s become a critic, right?” he says. “You hear that all the time — everybody has a platform and that’s great. I’m all for that, except for when that platform is all negative. I’ve seen that shift lately. Over the past two years, people have just gotten kind of negative, and I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault, really, I think it’s a result of a lot of this pandemic stuff. People are kind of in shock from isolation and then resocialization and then isolation again. All this stuff, I think, is having some sort of lasting effect on the social structure a little bit in hospitality.”

The first guests on the podcast include The Goodyear House’s Chris Coleman, longtime Charlotte food critic Helen Schwab, and chef/owner Sam Diminich of Your Farms, Your Table. Though the podcast will initially be Charlotte-focused, Lynch plans to eventually bring in guests from across the country, including his connections from two appearances on the popular cooking competition show Top Chef. The conversations will be unscripted.

“Hopefully people will get to know them better and realize the sacrifices and determination that a lot of these hospitalitarians have to put in to offer these experiences to people,” Lynch says. “It’s a labor of love for sure. I mean, nobody’s becoming millionaires opening restaurants and on farms. … So I want to talk about that stuff, and I want the people that do it to talk about it, and talk about it for real.”

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