Alton Brown’s ‘Last Bite’ tour includes Hartford stop

HARTFORD — From the “first bite to the last,” television personality, author and famed foodist Alton Brown has cooked up a buffet of new surprises for what he has declared his last tour.

“Alton Brown – The Last Bite” makes its way into The Bushnell in Hartford, Conn, on Sunday, March 9, as part of a more than 60-city national tour that began February in Florida and ends in May in Texas.

Showtime for the 2 hour and 30 minutes show is 7:30 p.m.

Brown, who has more than eight million social media followers, has created some of the most popular and successful live, interactive culinary variety shows ever. His “Edible Inevitable,” “Eat Your Science,” and “Beyond the Eats” tours performed in more than 200 cities with more than 550,000 fans in attendance.

Brown’s tenth book, a collection of essays and ruminations, “Food for Thought,” was just published by Gallery Books. Before performing to sell-out crowds around the country, Brown started his career directing television commercials when he got the “crazy” idea to go to culinary school and reinvent the cooking show. The result was “Good Eats,” an irreverent, science-forward program with Brown as its star. Some 256 episodes aired across 16 seasons. He also hosted the iconic programs: “Iron Chef America,” “Food Network Star,” and “Cutthroat Kitchen.” Among his various honors are a pair of James Beard awards and a Peabody. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, the designer Elizabeth Ingram.

Tickets – ranging in price from $35 to $79 – are available online at bushnell.org. VIP tickets, priced at $200, are in limited supply and include a brief Q&A session with Brown in the theater and a signed copy of his new book.

On a tightly-scheduled media day recently, Brown gave The Republican 15 minutes to ask questions about the tour and his career.

Q: On one of your recent tours, you claimed it would be your last, but it wasn’t. Is the “Last Bite Tour,” as the title implies, really your final tour?

A: I was misquoted. What I really said was that it was the last tour that I was going to do certain things as part of the show. This will be my last big national tour living on a bus for three months. After this, I am going to concentrate on club dates [and] small theaters with 500-800 seats. I’ll be following the Neil deGrasse Tyson tour model and not the Barnum & Bailey model with an 18-wheeler full of stuff.

Q: What kind of special things do you have planned for the “Last Bite”?

A: I always try to follow the model we invented, which is a live culinary variety show. So, there is a lot of stuff going on – comedy, science, a lot of audience interaction with volunteers on stage, live music but not as much as in the past. And that is because our culinary demonstration in the second act is enormous. It’s the biggest thing we have ever built and it fills the stage, so there is no room for a band. This show is more like [something] fans of my television show ‘Good Eats’ would expect to see. There is a lot more science in the show than has been in any of the others. And, I’ll be honest, honest. I did my first three tours trying to please the audience, but I’m doing this one for myself since it is the last tour of this magnitude.

Q: What did you build that is so large there is no room for a band?

A: I’m not going to tell you. It is a machine. We build these very strange machines for cooking on the tours. The first was an “easy bake oven” that was 12-feet long and 8-feet high. The last was an enormous air fryer and this one is three times larger and more complicated. I’ve been obsessed with steam since my childhood. All I’m going to tell you is that it’s a machine that cooks something – and a lot of it – by using steam. And that’s more than I’ve told anyone so far.

Q: Why were you unhappy with television cooking shows, ultimately deciding to create your own unique brand for television?

A: They weren’t explaining things. I would watch these shows trying to be a better cook in the late 1980s. And all they would give you were recipes, no one explained why or how. It was really frustrating to me because I felt that I couldn’t become a better cook just accumulating more recipes. I needed someone to explain to me why I was doing these things, and that just wasn’t the mindset at the time on these shows. It was probably because the shows were being run by chefs who either owned or ran a restaurant. They had no interest in explaining why you do something, they simply wanted to have what they were doing replicated. That is what they want their restaurant workers to do. So, they weren’t naturally teaching anything except probably to give you a little information here and there about an ingredient.

Q: Which of all your own cooking shows is your favorite?

A: “Good Eats,” by far. It was my child, my creation and I wrote and directed it. After that, I appeared on “Iron Chef America,” which taught me more about food than any graduate school could have. Everything else is secondary after those two shows.

Q: Back in 2009 you changed your eating habits and lost 50 pounds in nine months. That had to be hard for someone always around food. What prompted that?

A: Well, I was very overweight. Was it hard? Yes, telling yourself you can’t have certain things to eat or drink and that you have to change the way you are doing things is hard. I built a diet that wasn’t as much about denial, but on things I had to have and focus on. Of course, some things were highly restricted, like alcohol, which is full of empty calories, but my weakness. I love the taste of it. I could only have one drink a week and one dessert a week. You had to be disciplined, but after settling into the new routine it became easier after a month, and in six months I lost 50 pounds. But I haven’t kept all of it off. There is an essay in my new book about some of the negative things that can result from weight loss. I went too far and lost my mind along the way. I had a very negative psychological experience after losing the weight. I actually found once I lost the weight that I was in more trouble emotionally than when living with being overweight. Now I’m not as lite as I was, but I’m comfortable and in a healthy place.

One of the things nobody ever talks about is he psychological aspect of losing weight. Everybody makes it sound like nirvana, something so wonderful, with rainbows and unicorns at every turn. But, it’s more complicated than that.

Q: Do you have another television show in the works after the tour?

A: I don’t know if I will do another show. I’m very disenchanted with the way the, quote, ‘television’ business is run now. I have this new book of essays and that is a real innovation for me doing that kind of writing. When the tour is done, I’m going to take a month off, sit very still and figure out what I am going to do next. I love creative freedom and creative autonomy and I get a lot more of that now in live on-stage performances than I do on television. So, if it’s something on television, then it will likely be a show I can produce on YouTube. At my age, I’m not going to be told by some 25-year-old TV executive about what I should be doing. At this time in my life, for me it’s all about my desire for creative freedom, not exposure, not adoration and not money.

Q: If someone wants to know more about cooking and eating, what would be the top three things you would tell them?

A: I talk about this in my show. The No. 1 thing to being a better cook is to read the recipe. People forget how to read today. Recipes are very powerful instructional pieces, the last bastion of instructional language. You need to simply sit down and read the recipe. It is the single biggest upgrade in your skillset that you can ever do. The other one is to stop looking at food on social media. Social media is like a culinary cancer, destroying our relationship with food, with one another, and destroying our ability to grasp what hospitality really is. As for eating, I’m simply going to say ‘Stop being so damn special.’ Odds are you are not really lactose or glucose intolerant. Unless you really are intolerant to some things, shut up and eat what somebody serves you. If you go to somebody’s house for dinner and they serve you meat, but you tend not to eat meat, just eat the meat. You are just trying to be difficult. You should be grateful somebody is serving you food. If you have a medical condition, of course, that is different. Most of the people I know who have a list of special dietary needs just want to be difficult. Stop it. If somebody is serving you food, take it with hospitality and graciousness. Otherwise, you are just rude.

Q: What is your favorite food to make, to eat at a restaurant, and to eat on tour?

A: I almost don’t eat anything on tour because I’m too afraid of getting sick. My favorite food to cook is roast chicken. And my favorite food to eat as a restaurant is sushi. I’m a sushi fanatic. But my homemade sushi is terrible.