Andrew Zimmern

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is a lion of the food world,
Andrew's Zimmer Andrew. Good to have nice to be here,
Thanks Bob. So, how have you been coping with COVID?
What's your life look like for the last eighteen months? Um?
I think when when I when I hear the word

(00:31):
coping and COVID in the same sentence, Uh, it makes
me feel tired, sad and angry. Uh, tired because we've
been working harder than we've had to to stay above water.
And what I mean by that is that we've needed
the help of our fellows, and I'm not sure we've
gotten that. A percent. We've needed the help of our governments,

(00:52):
and I'm not sure we've gotten that. I think we've
needed to come together in a way that is quite
frankly been because Austin and we we haven't been able
to achieve that as a nation. I thought this would
be the kind of thing that would be an automatic. Um,
you know, a a public health crisis, global public health crisis,
and safety and wellness of our citizenry is government's number

(01:15):
one obligation in my opinion. So tired, Uh, sad, I've
lost I've lost friends, I've lost loved ones, I've lost businesses,
I've lost money, I've lost time. I've lost so many
things to this horrific uh pandemic. And UH angry because

(01:40):
when I start talking about those first two, it just
makes me really piste off. We we we we could
have had this thing. And I mean that in the
full expression of the colloquial sense in which I suggested.
I mean, we really could have had this thing. Um.
I was very publicly outspoken about the I even used

(02:01):
the word genocide at one point with the Trump administrations
handling of this uh pandemic in our country, although it
did have very serious international implications, as we found out
later when when tapes of the former president came out. Um.
And I wasn't joking about that. I I you know,

(02:21):
we we fumbled the ball, fumbled the ball, fumbled the ball. Uh,
then we get a vaccine. Uh. And we're now in
a situation with the delta variant where we're we see
ourselves going down the exact same path that we did
uh in uh you know, a year and a half ago.

(02:41):
So UM, Yeah, tired, sad, and angry, Okay, let's break
it down to the more micro level. Since the lockdown
of March. Where have you been? Have you been still
been in the Minnesota area? Has you traveled at all? Sure? Uh?
I did the Bill Mar Show. I think the last

(03:03):
weekend before the country shut down. Uh it was either
the first uh weekend of March, end of February, beginning
of March. I did the Mars show. Uh. There was
no one in the audience. They didn't quite know what
to do. They were about to go into lockdown. UM.
I remember no one being on the streets in Los Angeles.

(03:24):
I remember coming home and was here for uh, you know,
going back and forth between my home and my my
private office. There was an advantage to having an office
that's a huge loft space with uh four different doors
uh going into it. It's a it's a one floor

(03:46):
uh sort of little mini complex we have for all
of our businesses. So we very quickly you know, masked
signs tape on the floor, and three or four business
leads and are controller in there every day, uh, trying
to make sure that, um, you know, to keep our
businesses to float. And you know, we had to downsize

(04:08):
and you know, lost some businesses and and lost some
business within the businesses that were open. UM. I've started
traveling again in uh early summer, UH because we found
a window and the ability to shoot some stuff outside
that we could make some episodes of Family Dinner, my
show for Magnolia and do it safely, UH, with testing

(04:31):
with masks, with all of the precautions that were necessary
to take and UH, you know, no one's sick. I'm
super proud of the fact that our company we have
a spotless record. UM. And and that includes the families
that we worked with. I did one or two day
trips to places during the summer. You know, I looked
at some real estate and Nashville for a restaurant deal.

(04:54):
I did you know, some other stuff like that. UH
went out to l A and shot a bright shiny
floor you know, game show for another network. UH, and
did some stuff like that. UM. And went and visited
my kid. You know that my son goes to school
outside of the home in another state, and UH I

(05:16):
was unable to see him. He was home, I guess
for his last home visit. The beginning of February, right
for COVID went went bonkers and they didn't allow kids
to leave the facility or parents to pick up their
kids for a a local visit until the end of June.
And that was the longest I went without seeing my child. UM.

(05:38):
And I know some people haven't seen their parents or
other family members in in longer. UM. I only have
my own experience. Those five months were absolutely brutal. UM.
And you know I you know, no vacations, no nothing.
We we shot a couple of things over the last
couple of months. Uh. It's been nothing like our my

(06:01):
regular travel schedule, that's for sure. Everything's been canceled and UH.
And now I'm not so keen on traveling again until
I see where this thing is going over the next
couple of weeks, and certainly not to the places that
we uh you know, typically find very easy uh pickings
for shooting. UM, which is in a lot of states

(06:24):
that offer us a lot of flexibility, but also happened
to be ones that are exploding with outbreaks of real
life cases of the Delta variant and shuttered hospitals and
and story numbers. UM. We're in a Minnesota. By the way,
I think rates is substantial on the CDC website in

(06:45):
terms of UH uh exposure and caseload for the Delta variant. Uh,
but we're in the orange, but we're not in the red. Okay,
almost a non sequitur. You said you were on the
Bill mar Show, and I watched the show and it's
a fun show. Other than literally the experience. Do you
find that gives you any benefit? Does it? You know,

(07:08):
in the old days viewer on TV, everybody saw you
in a world where only a couple of million people
might see the number one readed network show. What's that like?
Brilliant question. Um, some shows I do because they're fun
and I want to do them. Uh. And it has
nothing to do with the exposure. You know. Sometimes people

(07:29):
say to me, hey, would you do this show? Do
you do that show? You're gonna get a lot of exposure,
And I remind people that I have, you know, hundreds
of hours of television available on an international streamer. That's
you know, available in a hundred and seventy five countries
around the world. Um. And I certainly am at that
point in my career where I'm not doing things for

(07:50):
for exposure. Um, the Mars Show, you have to remember,
timing wise, my MSNBC show What's Eating America had just
UH premiered two weeks beforehand, and so I wanted to
promote that show to a very like minded audience. UM.
I had done the Set Meyers Show, I had done

(08:13):
a whole bunch of other uh, you know, marketing and
pr stuff around the MSNBC show UH in early February
and late January, especially UH with jose Andres, who was
the in the first episode with me. UM. And when

(08:35):
I got the invite to do the mar Show as
someone who watches it every weekend, it was an automatic. Yes.
Bill is very food obsessed and very opinionated about the
necessity for human beings to eat clean, healthy food, and
he actually wanted to talk about things that other shows
would rather not discuss, and I find that fascinating. UM.

(08:58):
And you know, fun these days in my career. If
it's not fun, and if it's not with people that
I'm really excited about talking to, sitting with, UH, visiting
who are who are kind of into talking about ideas
the way I am, I'm much less interested. What is

(09:19):
the number one publicity vehicle to get your message out? UH? Great? Great,
great question. UM. I would love to be UH doing
more in in cable news because as noisy as that is,

(09:42):
I know that a lot of people who deal with
public policy and and the making of laws are watching
those shows. And I believe if I do, if I
rant for fifteen minutes in one of my shows on
a lifestyle network about UH food policy or about uh

(10:04):
you know, aquaculture or other things that I believe are
are are vital or the necessity for a foods are
a cabinet level position UH and pulling food out of
AGG and and U S d A, f DA, etcetera. UM,
I think that the percentage of people who are watching

(10:24):
that lifestyle show do not that they want to be
entertained by me, and they want me to be teaching
them other things. And I believe when I'm doing my work,
most notably on MSNBC of late, UM, I believe I
have the greatest impact. And that's kind of what I'm
looking to do uh these days. UM. And they are
also you know, UH opportunities online in the digital space

(10:49):
where you know, a good one minute clip of me
UH talking about the something that I'm really impassionate about
on certain websites, podcasts, etcetera. I think I have a
tremendous opportunity to influence UH outcomes or a greater percentage
of a chance to influence outcomes. Okay, there has been

(11:12):
a lot of news about the impact of COVID in
lockdowns on restaurants. UH. The latest news prior to this
delta variant putting a huge question mark in was the
ability to get help. So this is where you have
a lot of expertise. What I'm asking you is to
what degree have the restaurants and the restaurant industry been

(11:37):
affected by this? To what degree can they get out?
And what are the economics of a restaurant. I know
some people that say, well, you know, they're asked to
invest in restaurants in Los Angeles and they get reservations,
but they're not looking to get their money back. Then
you have Danny Meyer's got an empire. So what are
the economics of the restaurant world? And then square that

(11:59):
with both the economics during COVID and especially the help situation. Well,
it's it's both those things are true at the same time.
It's it's as if you could invest in a a
Taylor Swift record and the latest Crosby record at the
same time. You know, you're you're you're looking at two

(12:20):
very different things, but both our music. Right. UM, let
me let me take a step back and then bring
up to this this question of what we're looking at
now in terms of pay rate in restaurants, which is
extremely extremely important piece of the puzzle. UM. When COVID
went down and restaurants started to shut her, and we

(12:42):
saw the writing on the wall, seventeen of us, then
forty of us, on a series of emails and phone
calls and and skype calls and then zooms over a
two week period, co founded a group called the Independent
Restaurant Coalition Save Restaurants dot com. Every One can go
there and see everything that we've been up to. UM.

(13:03):
Chief among us were some people from very diverse backgrounds.
Uh Sam Cass uh incredible chef, but had also been
uh former First Lady Michelle Obama's Uh foods are uh,
Tom Collichio Jose Andres myself, Uh, the whole slew of

(13:25):
incredible human beings. Um. But several of us, especially people
like Tom Jose myself who had been talking for years
about raising a hundred thousand dollars at the gala to
dump that money into a bucket with two hundred thousand
dollar holes at the bottom of it, wasn't doing anything

(13:45):
to advance the causes that were so near and dear
to us. UH. Tom had started a Food Policy Action
Committee a few years beforehand, and for him, politics was
a love language. Jose Andres had founded World Central Kitchen
a few years before UH, and for him, UH, it
was feeding a hungry planet, especially those in crisis, was

(14:07):
his love language. UM I was about educating human beings
and and telling stories and changing hearts and minds with
that storytelling. With the politics kicker on the end of it,
and you know, with along with all the other folks
who were involved U with us, we knew that we

(14:28):
had to get federal funding for restaurants and we need
to start working on it right away. So the i
r C was founded with a very very simple premise
protect independent restaurants UH and do so by making sure
that we were getting laws passed on Capitol Hill. So
first UH we worked to get the p p P.

(14:49):
Then we worked to change the p p P. Thanks
to UH Republican Chip Roy of Texas and Democrat Dean
Phillips of Minnesota who pushed the p p P change legislation.
It fixed a Swiss horrible piece of legislation, actually made
it work for some people. And then we went to
work with UH Senators uh wicker And and Cinema and

(15:12):
Earl Blueman, our Congressman of Oregon, and UH they drafted
Earl drafted the Restaurant Relief Act Restaurants Act, excuse me,
and the Restaurants Act. We had done a lot of
work and invested tons of money on a lot of

(15:33):
economic studies to see exactly how much money was needed.
We came up with a figure of a hundred and
twenty billion the OMB, a whole bunch of other independent
studies I think Mackenzie had done one as well, a
bunch of other big accounting firms had done them. Everyone
came up with roughly the same number. Cost a hundred
twenty billion dollars to save restaurants. But that would be

(15:54):
worthwhile because you know, independent restaurants would lose a quarter
of a trillion dollars just through the last three quarters
of that year. UM. So it seemed like the easiest
thing to do. Let's let's get those restaurants back stopped,
UM so that we would have those restaurants to return
to whenever UH this thing ended and restaurants could fully open.

(16:18):
That never happened until finally, with some last minute wrangling
and thanks to some incredible work from some of our
members UH Centator Schumer included or got included twenty five
point nine billion dollars into the Restaurant Relief Fund administered
by the s b A in the America Cares Act,

(16:41):
which was the big tranche that the Biden administration passed
UH earlier this year. Now, the s b A opened
and it took applications for UH for these forgivable loans
and grants, and they took on eight billion dollars, rounding

(17:02):
up from seventy nine points something eighty billion dollars in applications.
They only had twenty five point nine billion to give out. UH.
So there is a substantial number of people who have
applied for this, deserving of it been approved, who were
sitting here waiting for money. So the I r C

(17:22):
is desperately trying to get that Restaurant Relief Fund refilled.
It is of vital importance. If we don't, we're going
to have an economic tragedy of what I fear will
be biblical proportions, and here's why, and then we'll get
to the cost of doing business with the employees. The
independent restaurants, when you pull them on together, pull them

(17:45):
all together, are the second largest business in America behind
only behind the US government. UH. It is a trillion
and a half dollar industry, represents about five and a
half percent of g d P. But it only keep
seven percent of the money that flows through it. And
of that seven percent, well over half of it is

(18:08):
put back into the business buying broken glass, replacing broken glasses,
broken dishwashers, stuff like that. So it is an incredible
vital piece of turnaround money economics. UH. And restaurant taxes
also go to give municipalities to buy books for schools
and paint lines on roads and put new lights on

(18:30):
main Street and all that other stuff. Restaurants are also
vital to the tourism industry. They're vital to the cultural
identity of main street America. UH And most importantly, because
I believe that that everything is about people. When you
look at the people that are employed in restaurants, where
the number one employer of single moms, number one employer

(18:51):
of single dads, number one employer of returning citizens, those
coming back from jails and institutions, number one UH first
time UH job provider and now most recently the number
one last job provider. UM. It is a depending on
whose stats you look at, the number one or number

(19:12):
two for immigrants and new arrivals to this country. So
you can see this is a very very special population.
They're not gonna go leave a restaurant and the next
week go to work at Ernst and Young. It's just
not how it happens. It is a vital population that
needs these jobs. The if you look at the supply chain,

(19:32):
all the food and the goods and the booze and
everything else that goes into a restaurant. Uh, the impact
on our economy isn't limited just to that trillion and
a half dollars and that five percent of g d P.
It multiplies by three or four times. Quick little fact,
just to to justify my point making UM, seventy five

(19:55):
cent of fish and seafood harvest did in America in
all our coasts, by all of our fishing industries is
sold in restaurants. Right, That's where the majority of people
eat their seafood. So just the impact on the American
seafood industry. You're taking away eight When when restaurants were closed, uh,

(20:16):
you know, four or five months into COVID, UH, the
American fishing industry literally came to a halt. Just to
give you an idea, that's where you saw it. By
the way, those tragic pictures on the cover of the
New York Times of the zucchini farm in a Maacoli, Florida,
or the lettuce uh farm in the Salinas Valley literally
tilling under the fruit and vegetables as far as the

(20:40):
eye could see because there's no one, no one to
pick it, and no place to sell it into, and
no one to ship it truck it right. It's is
an incredible, incredible impact on our nation's economy. And when
restaurants closed, So when restaurants reopened more vigorously a couple
of months ago, and some were getting federal bunnies and

(21:00):
some had been able to finatal things with p p P,
the vast majority had taken on a ton of debt,
everything from people who in a little pizza parlor who
had maxed out their credit cards to UH savvy restaurateurs
who've been able with their track record to get loans
from banks. Everyone took on a staggering amount of debt,
gambling that they were either going to get relief from

(21:22):
the government in form of the restaurant refund being top
back golf, or they were going to be able to
open fully. Now you have to remember even those restaurants
that were open fully, and I walked by some in
my hometown and was like, Wow, they're doing great business.
But I also knew that they had taken on a

(21:43):
year and a half of debt and they missed a
year and a half of profit, and to make that
up would take five or six years of being full
all the time just to get back to zero, just
get back to where they were at the end of
beginning of One of the things is that UH folks
never saw coming with COVID UH was the the human

(22:11):
capacity for enduring pain and misery and coming up with
a better solution for their own lives. And I believe
that and the low pay and some of the toxic
UH issues surrounding the restaurant business are the two biggest
reasons that we are struggling to find people to work

(22:33):
in restaurants. UM. So many people who were servers, bussers,
hosts and hostess bar backs, uh line cooks, dishwashers, simply
found a different way to make a living. And as
things went on during COVID, they realized, wow, this is
this is pretty good for my lifestyle, or or I've

(22:55):
changed what I'm doing. Um, I've found another way to
supplement my life. Remember a lot of people in the
restaurant industry are lifers. They're they're devoted to restaurants. They're
always gonna work in restaurants. They love restaurants. But the
vast majority of them are actually they're temporarily their college
students moving on to something else. They're actors in New York,

(23:17):
their musicians in Nashville, right, Um, they're doing something else
in transitioning. So people found a better and different way.
And I believe very very strongly that a lot of
people were working in restaurants that we were unbalanced, where
there was no vacation pay, there was no health benefits,

(23:39):
there was no types of insurance there there there wasn't
a professionalized atmosphere within the restaurants they were working in,
and they felt that those issues were toxic to their
returning that decided to make a career switch. I have
seen now. I was just on a two weeks ago,
was on an interview and with Tom Collegio. And the

(24:03):
reason I bring him up is that extremely famous chef
with you know, a half dozen restaurants around the country, uh,
maybe more um and someone who very much uh is
at the the tip of the iceberg when it comes
to fame and and also skill set, an incredible chef,
incredibly talented. Right before we went on, he was telling

(24:27):
me that, UM, he was only open I think at
that point Wednesday through Sunday. Uh. And the reason was is, uh,
he couldn't find enough staff. And there were some people
in this position who actually found that their restaurant in
their own lifestyle function better than being open seven days.

(24:48):
They were willing to do less money and keep a
little bit themselves and find it easier to manage. I
know of a lot of local restaurants here in the
Twin Cities, obviously, and I speak to more restaurant owners
here in the Twin Cities on a regular basis that
I do anywhere else. But we're a big modern metro uh.
And by the way, in summertime where people can sit outside,
they're all off there. Only there some are open limited hours.

(25:10):
They've limited their menus so that they could shrink the
number of people on their staff. It is a huge,
uh crisis. The employment crisis and restaurants is very real. UM,
I do happen to believe, uh, like uh some other
people in my industry, UM that a level setting of

(25:34):
hourly and salary employees, a level setting of the tipping mechanisms,
a level set, level setting of guests charges. In other words,
letting everybody in the restaurant profit equally from this success
is of vital, vital, vital importance. Okay, Denny made that.

(25:58):
You know, we included the service me then after COVID
got eliminated. Uh, I know him, but very you know
a fraction. Have you spoke with him in terms of
how that worked before the COVID? Was it working for him? Yeah, well, Danny,
I've I've known Danny for twenty five years and I
consider him a good friend and uh we do speak

(26:18):
and uh he is someone who I consider to be
uh one of the brightest, uh smartest business people and
human beings I've ever met in the restaurant business or elsewhere.
He also is one of the folks. If he's not
the leading light. He's one of the two or three
leading lights in our industry. Everyone looks at what Danny

(26:41):
does in his businesses um uh and his book Setting
the Table is probably the only mandatory piece of reading
and the restaurant business that I reckon. When everyone says,
what's the one thing I should read, I said, you
read Setting the Table by Danny Meyer. It's the It's
the best book about restaurants and hospital so much so
that there you know our business leaders who who make

(27:05):
it mandatory reading for their C suite people, they're not
even in the food business. It's a it's a really
brilliant book I recommended for everyone. Danny several years ago,
pre covid H, decided to experiment with service charges and
doing away with tipping. He was, like many other things,
way ahead of his time, too much, too soon, and

(27:25):
without other people doing it in the industry, was very,
very confusing to consumers. So Danny went back to tips. Uh.
The other issue that restaurants have charged. I'm being completely
transparent here is someone who is a partner in several
restaurant groups and invest in restaurants himself and talks to
a lot of restaurant owners. People had talked about doing

(27:47):
this pre COVID again, because it is very crucial. Restaurants
have not been able to charge what food really costs
on a plate for many, any many decades. They've been
artificially deflating their prod uh, the their what they charged
their prices on their menu and trying to make it

(28:09):
up at the bar. You've probably heard this colloquially at
dinner parties a lot for anyone who's invest in restaurant. Well,
we're gonna do at the bar. We're gonna do fifty
percent of revenue from our bar. We're gonna make a
bar that happens to serve food and every other version
of that and in every because your profit margins are
higher and there's less waste than all the rest of
that kind of stuff, and you need fewer people to

(28:29):
serve liquor than you do to serve food. Uh. But fascinatingly, um,
right before COVID, a lot of restaurateurs were calling me
to explore the idea of what it would take to
go with a service charge, And in talking to them,
the one thing they all had in common was they
all believe they would lose a lot of employees, they

(28:51):
would have to go to restricted hours for a couple
of weeks or a month as they onboarded new employees.
Right as you in board those new employees who have
different expectations of dollars, you can then retrain your staff.
That's a huge expense for a restaurant. One of the
biggest expenses restaurants have, uh independent restaurants is that is

(29:13):
the dollars takes to train and on board a new employee,
and the the old employees would leave because a server
that was making a good night is now gonna make
twenty five and a good night and he's gonna be
sharing money with other people and taking less for himself.
So those people tend to leave and go to another

(29:34):
restaurant that isn't implementing service charges. So a lot of
people shied away from it. COVID put everyone in the
same boat. And so now that we're out of COVID,
I would say the majority of restaurants that I've been
in in the last five six months, uh and that's
uh four months that I've been dining out. Uh. The

(29:58):
I would say the restaurants that I go to all
have a service charge on them. We just in Minnesota
today one of our the Twin cities most beloved newcomers.
A and by the way, this place that serves hamburgers
uh and ice cream and French fries. That's not a
fancy restaurant UH called baby Zito's, just beloved by Minnesota's

(30:22):
hot new place. Everyone loves it. Have you had their burger?
Have you had their ice cream? Run by incredible young people,
really impassion just announced that they're going to a service
charge of eighteen percent so that they can share the
money with all of their employees and and actually get
the economics of their own business right. And you're seeing
this more and more and more. And the reason is,

(30:44):
we have to pay our employees better. We have to
offer them paid sick leave, we have to offer them
some form of insurance that they earn into. We have
to professionalize and get those dollars up for these employees
because so many of them have been kicked in the
butt by artificially depressed wages. And the reason that restaurants
can't pay the same dollars that other businesses do is

(31:08):
because they haven't been able to charge what that plate
of chicken really costs on the plate. For decades and
decades because no one, because the American consumer, and I'm
sure you've heard this before from from other thought leaders,
is hooked on cheap fast food. And I don't just mean, uh,
you know, the McDonald's of the world. You know, Americans

(31:31):
believe that, you know, a red piece of red meat
that's eight to twelve ounces should only cost them X
number of dollars and come with the giant baked potato
and a salad bar. And they're not factoring in what
that food really cost to get to the table, what
it costs to be planted, picked, trucked, prepped, stored, cooked

(31:51):
and served and cleaned up after that plate of food.
Dining in restaurants is a more expensive proposition. As we
want this huge moment in American history where food is
the new rock right where we've we've never had. There's
no culture in America, no culture in the world that
has had a more romantic relationship ever with food that

(32:14):
America has in the last ten, twelve, fifteen years. But
we're not willing to pay for it. And now the
swallows have returned to Capistrano, and in the spirit of
tortured metaphors everywhere, it's time to pay the piper. Okay,
you mentioned all these household names. Certainly two people paying attention, uh,
you know, Tom Collickio Jose Andres. I gotta ask you

(32:39):
some of these people, certainly Bobby Flay seems to be
on food television seven. To what degree is their camaraderie
and to what degree is their competition both? I think
it's like any other business. You know, food people are
the best people in the whole world. I really truly
believe that I'd rather be with food people than any

(32:59):
other human beings on planet Earth. If I'm with uh,
food people who are recovering addicts and alcoholics as well,
that to me is the the apex of human being.
But I have a lot of personal bias there. Um.
You know, there is a ton of mutual respect to
some people not like each other. Of course, it's just
like anywhere else. Um, But there's a ton of respect

(33:22):
because you have to work really hard, uh to get
to a place of achievement uh in the food world,
and it's even harder to stay there. I think people
unfairly criticized people like Bobby Flay. I'll just use him
as as an example. I've heard things from friends of
mine like, well, he can't really be a good cookies
on TV. He's actually one of the most phenomenal chefs cooks.

(33:46):
When he actually touches food, he's he's an incredible, incredible craftsperson.
Same thing with Tom Callikio. There's a whole generation of
people who only think of Callikio as someone who turns
to Podma when she's ready to tell folks to pack
their knives and go home. It's one of the greatest
chefs of his generation. Um. These are people who I
believe thirty years from now will still be talked about

(34:09):
for their cuisine at the same time that camaraderie. Uh.
You know, there's only so many TV stations they're willing
to put people on. There's only so many customers, there's
only so many fannies to go in so many seats.
There's only so many hotels that will give a chef
a deal and take their one or two units and

(34:30):
turn it into ten. Um. So obviously there's a lot
of healthy competition. UM. I don't think there's any competition
for people like Jose andres Uh. Josiandre's is uh to
me uh in rarefied air. Um. Not only is he
one of the handful I'm talking about Top thirty forty

(34:53):
best chefs in the world, Top fifty for sure. I
don't get an argument from from anyone. His skill set
is legendary. Um, we're talking three star Michelin. But can
also put together a sandwich on his vegetarian food truck
Tomato as well as anyone. Um. But he's also created
a a a global UH network for help with his

(35:16):
nonprofit World Central Kitchen. That I mean he was. He
was one of the three finalists for a Nobel Peace
Prize this year. For gosh sakes, first time a chef
has ever been a finalist for a Nobel Peace Prize.
And I hope people understand because of the unique aspects
and talent sets that this community of culinarians has. It's

(35:37):
why I really want to see UH, someone with a
food background become our first foods are And I really
hope before his time as president ends, whether that's one
or two terms, UH, that our current president UH adds
a cabinet level position UH to deal with food in
America because it is that big an issue. It touches everything.

(36:01):
You know, we're in a state of permanent climate emergency.
We're in a permanent state of hunger and waste emergency
in this country, all related to food. The immigration issues
in America, the largest number of illegal immigrants work in
the food business, and and the legal migrants come in
on visa programs that are managed by a group that

(36:22):
doesn't understand food. And so consequently, I believe that all
those things, lumped together, as well as a dozen other
issues we can talk about, make it a requirement that
we established a cabinet level secretary position around food. Okay,
that foods are you talk about all these issues of production,

(36:43):
et cetera. How about something that's been bandied about a
lot in terms of consumption. You're old enough to remember
in the Reagan era when it's school lunches, catch up
was considered a vegetable. So the issue of what people
are consuming, these big multinationals, they literally we have people
creating what is commonly referred to as junk food to

(37:04):
be addictive. Okay, so on some level you can't even
blame the consumer. Can this be turned around? Can of
foods are do something? Or is it's just too late? No,
it's not well for the for a national school lunch program,
it's not too late. In fact, we're seeing it. I
think we're up to uh fourteen states now that have

(37:28):
taken it upon themselves to pass legislation UH requiring all
schools to provide food free of charge to students. And
that's the first step. What I'm insisting on is a
two step process. I would like food two or three

(37:48):
meals a day uh to be because it's the place
to feed kids. Well, let's let's back up one second.
We have a hunger crisis in America. We had it
beaten down to of human beings that were food insecure,
which I think is a bullshit piece of terminology. I
think it's too areadite. It's called hunger of Americans were hungry,

(38:12):
they didn't know where their next day's meals were coming from.
COVID dropped another fifty of human beings below the poverty line,
So now many of those are hungry. I believe we're backup.
Statistics say twenty uh to I think realistically the number
is more like thirty uh. But even those that are

(38:33):
eating are not eating well. To your point, they're buying
their food at dollar general stores. We profiled all these
stories in my MSNBC show What's eating America. I could
cite you chapter and verse on the explosion of these
dollar general stores that do not sell fresh fruit, fresh vegetables,
produced fruit, meats, etcetera. Uh, they sell process food. It's

(38:55):
it's like a a cheap dollar store version of the
center of the super market is supposed the perimeter where
all the fresh food is for kids. I think it's
it's I mean, look, hungry children in America are no
longer a national embarrassment or a shameful piece of our
current situation. I believe it's a criminal situation. Hungry children

(39:18):
in the richest, most successful country in the history of civilization,
to me, is a criminal act. To keep children hungry
as a criminal act. The solutions are widely available. We
have the skill in this country to fix the problem.
We do not have the political will currently to fix
this problem. And this is not red or blue, or

(39:40):
left or right. This has been an issue like the
immigration reform that is so desperately needed, that has been
kicked down the road. Uh, you know, like an old
tin can for thirty five or forty years, going back
as you so, you know the reaganeer, a ketchup is
a vegetable, right, so what do we have to do.
We have to makes school lunch free for everyone. We

(40:01):
have to start cooking again in schools. You and I
are of the same generation. When I was young and
was in school, there were lunch ladies and they actually
had tilt skillets and giants saw tape, and they actually
made food, uh and it and and it came from
There were boxes with heads of lettuce that were cut
up that went into a salad bar. And you know

(40:23):
that that Salsbury steak sometimes tasted like a hockey puck,
but it was made with fresh meat and real ingredients
and what we call whole foods. Right, they weren't empty calories. Now,
even in public schools that are offering free lunch, so
much of the food that's being uh served there are

(40:43):
empty calories. And because the laws in this country say
that kids have to have a certain number of calories,
the easiest way to make the number up if you're
putting healthy food, fruits, vegetable salads, lean meats on a tray.
The way that these schools get around so laws is
stick a caramel roll onto the corner of the tray

(41:06):
and you've you've got your caloric intake number. We're poisoning
our children. Kids who don't eat well in school are tired,
they don't get good grades, their outcomes are are less successful.
This is statistics that I mean. You know, it's very
easy to access from the biggest and most reliable UH
institutions in the country. The pew UH Foundation does incredible

(41:29):
research UH in this regard um it is. It is horrific.
And I will add this to that. Anywhere I've I've
been screaming this from the mountaintop for twenty years. Any
place that the public dollar intersects with food, we are
under serving the people that need the hug that good

(41:49):
food h gives. Public hospitals, public senior centers, public schools,
UH jails, institutions. These people need good, healthy food to
help them recover, live respectfully, get better outcomes in the

(42:10):
cases of kids, lower recidivism rates, the cases of people
who are incarcerated. The warm hug that food gives. That's
talked about in the center fold of those food magazines
where there's like that ten million dollar house in Nantucket
and all the wonderful red, white and blue pley, the
golden retriever, you know, roving around and piles of lobster

(42:30):
and clams. That's a fantasy. That is for the one
tenth of the one percent we have of the population
in this country that need the hug and the nutrition
that good food gets, and we we have the ability
to give it to them. We just don't have the
political will right now to make that a reality. And

(42:51):
that's why I'm working so hard to make that a
reality by trying to talk to politicians, tell these stories,
you know, my MSNBC series What's Eating America out there
and talking about this on shows like yours, because it's
vitally important for people to understand that, you know, as
the late great center of Paul Wellstone, my political mentor
here in Minnesota, used to say, we all win when

(43:14):
we all win, and if we want, if we want
to fulfill the promise of this great nation, we have
to start feeding people properly. We just have to to
not do so is is criminal dereliction. Okay, But one
thing we know is it's expensive to eat healthy. So
it's easy. It's cheaper to eat at rallies than to

(43:35):
make a fresh meal at home. And in an addition,
if you it takes time. Okay, In addition, if you're
Oprah and you have a private chef, it's amazing what
they can make taste good, but we also know their
costs involved. Is there any way to make healthy food
more economically available to people who are challenged financially? Of

(43:59):
course there is, and there's tremendous their tremendous programs out
there in the school lunch front. Uh, you know, challenged
with that same problem. Hey, there's no way for a
dollar seventy nine a meal, you know, or whatever it
is that the public schools at Can you make a healthy,
nutritious meal for kids that they'll eat well. Chef Dan Jiusti,

(44:19):
who was the Chef de cuisine at Noma when it
was America the world's number one restaurant, started a group
called Brigade B R I G A I d UH
in the UH Northeast. He's based, I believe, out of Connecticut,
UM and his company is now working with public schools
I think in three or four states and has proved

(44:41):
that you can by buying smart and preparing fresh, uh,
you can do it and still meet the economic requirements.
It does require extra investment from the government, but what
better use of our funds? And I don't want to
use the old cliche, uh, you know, let's have more
bake sales and fewer aircraft carriers. But that cliche was

(45:02):
true for a reason. I think we do overspend in
a lot of areas that we don't need to overspend in.
Where just a few hundred billion dollars a year, and
I know that's a big amount of money, but when
you compare it to some of the costs of things
we're wasting so much money on, becomes a drop in
the bucket. And I also will say this, Bob, that
we have skewed the food system in this country to

(45:26):
reward the farm to freighter agricultural community. Giant agribusinesses that
grow seed corn and soybeans and cotton and all the
rest of that are the ones that get what are
now insurance incentitives, incentives that are also called subsidies. Right.
It's it's just transferred over into crop insurance and stuff.

(45:47):
They're able to farm ten thousand acres with just five
to ten employees because they're driving these giant behemoth machines
that plant and picked the food food fit for human consumption.
All of it has been legally labeled. This is why
we needed. Foods are has been legally labeled a specialty
crop so they can't get crop insurance right. And yes,

(46:08):
in a sense it is especially great. It has to
be picked by You can't a machine can't pick a
tomato or a great has to be picked by hand.
Let us has to be picked by hand. Payers have
to be picked by hand. But if we could invest
in food, what better thing to invest in then feeding Americans.
It is the to me, it is a no brainer.

(46:29):
That's where we should be investing. And if we invested
federal moneys and subsidized farmers who were raising food for
human consumption to the same degree that we're allowing insurance
subsidies for these farms to freighter economy farmers, uh, the
system would literally self correct all by itself. If we
invest in real nutritious food. We've just done the opposite.

(46:52):
You know, we all know we've heard that that point.
It's true. Seventy of the food in America is produced
by the same seven companies. We're destroying our biospheres with
these giant agri businesses. All of the runoff from those
farms and those chicken uh, giant chicken farms and feed
lots where the cows are standing in their own filth

(47:14):
goes into our water system. We never had algae blooms
to the degree that we do now. Uh, stifling algae
blooms that kill off huge swaths of our coastal fishing zone. UM.
Until we started interesting these chemicals into the waters. We
can literally trace them from the Gulf into farms in

(47:34):
the giant agri businesses in the Midwest. Because all of
that filth is going into the rivers like the Mississippi
and dumping into the Gulf. We need someone with common
sense ruling the roost. Here. Foods are for the wind.
From time immemorial, there's been the image of the tyrant,

(47:58):
abusive chef. All of a sudden seen comes along. We
have the me too era Mario Batali, let's use the
word was outed. What is really going on? And will
progress be made? Has progress been made? An amazing amount
of progress has been made, and it requires a lot
more progress. That toxic environment that I talked about before,

(48:21):
the part that relates to this question is often referred
to as toxic masculinity and restaurants. UM. You know, the
the majority of chefs in America for generations have been
uh you know, old white men, and they have been
allowed uh societally, culturally, uh to create environments that are

(48:46):
uh unfair, uh in many ways, illegal in many ways,
and toxic in many ways. UM. Let's start with pay structure.
It's it's ridiculous that the you know, a active man
or woman at twenty something up at the front of
the host and makes thirty dollars an hour and a
dish dishwasher makes eight nine or ten and worse, eight

(49:09):
nine or ten under the table with no benefits. UM,
that's ridiculous the amount of uh. And this is something
that has been a problem in our industry for a
long time, and I think it's unfair when people say that,
uh it's no longer a problem. It's a problem. Alcohol,
drugs and mental health issues in the restaurant community is

(49:31):
at a number that is, depending on who study you
look at, uh six seven percent higher than it is
in the in the rest of our population. UM. I'm
working with an organization out of Atlanta called the Giving
Kitchen UH working on their alcoholism and addiction programs as

(49:51):
they roll out these programs into other states to try
to help people because the restaurants have done a really
lousy job of doing it. If you work at you know, uh,
the company down the road and you're having mental health issues,
rugger alcoholism problems, you can actually get your company to
help you with the HR department will help you access treatment, etcetera.

(50:14):
It's one of those places that restaurants, despite being a
trillion and a half dollar industry, are hundreds of thousands,
six hundred seventy, six hundred and eighty thousand, to be exact, uh, independent,
little micro businesses, some of them very small, couple hundred
grand a year little mom and pop Delhi on a
tiny little town on Main Street, or that twenty million
dollar a year restaurants in New York City or Los

(50:35):
Angeles that everyone is dying to get into, and everything
in between. We need to service our employees better, We
need to take better care of them, and we need
to understand that the byproducts of decades of decades and decades,
and in this country four hundred and two years of

(50:57):
white privilege has created toxic levels of intolerance in many
businesses all across America, and restaurants are no exception to
this rule. Um, but restaurants can fix themselves faster than
big corporations, and what we've seen is incredible leaders uh

(51:19):
in all states. I mean I could start naming names
and and never stop. We don't have time to list them.
All of people who have created open source playbooks for
retraining employees, for managing restaurants, for instituting profit sharing and
coop based revenue systems, who have figured out ways to
to pay people better than a living wage, uh, so

(51:42):
that people don't have to have two or three jobs
to uh, you know, put a roof over their family's
head and feed them uh and pay for the basic necessities.
And still doing it in the restaurant industry, I think
one of the silver linings. And I hate talking about
this topic. I almost feel guilty, and I know I'm
gonna get a lot of letters about it. The fact

(52:04):
of the matter is is that while COVID has kneecapped
our industry and has destroyed, you know, put thirty percent
of it out of business, and maybe more now with
this explosion of the delta variant, the one saving grace,
uh is that I think twenty years from now, when
we have the numbers and we're gonna be able to
look back and realize that it was in knock on Wood.

(52:26):
Things don't get too much worse that we literally shifted
from doing business and restaurants one way to a variety
of other business models that actually worked better, were fairer
for everyone, and didn't just reward the few, but instead
rewarded the all. And I don't mean that in the
commonly when whenever I talked about these people immediately start

(52:48):
screaming socialist at me. Couldn't be further from the truth.
I am very much a capitalist. Uh I believe in capitalism.
I actually believe as an entrepreneur that that small business
and big business can actually save uh culture can save
this country uh In for many different reasons, UM, but

(53:10):
I very much of the capitalist. I just believe that
we have used the wrong economics and the wrong revenue
system in restaurants and been benefiting the onlys. And I
think that the I think that's time. That time has come,
and I think smart and savvy operators have realized they
can actually be more successful in uh In using more

(53:33):
varieties of business models, keeping the cash register ringing, not
just in lunch and dinner, uh using bonuses and incentives
and and yes even co op models, and yes, even
paying their employees more Uh. Michael Thestoria Um owns a
a booming franchise, one of the one of the most
popular pizza franchises in America and one of the fastest growing,

(53:57):
by the way, called and Pizza. Uh. People can look
him up Michael Historian his companies and Pizza. I think
he's got forty locations around the northeastern United States something
like that, and growing very quickly. Um. He's paying people
what everyone else considers an exorbitant rate and is one
of the most outspoken proponents of taking care of your

(54:19):
own people first, which, by the way, is a Danny
Meyer idea. Danny Meyer was the one thirty years ago
who said the customer is not the most important person
in the restaurant. The most important person in the restaurant
are the employees. If you don't take care of your
own people, then you have nothing to offer someone who
walks in the door when you're open. And I believe
those principles are very very important. Okay, Earlier you mentioned

(54:42):
that given a choice, you'd like to hang with restaurant
employees in those in recovery. What is special about those
in the recovery? Is it just a shared experience, or
do you learn something that those who have not been
through the process don't have uh the latter um, And

(55:04):
by the way, I should expand that, I was saying
that with a with a smile and a wink. UM.
I like hanging out with people who have been through
some heavy ship. I like hanging out with people who
have been forced to make some changes, have either had
a phoenix like experience rising from the ashes, had the

(55:27):
Joseph Campbell Hero's journey, and he was talking about, you know,
the odisious of of ancient Greek mythology. Tested kept away
from home for thirty years until finally returning to his
beloved athens um and that was the way that he
became spiritually fit and closer in understanding to what made

(55:49):
him happy. UM. I believe that people who have uh
not been tested in life, who have not faced uh
at because I think we all do at some point
incredible challenges UM, don't become the fullest versions of themselves.
And I really love being I think food people are

(56:12):
most generous people in the whole world. I mean one
reason while our industry has been kneecapped for the last
nineteen twenty months. I mean literally kneecapped. Who are what
are we doing? We're just borrowing money from banks to
feed first responders. I mean, you know, food people are
still cooking for other people and we can't we can't
help it. We This is how we believe in serving

(56:34):
our communities. UM. And I believe people in recovery once
they've established a a a firm handle on their own
sobriety from whatever they're recovering from whatever there is um
is UM. I think those people who are doing the
real work to change themselves are some of the most
inspirational people in the whole world. UM. I wish uh

(56:58):
that uh someone who look like Santa Claus but without
a hat, parted the clouds and whispered the the truth
of life, the answer to all the questions that I
have about you know, how to be happy, joyous and free.
I wish that that that happened to me, but it
never has. Where I've heard and learned from people is

(57:22):
from folks who have been through the same challenges in
life that I face or will face. UM, who share
their experience, strength and hope with me. And when they
do that, I believe that's actually my higher power talking
to me. Without getting to out there. I hear the
answers all the time from other human beings. That's who

(57:44):
That's where I get my spiritual strength from. Uh. Is
not from Santa Claus in the sky, but from other
human beings. Okay, how does a nice Jewish boy from
New York City like you who goes to you know,
high level institutions like Dalton and end up in the
food world? Oh? Boy, I knew when I was four

(58:05):
years old. I think those other detours were I was
very lucky that my parents had me in those places
because I I received an education that allowed me to read, write,
and think critically, um, and have some heightened level of

(58:25):
intellectual curiosity and really be tested at school and enjoy
it um and uh. But all along my parents were
also traveling with me all around the world, cooking with me.
My mother was an incredible cook, my father was an
incredible cook. They both loved to travel. UH. We ate

(58:46):
to travel and travel to eight. I've been around the
world two or three times by the time I was
fifteen years old. Um, what did you My dad was
in the advertising business, and at one point his domestic
agency decided they were going to go international and so
they had to take a bunch of executives and actually
be out on the road for years and years and

(59:07):
years establishing these outside agencies. First by uh what's now
called acquisition, right. You acquire an agency in London or France,
or Rome or Paris or Rome, uh, and then you
stock it with some people to establish your own culture.
And then you send your c suite executives over there

(59:27):
on a regular basis to be checking up on things.
You know, there was you know, this is the sixties
and seventies, by the way. Um. And so my father
would you know, he'd have to go to Paris for
three or four days because there was an issue over there.
And if I was staying with him my parents were divorced,
I would go. There was no nanny or babysitter. And

(59:48):
my father believed that me going away with him was
learning as much as I would anywhere else. Uh. The
very progressive Dalton school that I was in h agreed.
And so I would find myself at age nine sitting
in a little seafood restaurant in LaSalle in Paris. The
old the old fishing docks and and the just a

(01:00:12):
place where there was danger, where there was you know old,
you know, dirty music on the jukebox, where the lights
were low, where there was a baseball bat and a
gun behind the bar that had been used. But the
food was incredible. And we're sitting there eating these tiny
little big ornio, these steamed periwinkles, these little tiny blue

(01:00:33):
snails because my father's counterpart, who ran the French agency,
Jacques Lange, loved drinking pastie and eating uh, these big
orno and then having a saute piece of fish for dinner.
And my father loved it too. And I just sat
there reading my book while they talked business, and it

(01:00:57):
was it was life changing for me. I was hooked.
I want it to be a part of that mystique
and that that that or I loved everything about the
food business. And then when I was the summer I
turned fourteen, I asked my dad for that the spring
before I turned four. You're the only you're the only
kid or the other only child, only child, but my

(01:01:19):
my father, I'm a July baby. So in you know,
April of that year, I went to my dad and said, hey,
summer's coming up. I kind of like an allowance raise,
and you know, I think I was getting whatever seventy
five cents. I'd like a buck And my dad looked
at me and he said, what do you mean? And
I said, you know, allow, it's a little a little

(01:01:39):
something something for me. Now. My father, greatest generation, lied
about his age, went into the Navy, you know, it
was in the Pacific for three years, came back, helped
build a big company. Um didn't take any crap from anybody.
He was a legendary figure in the ad agency world
of the fifties, sixties and seventies, and and you know,

(01:02:02):
he was the He was one of those people who
had gravitational pull around them. Everyone loved my father, UM,
and you know that that everything slanted towards him when
he walked into the room. I'm a pale version of
my dad, much paler. And my father looked at me
and laughed and told me to to get out of

(01:02:24):
his room. I mean literally chase ma. And I was like,
what what did I do? And the next day he explained,
my dad loved to make me sleep on stuff. And
the next day he explained to me that I was
going to turn fourteen, allowance was over time to get
a job. M That irked me for a while, but
I immediately countered with great, I want to work at

(01:02:46):
the Quiet Clam, which was a seafood restaurant that some
family friends owned on the Montauk Highway in East Hampton.
This is nineteen and uh, my father said, you can't
work in a restaurant. How are you can't bike there?
It's too far. I said, I'll get someone to drive me.
I'll find I'll get a lift. He goes, well, Maggie
and Irene haven't even offered you the job yet. I said,

(01:03:09):
I'll go ask them. And thus became the process, a
month long of negotiating with my parents to work at
this seafood restaurant, which I did, and I had a
natural ability for it. I cooked with my mother for
you know, a decade. Um, I'd forged. We didn't call
it foraging. Uh we we we gather food. We'd rake
for clams at Barnes Landing. We'd surfcast for striped bass.

(01:03:32):
We uh you know, go crabbing in the ponds beyond
the Georgia Coad Breakwater. Um, we would go ealing in
three mile Harbor. I mean, you know, my father loved
to collect food and throw it on the grill at
the beach or whatever. We pull muscles up from in
between the rocks on the jetties. Uh. And my mother
had a huge garden at our home, and so I'd

(01:03:56):
been food for so I knew how to chop a tomato.
I knew how to shock a clam. I knew how
to grill a piece of meat. And I also had
a natural aptitude for it. And so I became pretty
successful throughout my high school years cooking at this restaurant.
Went away to college because my father believed I needed
to go to a good college, uh and studying art

(01:04:18):
history and history. For a while, I thought I was
going to teach art history. Um, there's a lot of
similarities that art history has uh with with food. You know,
you look at a painting. I remember Madam Karetsky in
the in the first day of the first class of
you know, Renaissance painting, put a put a painting by
a Dutch master up on a wall from from the

(01:04:41):
Northern Renaissance era. UM. And you know, it was a
woman and she's standing in front of a window, and
there's a table and a dog and a bowl of
fruit on the you know, and that's really all you
can see. And she asked everyone to write down everything
you see in that painting. So everyone did. It wound
up being, you know, fifteen twenty nuns. And then she

(01:05:02):
spent the rest of the forty five minutes after calling
on a few students, just to verify that no one
could actually look at this painting the way she could.
And she then spent forty five minutes explaining what she saw. Uh,
there were pineapples. They don't grow in the fruit ball,
they don't grow in holland that met the family was wealthy.
Through the window you could see boats. That was probably there's.

(01:05:24):
They were traders based on the dress, the material, the
jewelry she had. And so she told this story of
you know, of of you know coastal uh the coastal Netherlands, um,
you know, in the fifteen hundreds in a way that
was like Sherlock Holmes to me. I mean, how did
she deduce this? I was staggered, and so I fell

(01:05:48):
in love with our history. Had always studied history. I'm
a double major, you know, got a essentially a degree
in both. And I realized one day when I was
staring at a bowl of china fina a jungle market
in nicaraguach. I'm fine as a stew made of inners
guts of the animals. It's you know, couching, a povera,

(01:06:08):
the food of the poor, right, and it's it was
made in big ten gallon barrels and all the workers
and the people who finally got off work at ten
o'clock at night after starting at seven in the morning.
By the way, I would come by and for a
few uh you know, shekels be able to have a
big bowl of this incredibly nutritious food, but one made

(01:06:29):
with parts that other people overlooked. And I looked at
my bowl. It was probably the third or fourth season
of Bizarre Foods and I and I just started talking
about what this bowl of food looked like to me.
And I didn't see, you know, intestines and livers and
hearts and lungs um and onions and hot chilies, uh

(01:06:52):
and and coconut milk. I saw, you know, families and
the struggle to put food on the table and not
being able to afford anything else, and raising animals and
keeping the the innards to yourself when you had to
harvest them and sell them, uh so that you could,
you know, buy some school books for your kid. And
I started to talk about Nicaraguan culture in you know,

(01:07:15):
fourteen uh, the same way that Madam Koretsky talked about
you know, Northern European culture in fifteen sixty eight, and
I realized that it was the exact same thing. You
have to look at something and get a snapshot of history.
It's actually what drew me. And I'm not blowing smoke
where I shouldn't. We've just met, but in full transparency,

(01:07:37):
we have been emailing each other back and forth several
times over the last couple of years. It's one of
the things that I loved about your newsletters that I'm
addicted to because you you do the same thing. You
draw inferences and are able to illuminate parts of our
contemporary culture or do comparative cultural studies to the way
things may have been thirty or forty years ago to

(01:07:59):
the way they are now in talking about music, and
I feel that I do the same thing, uh in
with food. Maybe I'm also a paler version of you,
although I am an art history major too. Are you
really absolutely, oh my gosh, fantastic, But making it about you,
You're in college, you know, the next period of your life. Hey,

(01:08:23):
are you working in restaurants? Be? Does that make it separate?
You separate from the people? Advass or see you graduate?
How do you get into the industry? And how do
you fall off the edge with alcohol and drugs, etcetera.
So that period, I was already a daily cocaine user
and a a chipper, a weekend heroin user. By the

(01:08:44):
time I graduated college high school in the nineteen seventy nine,
I mean pillows every day, smoking weed every day, doing
coke every day. Weekends are for uh, we're for sniffing heroin.
And I had fallen in love with hallucinogenic mushrooms and
so two or three times a week I'm eating those.

(01:09:07):
I'm a true New York City garbage head. Um. It
was impossible to uh maintain the focus on my school work. Impossible. Um.
After my first Tuesday after my freshman year in college,
I was asked to take a mandatory semester off. UM.
So the summer of nineteen eighty I went to Italy

(01:09:30):
and I worked for nine months uh in a restaurant. Lie.
I worked for four months in a restaurant in Venice
during their peak time, UH called a La Columba restaurants
that's still there, uh, right around the corner from the
tavernas La Finch uh stone's throw from Saint Mark's Place.

(01:09:52):
And I worked there for four or four and a
half months, UM, and then I went to Paris and
worked for at Last Center at a restaurant called Larca
Strata uh, in the same building that now houses are
Peg another very famous three star Michelin restaurant. A Larca
Strata had three Michelin stars. At the time, there was
no Italian How did you get these gigs? Well, those

(01:10:13):
were the days. This is fascinating. I mean you talk
about a time shift. Those were the days when if
you were an American culinarian, uh, you could knock on
the back door of a fancy restaurant and asked to
work there, And if you were smart, you just said,
I'll work for free, knowing that if you're good, they'll
wind up paying you something. But at least they'll let

(01:10:35):
you sleep on the banquets at night, or they have
a place where people can sleep. I remember at one
point at Alla Columba, I was sleeping in in literally
an attic of a of a farm. There were cows
living below me. And I was up in the attic.
It was the best living. I slept like a baby
every single night, probably because I was so exhausted. Uh

(01:10:58):
But but then the chef would pick me up in
the morning and we'd walk to the vegetable market and
the rialto seafood market, and we pick up all the
stuff for the restaurants. And I learned about ingredients because
I was the guy carrying the chef's stuff and wheeling
it on this two wheeler through the cobblestone streets of Venice,
because I was the lowest guy in the totem pole.

(01:11:19):
But as that uh well about to term nineteen year old, um,
I was learning about ingredients I've never seen before in America. Right,
I'd never seen a razor clams as thin as a pencil.
I never knew to open them. You dip the end
in a little pile of salt that you keep in
a cup in your station, and they sort of open
up for a second. You can run your finger through

(01:11:41):
and not damage the raw razor clam, still keep them
alive and remove them from the shell. I didn't know
there were eight types of trevisa lettuce that we commonly
call ridicio in this country. Um and that the tight
head of ridicilo that we eat in this country was
unknown to Italy. We actually genetically engineered it to the
whole and tight use Americans like stuff where you get

(01:12:02):
a lot of weight for your money, right, um. And
so I learned all this stuff in this restaurant. Then
I went to Paris to stand knocked on a door.
So in those days, this is the late seventies, early eighties,
you could actually do that. I was talking to Thomas Keller,
one of the deans of American cooking and you know,

(01:12:23):
arguably the most important chef of the last fifty years
in America. Um and and again someone for whom he
will still be in the books a hundred years from now. Um.
And I asked him about stagiers and interns from cooking schools.
I said, how many applications do you get a year
two stage and intern in your restaurants? Because if you

(01:12:45):
could work for three or four months in a Thomas
Keller restaurant, it gets you a much better, more plumb
position at the next place that you move on to
and it and it gives you connections to some of
the best culinarians in the world. And uh, he said, well,
we stopped counting fifteen years ago when we hit ten
thousand applications a year. So that just shows you how

(01:13:06):
popular food is. I went to the Culinary Institute of
America at one point because I thought I should go
to cooking school. And I didn't have a great experience
there on the on the day that I was I
was there, Um, I already knew a lot, had been
cooking a lot, and and the CIA was you know
that there was no waiting list. I think now there's

(01:13:27):
like a five year winning list to get into the
c I A. I mean, it's just it's it's an incredible,
incredible explosion in the food business in America on every
single front. Um, when I was cooking and coming up,
and I think it was a good thing, because I
may have abandoned the thing I love more than anything
in the whole world if it had been more difficult

(01:13:49):
for me. Um, I was such a horrific drug addict
and alcoholic. I somehow and by the way, alcoholism at
the level that I was, uh suffering from the disease
is oftentimes exemplified by you know, gross irresponsibility and gross
responsibility at the same time, right, So I would show
up for work and kick ass and make myself literally indispensable, right,

(01:14:12):
I mean literally indispensable. Um. And then I would just
disappear on a bender for three days, or steal a
hundred dollars from the till, or take two bottles of vodka.
And folks in the food business and the restaurants that
I was working in, and by the way, some very
good ones put up with this because I was the
only guy that could put out two d orders of

(01:14:33):
risotto on a Saturday night in three hours on only
four burners. Um. I remember one restaurant I was in
hearing a discussion between the general manager and the owner.
The owner saying, you have to fire this guy, the
general manager saying to him, who's gonna do two hundred
egg dishes on Sunday brunch? We don't have anyone to
do that. So I the general manager, saying, I don't

(01:14:56):
care that he steals bucks worth of booze from every weekend.
You know, is he an addict? Sure? Is he you know,
a reprehensible mess? Sure? Is he an alcoholic? Absolutely? Is
he a thief? For sure? But we know what he's
doing and he can cook the gosh darn eggs um
and eventually my food career. I cooked in some really

(01:15:19):
great places and made quite a good name for myself
in New York. Then the wheels came off and I
became a homeless mess. I wound up trying to kill
myself in a flop house hotel in January, uh, in
New York City. Some friends found me, and a few
days later I woke up and I was in a
hospital attached to what is now Hazel and Betty Ford.

(01:15:45):
You say you tried to kill yourself, A little bit slower.
You were in such a bad place. Was his heroine?
You're in the floor. Give me a little more detail,
a little more fot I kicked. I kicked hard drugs
three years before I went homeless. Um. In negotiation with
my friends, my girlfriend, my parents, Oh, the problem is

(01:16:09):
hard drugs. I'll get rid of those, right. The problem
wasn't hard drugs. The problem was me. The problem was
I couldn't handle taking anything that affected me from the
neck up. Uh. But the drugs and alcohol are just
a symptom. I I had a life problem. I had
a responsibility problem. I had a spiritual illness. I was
I was soul sick. I was I was incapable of

(01:16:32):
living life on life's terms. I I I I didn't
need to be rehabilitated. I needed to be hubilitated. I
didn't have any of it. So um, little by little,
I gave up everything, and then eventually I just got
you know, I went from that phase. It's it's a
very unique thing for alcoholics and drug addicts. You you

(01:16:54):
you're in a phase where you tell people, when confronted
with the truth, you know, by by people who love you, Hey,
I love you, You're my best friend, You're you're you're
a mess, and you've done X, Y and Z, and
you got fired from your job, and your wife is
leaving you, and the dog won't talk to you, and
you you're you've got no money in the bank account.
And the police said all this stuff is you have

(01:17:14):
all these horrific things that have happened to you, your consequences,
and you sit there and and you deny it. Oh, oh,
well here's why, and that's not really the case. And
well I wasn't really arrested. And she I really don't
want to have that relationship with her, So I'm happy
she's out of my life. And you just make every
excuse in the book. And I went from that place

(01:17:37):
about four years before I sobered up, to a place
where if you confronted me with those things, I told
you to go screw yourself and get out of my way.
I didn't care. I didn't care that I was that way.
And then eventually you get a case of what in
recovery we call the buckets, where you're just like, you
don't care. Fuck it. And at that point I did

(01:17:59):
lower and lower and lower and lower, and crossed lines
and barriers, uh that I never thought. I never thought
I would I would cross. I never thought I would
become a petty, petty criminal. That wasn't when when I
was ten fifteen years old, that wasn't in my Hey, someday,
I want to be so desperate that I'm gonna stand

(01:18:22):
in the freezing cold outside of nightclubs in New York
that I know, and when a drunk business guy in
an expensive custom suit, because I could recognize one right
go stumbling by. If he's not with any other friends,
I'm gonna follow him, push him into the alley, grab
his wallet, and run, or I'm gonna steal purses off
the backs of restaurant chairs on a summer's day and

(01:18:44):
Madison Avenue, run to the wall at Central Park, vaulted
and head down to Alphabet City and sell the credit
cards and passport and get some cash to to get
high with. I never thought I was going to be
that person. I never thought I would be the person
whose parents would think they were dead. And I knew
they thought that I was. It wasn't around, but didn't care.

(01:19:05):
I'd rather just keep drinking and drugging endlessly. Wake up
and use pass out, wake up and use pass out. UM.
Eventually I got UH evicted from my There is a
Sheriff of New York by the way. This was are
a sheriff of Los Angeles, UM the UH. Shockingly, the

(01:19:26):
Sheriff of New York UM knocked on my door one
day with an eviction notice, and I wound up going
down to the bar. I had no one to call
for help. There was there was not a single human
being whose number I could call. There was not a
single human being who would take my call. UM. I

(01:19:51):
had burned every bridge, and so I went down to
the bar where I drank. This is by the way
around the corner from the port authority a shot and
beer bar that is the last stop on the on
the subway for uh many people. Most of the regular
customers in there just died of alcoholism, were wound up
in institutions. And um, I would drink with these people

(01:20:14):
till four or five in the morning. Then they closed
the place for half an hour, spray it down, and
then let you back in. And I went down there
and this this old drunk named a J. I can
see him. I've never forgotten what he looked like that night.
He didn't have all his teeth, he had a big beard, glasses.
He was the loudmouth guy, but he was kind of
like the ringleader, was the cock of the walk in

(01:20:36):
that bar. And he's like, what's up? And I was
just like God evicted. And he said, sleep with us tonight.
And I said, where are you sleeping? He goes, we
have an abandoned building down on Sullivan Street that were squatting,
and uh, I said, okay, I had a by the
way that I had a duffel bag of dirty clothes
with me, and so I spent eleven months of my

(01:20:58):
life sleeping on that pile of dirty clothes in an
abandoned building on Sullivan Street. Uh, cement casements in the windows. Um.
It was when I look back on it, it was awful,
and to me it was completely okay at the time.
I used to steal a bottle of comic cleanser, uh

(01:21:19):
every couple of days at the bodega down the street. Uh,
you know, put some comic cleanser in your jacket pocket
by a pack of smokes kind of thing, and then
sprinkle a circle of comic cleanser around, uh my pile
of dirty clothes so the rats and roaches wouldn't crawl
over me when I passed out. Um. And eventually one

(01:21:41):
day I woke up there and I just realized there's
winners and losers in this world. Will Actually, right after
New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, I woke up
there and I just thought, I've I'm irredeemable and I'm hopeless.
This is I literally should just end it all. I
was in so much pain getting up every morning that

(01:22:02):
hitting the bottle even you know, chugging at it, and
you know, you know, like I said, I kicked the
hard drugs, but I was still drinking booze and smoking
with and drinking. By the way, a lot, a lot
large volumes of alcohol. I was very turned out. It
was very sick. I found out when I got to
the hospital unit at Hazelden I needed to be there
for four or five days and said the usual one

(01:22:23):
or two because they were very concerned about my body
giving out, UM, my organs, my my liver and kidney's
most importantly. UH. And I just decided that I was
I was gonna end it all. And I stole some
jewelry from my godmother and I went in and I
hocked it in New Jersey. By the way, huge mistake.

(01:22:45):
Never steal something in one town, cross the state lines
and hocket another and leave a paper trail with your
name on it. UH. That's very typical alcoholic behavior. I
wound up facing that charge when I was two years
sober in Minnesota, UH, and pled guilty to it because

(01:23:06):
I did it, and recovery had taught me to answer
for the stuff that I did, and I was facing
a couple of years in the workhouse at at best,
and I wound up getting an action in contemplation of
dismissal because of the service work that I had done.
Thanks to the loving community here in Minnesota, that got me. Well, um,
but when when I went to kill myself and I well,

(01:23:28):
I took this money that I from the jewelry at Hawks,
and I went to the San Pedro Hotel and I
just bought a ton of vodka and just went into
this hotel and just started chugging booze around the clock,
knowing I just knew in my gut my body's gonna
gonna quit. I was very, very sick, and I drank around.
I know I was there for at least three days,

(01:23:48):
but no more than five. Uh and uh based on
you know, the information my friends had about that they
got from the hotel person about when I got in
and when they came around me. And uh, two days later,
I was on the plane one way ticket to Minnesota. Okay,

(01:24:13):
a couple of things. One, you know, just like the
TV show Intervention, someone can need to go to rehab,
but they either don't want to or they go and
they jump. So, okay, what's your thought process? And then
you get out your Minnesota, how do you get back
into the food world? Super super easy, I mean easy

(01:24:37):
answer to both, but I guess I'm really talking beyond that.
You end up building let me let me get to
my question a little more specifically, you end up building
this empire. Most people, when asked that question, they say, well,
it just happened. Okay, I'm sophisticated enough to know it

(01:24:57):
never just tapped. It was very intentional on very so
walk me through accepting rehabilitation and then deciding that you
wanted to be more than just a chef and a restaurant. Um.
Really very simple story. Um. It was not my first
go round at recovery. The difference was that that particular

(01:25:20):
uh time, I would have sobered up in a liquor store.
I was sick and tired of being sick and tired,
and I had just this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little
light that came under my door, and I just focused
on that little tiny light. And I had a series
of experiences my first thirty days in recovery sufficient to

(01:25:40):
get me to point C, D and E. I went
to a half I had a good experience in my
primary treatment at Hazel, and I went to I. I
just said yes to everything I was told to do.
I got a sponsor, I went to meetings, I went
lived in the halfway house first seven months. Uh, they
told me get a job. I got a job washing

(01:26:01):
toilets uh in the the workhouse and jail system in St.
Downtown St. Paul. That was so horrific a job. I
got another job two days later as a dishwasher in
a coffee shop. Now a coffee shop here in Minnesota
kind of like once in New York. Uh is a

(01:26:21):
place not like a Starbucks, but a place that opens
at six am and serves breakfast and lunch all day long.
And they have lots of hot coffee and just sit
on stools and UH. Sometimes that the employees who worked
in the kitchen, there were two of them, wouldn't show up.
I showed up every day, uh for that job. It
was the best job I ever had. I never wanted
a job so much in my life is that job.

(01:26:44):
And I treated it like like gold. And uh when
they were sick, I would cook or or they wouldn't
show and I would cook and the owners were like, Wow,
you're sandwich is looking really good today. In the soup
seems really good. And uh so I got, you know,
a little bit of a raise and some preferential hours.

(01:27:07):
But I was just very anonymous and going back to
my halfway house every night. And eventually I decided to
become a dishwasher at a better restaurant, and my plan
was to still to go back to New York when
I got out of the halfway house, and so I
went to this uh, French restaurant in that had just opened.

(01:27:28):
It was like two days old. And I knew that
the restaurant was owned by two French guys in New
York that I knew from partying days in sag Harbord.
They owned a restaurant in New York of the same name,
Cafe and de Ti in the Theater District. And they
had opened a Cafe and de Ti in the Fauchet
Tower right around the corner from the Theater District here

(01:27:50):
in the Twin Cities. Um and uh, you know, so
I knew that it would be a good place to work,
and so I went there and I got a job
as a dishwasher. And one day one of the cooks
didn't show up for work, and um, it was really
pretty straightforward. I went up to the owner and the

(01:28:11):
chef and I said, look, I can put out that
guy's station. And it was the grill station onion, soup,
steak free. It's you know, a couple of appetizers, scargo
went under the broiler there. It was a very very
simple station. It did a couple of specials that day,
and the lunch menu a chicken pie ard, a couple
other things. Um, but you know it's ten twelve items

(01:28:31):
on the menu came off of that station. It was
the easiest station I thought in the restaurant um. And
I've been watching for a couple of weeks. You know,
as the dishwasher, you're running down and grabbing bus tubs
of pots and pants from underneath the counters where the
chefs are cooking. The cooks are cooking, and you know,
my perch in the dish room, I could see what

(01:28:51):
all the people were doing. And frequently, when there's no
more dishes to watch your peeling potatoes, are working on
prep for the chef. And so you know, I'm just
oiling an anonymity. They're very blissfully by the way. This
guy gets sick. They don't have a choice. They have
to let me cook. And they're like, well, the dish washer, okay,
keep an eye in and we'll take a couple of
dishes away from you so it's easier. I'm like, I

(01:29:12):
can do it. I can do it. They're like, well,
do you know how to grill the salmon. It's like,
I don't know how to I know how to grill
the salmon. Um. And after the lunch shift ended, the
owner of the restaurant, I remember, opened the door to
his office and as I was walking by, and I
remember just seeing his finger and I walked in the
office and he he sat me down and he said,
can you answer me one? I have one question for you?

(01:29:33):
And I said sure. He said, can you explain to
me why my dishwasher just put out food better than
the chef in my restaurant does? And why when everything
went to ship on the line in the middle of
lunch because they were packed. I mean they were just
murdered with business, um, and with lunch, you're just slammed

(01:29:55):
all at once. They were doing a full second turn,
which is how popular it was. But great, there was
no French bistro in that town. Every rest every city
needs a French bistro in a big seat like Minneapolis,
right in downtown. It was quite famous. Um. And I said,
I've worked in restaurants all my life and I'm just

(01:30:16):
here in Minnesota for a while. And the guy said,
why And I told him and he said, well, he says, I,
I'll make you the chef in this restaurant. And I said, well,
first of all, you're you're offering that to me immediately
shows me that you don't know what you're doing. I said,
so I'm less inclined to take that job. But I
also can't take that job because I'm living in a

(01:30:36):
halfway house. I have to go home and I have
to be there every night at five o'clock, right And uh,
I said, but I love my my job dishwashing here
and I'd like to keep it. And he said, uh, well,
I'm gonna talk to the chef. We're gonna have you
prepping and do it. So I was washing dishes, I
was waiting some tables, I was prepping and uh. I
worked there for four months and then I got out

(01:30:57):
of the halfway house and I needed to earn money
to put a roof over my head. And I went
back to him and I said, is that job offer
still available? And he said yes, and I said, great,
I'll take it. And he said, do you want to
negotiate salary? I said not at all. I said, you
pay me whatever you think is fair. He said, you're

(01:31:18):
kidding me, and I said no. I said, you're gonna
pay me more three months from now and six months
from more, but you start me whatever you want, because
remember I'm going from dishwasher at six dollars an hour
whatever it was back then, to like the highest salary
position in the restaurant. Um. But I also knew that
I could change that restaurant and make it great, uh,
and that the current team there was was not capable

(01:31:40):
of that. And I told him I just need these
These are the three nights off that I can't work
because I need to go to my meetings. I want
permission to have a daytime meeting from noon, sorry, from
two to three o'clock, three days a week in the
back of the dining room. He said sure, And I
negotiated some other stuff all around my recovery, stuff that
my my sponsor in the twelve step program that I

(01:32:02):
was attending, had insisted on, by the way, and uh.
And that was it. And after five or six years
of you know, that restaurant, we within a year I
replaced everyone and was arguably I mean not my words,
wasn't are the magazines and newspapers you know called it
the best restaurant in town. It was. Uh. We did
so well it allowed the managing partner in Minneapolis to

(01:32:26):
buy the place back after I've been there a year,
from the French partners in New York who didn't want
to run it or own a restaurant in Minneapolis anyway.
UM and so I felt very good about what we
achieved there. And then I decided. I had a moment
of clarity about five six years in. I realized I
was telling stories with my food and telling stories to

(01:32:47):
my staff, but I felt my stories needed a bigger audience.
And I wasn't going to be the best version of
myself if I stayed cooking in a restaurant as much
as I love them. And this is ninete eight nine nine, UM,

(01:33:09):
and I left. I resigned, and I got a job,
an internship, unpaid at a radio station, a magazine, the
Big Glossy Monthly Minneapolis State Paul Magazine, Radio State, big
radio station in town doing a weekend radio show for

(01:33:30):
an hour on food. And a TV station, a local Uh.
It was a up N station after it was Channel nine.
It was an independence In those days in the Midwest,
there was still radio independent TV stations owned by single people.
Like a person owned this station and programmed it with
stuff from all the other stuff that just doesn't exist.

(01:33:52):
And I don't think there's a TV station like that
left in America. But Stu Swartz owned this, this station
that him a up N station, then a Fox O
and O, UM and I started doing their morning. I
was a food feature reporter and once the week I
would do a little food recipe thing. And after ninety
days of working for free for all of them, I just,

(01:34:15):
I mean, it's my it's no secret. Get a job
for free, make yourself indispensable, the wind up paying you.
UM and I just I very much had a one,
five and ten year plan, and I just put you know,
my dream wasn't a dream, it was a goal because
I had actual steps leading up to what it would

(01:34:38):
take to achieve my goal. I wanted to have a
TV show that broadcast internationally talking about food and culture
as a unifying element in a world that I felt
we were only talking about the things that divided us.
And I I, if you try to sell that show,

(01:34:59):
no one's go to Bube. So I knew I had
to invent a hook. So I sort of sold a
Trojan Horse UM and I the hook that I created was,
you know, fat white guy goes around the world, eats
bugs and sort of exaggerating, but you you get where
I'm going with this. And the network said, okay, great, okay,
but a little bit slower. Which network? And this was
literally your first pitch other than Stu Schwartz station. Yeah,

(01:35:24):
well it wasn't my first, UM, but it kind of
was my It was my only. Uh I, So I'm working.
My goal was to be good enough at the TV station,
the radio station, the magazine to put together a deck
on myself. And with the TV work, I could put
together a real and if I was doing food feature

(01:35:45):
reporting and interviewing, and I was like, you know, Al
Franken was had returned to Minnesota, was doing a radio
show and writing these books. So his very first book
came out and he came on and cooked with me.
So I snipped that clip out and I went out
to this farm and did a package. You know, because
I learned, I created my own syllabus. I wanted to
learn how to be in front of a camera, edit

(01:36:07):
with a cameraman. I needed to know about cameras and
lighting and I just had to learn the basic stuff
of the business. And the only way to do that
is do it in live local news. There's no other
place to do it, right. And then I had enough
stuff and I started trying to take meetings, um, but
no one would meet with me. I was just a
guy with an idea, right. Uh. But eventually I weaseled

(01:36:30):
my way into enough doors and uh that I got
the attention of some people here in town who were
producing shows for h G TV local production companies, and
so I became the in house chef. I was doing
episodes a year on Typical Mary Ellen, which was an
HDTV home tips show early days of h G and

(01:36:54):
on a syndicated program called Rebecca's Garden. And so then
I had clips of myself on nationally syndicated TV shows,
and so that I took that and sent it around
and eventually it caught the eye of a first year employee,
the lowest person on the totem pole at Food Network,

(01:37:17):
by the name of Alison Page. Alison Page wound up
running Food Network twenty years later and is now the
runs Magnolia Network, the partnership between Chip and Joanna Gaines
and Discovery, and she is one of the smartest and
best human beings in the TV business. Um, and I

(01:37:37):
got to meet with her and uh, she said, I
don't know if I can help. I know, I'm literally
the person here was the least amount of juice. But
I'm gonna tell them that you're great and you've got
great tape. She did. She actually told them to try
to do something with me, and it of course they
said no, uh, but she did tell me. Uh, she
gave me one great piece of advice. She said, look,

(01:37:59):
if you come on Food Network, you're gonna be on
Saturday mornings and there's gonna be there's twenty other shows
being tried out then. And I said, well, my show's
difference about Traveling is that she goes, yeah, why don't
you talk to Travel Channel. Travel Channel is just hired
a new president and they're trying to change and it
really sort of hasn't been put out there a lot,

(01:38:19):
but they're they're they're going away from unhosted programs and
they're gonna start doing hosted shows. And that was radical
Travel Channel at that time. This is about two years
three years before uh, the first episode of Bizarre Foods.
There was just like World's Best bathrooms, world sexiest beaches,
world's you know, biggest houses, all that kind of stuff,

(01:38:41):
all unhosted. Um. So I started knocking on the because
I'd rather be one of my business gurus taught me
a long time ago, better to be the only than
be the best. So I decided that I wanted to
be the only food guy on Travel Channel. I wound
up being one year late by the time they bought

(01:39:03):
the show, but it wound up being good for me
because that other person was Anthony Bourdain. Um. But I
went and I just all I do is I focused
on Travel Channel. But at this point I'm a I'm
known to people in the business because I'm on two
nationally syndicated shows and sort of like I'm only doing
five minutes an hour on someone else's show, but I'm
a regular, right. So I finally got someone to meet

(01:39:25):
with me a Travel Channel. I made a tape on
my own. They didn't look at it for six or
nine months. Meanwhile, they hire Samantha Brown to host a show.
They buy Tony Show a Cooks Tour, put it on
for a year, and then wind up doing uh no
reservations with him, uh and uh one day uh. The

(01:39:49):
the head of the network, uh, finds my disc in
his briefcase. This is a true story, and he hadn't
watched it, and he'd run out of content and others
up to do when he was stuck in an airport
and he slid it into his computer in the days
when for those who are younger, discs actually could go
into your computer in the side. There's a little port

(01:40:09):
that opened up, and he watched it, and he really
liked me and the show. And I got an invitation
to go to Discovery headquarters in Bethesda, Uh, Maryland and
pitch my idea to the head of the network, Pat
Young and about ten other people in the room. Okay,
just as an intermediary point, why Bizarre Foods. I didn't

(01:40:30):
name it. I had a worse name for it. It
would have died if I had been allowed to name
the show. But the wee relevant of the moniker. Well
what here here, here's what Here's what I came up with.
I walked in that room and I told him, I said,
you know, here's you know, the Wandering Spoon or whatever
horrible show that I had. I'm going to go into

(01:40:52):
countries and cultures and I'm going to tell stories through
food about their culture to illuminate our commonalities and not
dwell in our differences. I'm going to show viewers that
through fun and entertaining food series, uh, we can learn
to practice better patients, tolerance, and understanding with each other.
Because at the end of the day, sitting down to

(01:41:13):
a meal with a family in Chicago is identical to
sitting down with tribal people in the middle of the
African veld Um. It's just that what's being served at
the table is different. And here's my point of difference.
I'm not telling stories about chicken breasts or you know,
fetucchini alfredo or you know, pork wantons. We're gonna be

(01:41:37):
eating you know, grilled African word hog and scorpions and
in but in the countries where they actually eat those things,
question why why this fantastical, crazy food that sounds nuts
And it's like, well, everyone loves to eat. So if
we can accept that this is what's part of the
regular diet in another part of the world. Uh, you know,

(01:42:01):
one man's weird as another man's wonderful, then maybe we'll
have some empathy and some level of understanding for a culture.
I said, Americans inhale other cultures first and foremost through
their mouths. Then we learned to love their music and
their people and all the rest of that kind of stuff.
But we love other cultures food first and foremost and uh.

(01:42:25):
The next day, I got a call from the network
and they said, if in its current format, we're gonna pass.
And I said, well, what do you mean is his
current format? And Pat Young said to me, it's entertainment educational.
He says, but if you can figure out a way
to come pitch it to me again where it's seventy entertainment, uh, education,

(01:42:51):
I'll help you find a production company and I'll put
this show on in a hundred and seventy five countries.
He says, I think you're gonna be a big star.
And I I went back to the drawing board and
I kind of repositioned the whole thing and created six
acts that were all different in this show. And he
ended up giving me a list of approved production companies,

(01:43:14):
some of whom were in Minnesota. I went to because
I had never delivered a show before, so I went
to this production company. They were thrilled to get a
show that was essentially sold um. And when we went
to shoot the pilot. They were still airing Cooks Tour
reruns of Cooks Tour, Tony's first show. By the time
my show delivered, he'd had a season on Travel Channel. UM,

(01:43:39):
they put Pat Wanted Immersive Talent, and you know, it
was just uh, Samantha Brown, Tony then me. He put
Tony and I on Monday nights back to back, UM,
and the ratings just exploded, and it was you know,

(01:43:59):
the following year, I got my own night Tuesday, and
they built shows around me. UM. I got very lucky.
The show's you know, everything is ratings, as you know.
So the premier comes out, we do okay. Second week,
we go up a couple of tents of a point.
Third week, third week we come out and we come

(01:44:19):
out of the gate and we're a couple of tents
below and I'm ready for them to cancel the show,
fully ready for them to cancel the show. But it
was the episode when we were in uh Ecuador and
a shaman, the witch doctor, who is not supposed to
be in the show. I had to beg the producer
of the photographer to come into this witch doctor's residence

(01:44:43):
with me to get an exorcism performed on my body
and he spat up on me and he I mean,
anyone can google this. It's it pops up right away
and resimmering witch doctor Ecuador, and he spits on me.
He lights me on fire. I'm naked by the way
in his us he kills two guinea pigs by beating

(01:45:03):
him on my chest. He throws all this stuff. He
break out in hives because he beats me with this
giant bunch of herbs and he Uh, I walk out
of there and uh, I'd like to say something funny
the camera. Well, I feel better, And it was a
very very very very funny sort of moment in the
history of the show. Um. Now, when it aired, the

(01:45:27):
ratings the next day were not as good, and I'm
ready for the thing to be canceled. But you can't
remember I'm on Monday nights, right, So the next day
was Tuesday, we get the ratings. Wednesday morning, I get
a call from the booker at the tonight show. Uh,
we've we saw this scene and we showed it to
Jay and Jay would like you to be on the
show Friday night. And I literally I said, you know,

(01:45:52):
you know, Michael stopped I thought it was my friend
pulling my leg and I flew out Thursday night. Friday night,
I was on the Tonight Show. UH and Jay we
we had a great time and Jay said, You've got
to come back. We love having you. Uh. And the
next week the ratings quadrupled. Quinn tuppled because those were

(01:46:15):
the days when your very first question that you asked me,
what do you what? Where do you need to be
to spread your message? In those days, the Tonight Show
was the most watched thing other than the Super Bowl
and Saturday Night Live, Right, And um, I wound up
doing the Tonight Show four or five times over the
next two or three years. And UM, I think without

(01:46:37):
that invitation from j the show, who knows who would
have happened. It could have found an audience or not.
But all I know is thanks to that that witch
doctor in Ecuador, I had a great year after that exorcism.
I mean it was good. Uh. And the moral of
the story is, anytime you can have an exorcism in
Oda Vallo, Ecuador, in the Central Highlands, do it the

(01:47:00):
brew harrows. They're the mail which is have incredible power. Um.
And it was successful. But I also to your point,
had a desire to start multiple businesses and do multiple
things with the gifts that I had been given. UM.
I have a marketing company of a production company that's

(01:47:21):
now eight years old that makes TV for me and
lots of other people, that's successful hospitality company, and I've
you know, I've written books, and I've written for magazines,
and I've done all the things that you're supposed to
do in in my career, mostly because it's stuff that
I want to do that has fun, but it also
has to have a service element to it. We we

(01:47:41):
believe very seriously at our companies that everything has to
leave the world a better place, otherwise we're not going
to do it. That that feeling has become stronger over
the last ten years than it was the first ten
years when we started um Our Companies. Uh, my first
company is still alive part of this triad of groups
and we're nineteen years old. UM it's a very very

(01:48:04):
powerful statement. I think about what can happen when you
treat human beings with dignity and respect. UM. I I
was an unredeemable user of people and taker of things
when I arrived in Minnesota January and the community here,
loved me up and gave me, uh a little bit

(01:48:28):
of respect and a little bit of dignity even when
I didn't deserve it, and they watered me like a plant.
And I think this is why human beings need to
be treated better in this country, because there's a million
versions of me out there that they're they're sleeping on corners,
they're in homeless shelters, they're in public hospitals, they're in

(01:48:48):
jails and institutions, and we need to take better care
of them because our society would be better off if
we actually love them up and gave them the dignity
and respect they needed to get well. Uh Um. It's
why I'm proud is when people say what's the what's
the most important thing you do? It's like I'm I'm
on the board of a group of New York called
Services for the Underserved, where we're able to take care

(01:49:10):
of thirty five thousand New Yorkers that no other agency
will take care of. Those are the things that that
I'm proud of. St of I. I love having an
Emmy on the mantel in the house. I love having,
you know, all the James Beard Awards and all the
other stuff that I have, and you know, I turn
on the TV and there I am and a bunch

(01:49:30):
of different streamers or Magnolia or whatever. That's great, but
it pales in comparison to all the other stuff that
I do, because that's the stuff that makes me feel
like I'm actually of this world and not taking from
this world. Okay, I only have a few minutes left,

(01:49:54):
so let's do lightning round quick answers. What's your goal now?
Change more public policy and laws in America to make
it easier for people uh to get fed, take themselves
out of the hunger category that they're in, and help

(01:50:16):
to remake our food system in America. It's a small goal.
You're divorced. And to what degree did your lifestyle terms
to travel around the world contribute to that? And can
people in this world, in the food world, certainly in
the food travel world, can they maintain a healthy relationship? No,

(01:50:36):
I think you need to. I think you need to
change things in your life. If you want your relationships
to prosper, you need to invest in them and you
need to do the work. Um, you can't be I
mean nowadays we can play words with friends, so you
know you can you play scrabble from anywhere in the world. Sure,

(01:50:59):
sure you can, there's an app for that. Uh, all
the face times in the world can't help you with
your primary relationships. You have to put the work in.
Where have you not been that you want to go
to Czechoslovakia? And why? Why? Is so ready an answer?
And why have you not been? And why do you
want to go? I've been to a hundred and seventy

(01:51:21):
seven countries, and I'm not talking about passing through. I
mean actually been, uh, spend time there. I've been to
China eighteen times. I've never been there for less than
two weeks. I've never seen the Great Wall. And the
reason is that I go in and I and I
haven't experienced there that no one else gets to have.
You know, I go to Botswana. I saw one square

(01:51:44):
mile of that country because I lived with the Juntoasi,
a protected tribe, the tribe from the movie The Gods
must be Crazy. No one has been allowed to live
with them for a week in forty years except me. Um,
you know, you know there's I nothing can come to

(01:52:07):
measure that. But I'd love to go back to Box
want and see the rest of this amazing country. I'd
love to go to China's a tourist and actually see
some of the sights and sounds and smells that I
never saw. Um. I'd like to go back to some
of the countries I've only been to once that were
really awesome. I actually I've been to Croatia twice. I
wish I could go to Croatia every year. It's an
incredible country with amazing people. Um, killer food, beautiful, But

(01:52:31):
never been there, just just scheduling and a couple of
times that it was on the docket to go shoot there,
some other talent was going there and they decided we
want zimmer and somewhere else. And you know, you don't
get everything you want, even if you're successful in this industry,
so a lot of times I had to take a
back seat to somebody else. Um. And just this is

(01:52:51):
crazy that I've been to a hundred seventy seven countries
and and someone like me has never been to Prague
or any of Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic. I mean, it's just
so a lot of people want to travel where ultimately
it's somewhat familiar. They go to the UK, they speak English.
My experiences I've had the best times in places like
bo Guitar and Mumbai. Well, mum by the speaking to

(01:53:14):
But you know, for me, just like with food, the
crazier if they don't speak English. The more out of
place I am, the better I enjoy it. How about you,
you want to go to an exotic place where your
number or you want to go with her some comfort.
I will double down on that actually and turn it
a little bit around. But I bet you can relate

(01:53:34):
to it. My guess is knowing you, having read so
much of what you've written and listening to your podcast,
I get the feeling you'll really relate to this. I
am the best version of myself when I'm traveling in
a place, and I'm the best version of the best
version of myself when I'm challenged the most. When I'm
out of my comfort zone, I take more risks. I'm

(01:53:56):
I'm less risk averse, I asked more questions. I'm not
a smarty pants. I don't pretend. I like myself best
when I have a bag over my shoulder and I'm
walking across Ethiopia. That's the best version of me there is.
I am curious, I am friendly, I am alert, I
am open to everything. I'm teachable, I am spontaneous, I

(01:54:21):
am all the things I want to be in my life.
I am that person because of the challenges of travel
is transformative. Travel is transformative. So consequently, what's amazing about
it is that you can then export some of that
back into your life in America. Right, So, like you
in those places you mentioned, you were forced to do

(01:54:45):
some new things, and you come back and changed human beings,
sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big impactful ways, but
you're changed. Travel is transformative. Okay, what are your favorite
one or two cuisines? You know there's a song by
Sunday Afternoon by the Kings and Ray Davis. You know,

(01:55:07):
give me two good reasons why I ought to stay.
So I usually say too, but you know I'm not
holding you to the ones that you know, Hey, you
gotta eat this cuisine for the rest of your life.
I'll answer it this way. The two most sophisticated cuisines
for depth and breadth, for variety of ingredients, for variety
of techniques, for uh, just just for just the deepest

(01:55:33):
and the widest. And I think they are the two
cuisines that sit atop the culinary in culinary Valhalla, are
Chinese cuisine and Mexican cuisine. Now from that comes a
lot of stuff. So if you go down to southeastern China,
you're gonna eat fusion cuisine that has a lot of

(01:55:54):
tie and vietnames. E vibe to it right, with fresh
chilies and garlic and their version of fish sauce and
things like that. Now, look, do I love the beauty
and simplicity of Japanese cuisine? And Japanese cuisine is always
the easy answer, or Italian cuisine. Every time I'm in France,
I turned to whoever I'm traveling with, I'm going you
know something, as cliches as it is, French food is

(01:56:16):
fucking amazing. And it is. But at the end of
the day, when I'm really being intellectual about it and
I'm measuring all the strengths and weaknesses, I would rather
take from high to low, bottom to top, side to side.
Chinese and Mexican. I think they are the two cuisines
that are the most complex in every measurable way. Uh

(01:56:38):
we can. And I've eaten enough around the world to
have some some perspective on that question. Eat out or
stay home? Stay home? Just because you travel so much, No,
I like to stay home and eat. Uh. Here's here's
the difference I think from professional chefs. Um and certainly

(01:56:58):
you know, I'm sixty. I've cooking for for money since
I was fourteen, almost with you know, except for a
couple of times. Here they're almost an unbroken line. Um,
And I've had the experience of you know, I mean
the food experiences that I've had eating out and traveling,
I would put up against anyone's. I'm not sure the
way that TV is no longer made in in oh

(01:57:21):
will buy thirty or forty more episodes they buy eight.
In the age of the streamer, they're buying eights and twelves.
I don't think anyone will ever travel the world and
eat the way Tony and I have had the opportunity
to when we were doing what we were doing at
Travel Channel. When we were doing that, I just don't
I don't think it will ever happen again. Um and I.

(01:57:44):
I love restaurants. I love the feeling of being in restaurants.
I love seeing what other chefs are doing. But at
the end of the day, and maybe it's more about
the age that I am, Um, I have the ability
to look so many different things. There's so many things
I want to cook. I'm now it's switched around. Instead

(01:58:04):
of like I have to fly to Hong Kong to
eat at restaurant X. Instead of that, I'm like, I
have to be able to get these ingredients so I
can recreate this dish or series of dishes from this book,
from this restaurant in Scandinavia that I've been dying to
And I where am I gonna find baby seagulls legally

(01:58:26):
in America? This is gonna be a toughie, but I
gotta find him. Has got to recreate this dish. That
is the stuff that excites me. Uh now, okay, hey
was norma as good as the rep B. What are
the two best restaurants you've ever been to? For you? Uh?

(01:58:47):
Noma was because and is because not only is Renny
Riseeppe is as phenomenal an executor of food. If you
asked him to make you real scalapini, he would do
with lawlessly. He has that skill set. It's like you've
studied art. It's like the impressionists. You know, mon A
man A, Sir, all those folks. They all went to

(01:59:08):
the Accold, to Bozar and then they rejected it. They
could literally paint a hand as if you were looking
at a photograph, even though photographs haven't been invented. When
they were paying the they once you can create a
hand that looks like it does in real life, then
you can create your impression of one. So these people
who are doing molecular gastronomy or very progressive cuisine or

(01:59:31):
cuisines that we see as being way out there, um,
have the culinary skill set to do anything. They are
masters of technique and craftspeople and so yes, Noma was.
But it was also progressive in the sense that they
were using ingredients from a part of the world that
wasn't the southeastern United States or Mexico or Vietnamena where

(01:59:55):
you can get so many things and everything grows and
it's incredibly fertile. They were were working with a limited
number of ingredients, doing a limited number of things. Um.
So the answer is yes, it was two best meals
of my life. Uh Well, prow house seafood house um

(02:00:15):
off an island uh In at the bottom of the
Filipino island chain just north of Borachai. Uh. You park
your car in a field and you walk down a
series of planks laid on logs in the mud. Thank God,
the tide goes out at night when they're open, because

(02:00:36):
the only way to walk to the restaurant, which is
a hut in the middle of a tidal estuary, and
the fishermen come by and push food and fish and
vegetables up through a hole in the middle of the
restaurants the whole middle of restaurant, like huge bunches of bananas.
They were making a banana drink that night with ice
that I had like sixteen of. But all the fish

(02:00:58):
in the shrimp they you know, it's whatever the chef
is making, and he makes batches this stuff and spreads
it around every table. We probably had thirty seafood courses
that night. Once you're there, you're there. You can stay
for five hours, six hours if you like, or you
can just walk back to your car at any point
in time and pay your bill. Um. I wrote about
it in my first book, UH one of the most

(02:01:19):
transcendent food experiences of my life. UM. And then the
second best one was at a um Uh, a little
az tech village about two hours north of Mexico, two
hours sorry south of Mexico City, um a town where

(02:01:42):
there's a large number of people of ast Aztec descent
still cooking pre contact, pre colonial food and still speaking
what is essentially a dead language. But it's not dead
because there's enough of them speaking it. But it's the
last place to get a taste of history where these
people that the oral tradition has passed these foods down.
And there's a small, little six seat restaurant in the

(02:02:04):
market there that a husband and wife run. Uh. That,
to my mind, is still the one of the top
meals that I've ever had in my life. I find
it interesting when I think of that question, just without
thinking about it. It's two restaurants that are as far
off the grid and as far away from anything resembling
tablecloths and silverware as anything I could think of. I think,

(02:02:28):
the more stuff you have. Uh, sometimes we forget that
food comes from the heart, not from the head. And
those two food experiences were ones that I consider them
a restaurant because number one, there was a financial transaction,
but more importantly, there was an emotional transaction. I don't
believe the history of restaurants by definition, is one that

(02:02:52):
starts with a financial transaction. I believe it starts with
a a an emotional transaction. Um, I think restaurants are
thousands of years old, not hundreds as other historians think.
And my favorite thing to argue them, um, and both
of those restaurants gave me an emotional transaction experience that

(02:03:16):
I think we're superior to anything else I've ever had,
be it a temple of gastronomy or some great street
food place or whatever they were. They price stand above
and beyond all the others. Is the two best meals
of my life. Okay, going back to the beginning, let's
say money was no object. You know, the billionaires coffers
were open. Do you believe this is fantasy land that

(02:03:40):
as a result of foodie culture, et cetera, could we
bring blue and Red together from the bottom via food
is Would that even be possible because we're not bringing
them together at the top. Yes, I believe. I mean
and and Jose and I talked about this all the time. Uh,

(02:04:02):
we need bigger tables. It's it's really that simple. We
need bigger tables. I wanted to do a show called
Dinner with the Dictator. Hopefully, if there's some network person
listening for me, we'll we'll talk about it. Um, because
of some of the places I've traveled and being the
only person who's ever made TV in some of these places,

(02:04:23):
or the first person to make TV there. Um, the
head of the country wants to have dinner with you,
and I don't believe in saying no, because I'm curious,
even if that person is a international narco trafficker, terrorist,
bad guy person, I want to go. I'm I'm an

(02:04:43):
experienced collector and a storyteller, and so I want to
go and see what that's like. And UM, I've never
left a table having a meal with someone disliking them more.
I've always understood more about them, and I believe if
we actually sat down and broke bread in the literal

(02:05:05):
sense with other human beings. I did a food dinner
once for four hundred people in Aspen, Colorado. Uh. It
was a buffet thing. We did whole roasted lambs, uh
in two different ways, lots of sauces and sides. But
I had assage, which is a North African Middle Eastern
dome that's used to cook very thin flatbreads on and

(02:05:28):
we're making bread to order. It only takes like thirty
seconds and it's enough for like three or four people,
so it kind of worked. As they came through the
line and we're throwing these giant loaves of flat bread
down into this basket and people would stare it, and
I said, just you and these other two people in
line with you, just grab it and tear it and
break it. That's for you. Three. This pieces big, it's
for you for this piece is smaller. It's for YouTube.

(02:05:51):
And we'd actually have them physically break bread and watching
them do that, this is seven or eight years ago,
watching them smile and watching what happened when you physically
broke a piece of bread with someone as you had
by the way, people you did not know just reaffirmed
for me. In addition to the hundreds of times I've
sat down to eat with people I was sure I hated.

(02:06:12):
I may leave. They're still knowing they're a bad human
being doing bad things, and I don't believe in what
they're doing, and I would still call the cops on
them if I could, or whatever. But I understand more
of them because I actually listened to them when we're
at a meal. I believe the shouting ends and we
can listen to them. What's heat in America? My MSNBC show,

(02:06:35):
I had I had a meal with people who were
on the other side of the issues. And in the
case of the Secretary of State of Alabama, UM John
Merrill at the time, someone who I thought was, you know,
the architect of the Southern voters suppression UM and still

(02:06:56):
a very very polarizing figure, and I believe a very
very evil person, UH with with bad intent and UH
and I and and the voting suppression issue in America
is is one that I mean, I devoted a whole
hour to it in What's Eating America? So I mean,
you know where I stand on this. But in that

(02:07:17):
What's Eating America episode, I actually dined with several people
who were on the opposite side of the issue for me,
and it changed none of my viewpoint about the issue,
but I I got some insight into where they're coming from.
Sufficient Two, if I was another politician or someone who

(02:07:40):
was in that place to be able to work with
them on something, could begin to do some things to
at least put all put some hold, put some awareness,
put some boundaries, make some improvements. The way we're going
scares the ship out of me. I mean, this thing
with vaccine, you know, we talk about restaurants. You know,

(02:08:01):
these cities all around the country and restaurateurs. Danny most
famously on CNBC the other day said, we want vaccine
people have to show a vaccine card to make a
reservation in the restaurant, right, So these vaccine mandates where
you have to show your vacs to get into something.
I do believe the federal government needs to come out

(02:08:23):
and say that and take this awful burden off of
restaurants and businesses and municipalities and states. We we we've
got to start to do stuff like that. I don't
think there's an option for it. But that's also going
to create some real tension and some real escalation of
trouble in this country, and I don't know if we're

(02:08:43):
gonna be able to recover from it. It's a we're
in a very, very dangerous time in America. Andrew, we
could go on for another two hours. There's so many
other things I wanted to ask you about. We'll have
to wait for another time. You're fantastic your natural rock
and tour. Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you
as a real, real honor and a privilege. I wanted

(02:09:03):
to do this for a long time. I've been a
big fan of what you do UH for several years now,
and and this conversation I feel the exact same way.
Next time I'm in Los Angeles and we if we
can go out to eat, let's go share our meal somewhere.
I would love that. Until next time. This is Bob
left sitt

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