The wellness world has gotten a lot more complicated since the Golden Door opened its doors in 1958. Today there are powders, potions, trackers, supplements, and approximately 9,000 ways to turn a chia seed into a personality. But the San Marcos retreat, guided by Deborah Szekely’s vision, was already taking a whole-body approach—bringing movement, food, and wellness together—long before wellness became an industry.
On this week’s Happy Half Hour, host Troy Johnson talks with Golden Door executive chef Greg Fry, who’s been at the legendary retreat for more than 12 years. They get into its history, the famous guests who’ve passed through its doors, and the truly impressive number of people who keep coming back (one guest has been 150 times).
Fry shares his experience learning how to make food that’s genuinely satisfying without leaning on the usual culinary crutches, and walks Troy through some of the recipes in The Golden Door Table, the new cookbook featuring 100 recipes from the resort, including feta-whipped avocado toast and the iconic potassium broth. They also discuss the Golden Door’s four-acre vegetable garden, which supplies about 80 percent of the vegetables on guests’ tables at this time of year, and the Country Store that grew out of that garden during the pandemic. What started as a way to keep all that produce from going to waste became a way for Golden Door to share its food with the surrounding community.
There’s plenty of history here, but ultimately this is a conversation about making healthy food taste good and about the philosophy behind a place that has been doing that for nearly seven decades. There’s also a cookbook, a garden, a little bit of Golden Door lore, and one extremely persistent problem: Troy can’t seem to stop calling Greg Fry “Glenn Frey.”
Some wellness habits die harder than others.
This summary was provided to you by AI. To hear from the humans, listen to Happy Half Hour wherever you get your podcasts.
