Table Manners with Jessie and Lennie Ware
British pop star Jessie Ware and her mum Lennie have been inviting famous people over for dinner since 2017, and somehow the concept hasn't gotten stale across 200-plus episodes and 60 million downloads. The format is disarmingly simple: a celebrity sits down at the Ware family table, Lennie cooks something lovely, and everyone chats over the clatter of plates and cutlery. That real-kitchen ambiance is half the charm. You hear pans sizzling, glasses clinking, and the occasional mother-daughter bickering that only a genuinely close family can pull off without it feeling forced.
The guest list reads like a fantasy dinner party. Robert De Niro, Dolly Parton, Paul McCartney, Cher, Florence Pugh, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Allen White, Malala Yousafzai, and Tim Cook have all made the trip to the Ware household. Recent episodes have featured Kate Hudson talking about her Italian mafia roots and Marcus Mumford previewing new Mumford & Sons material. The conversations aren't stiff press junkets either -- something about eating a home-cooked meal loosens people up in ways a studio mic never could. Guests share childhood food memories, embarrassing kitchen disasters, and opinions about whether a crisp sandwich counts as a real meal.
New episodes drop weekly across 18 series and counting. Each one runs about 45 minutes to an hour, and Lennie's cooking ranges from elaborate multi-course affairs to "whatever she could be bothered with that day." The 4.7-star rating on Apple Podcasts with over 11,000 reviews tells you the audience is loyal and large. It's a warm, funny, distinctly British show that uses food as the excuse to have conversations people actually want to eavesdrop on.
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