Pod Insights The Sporkful How Did Tony Shalhoub Learn To Play A Chef On Screen? About this episode Tony Shalhoub is an actor whose roles skew towards the quirky and neurotic — and his characters’ quirks often come out through food. In the classic 1996 film Big Night, Tony plays an uncompromising Italian chef whose Jersey Shore restaurant is on the brink of failure. In the TV show Monk, he plays a detective with OCD who has many strong opinions about how he wants his food.
Transcript 7,131 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:16 Dan Pashman? Are you kind of a control freak in that way?
1:18 Speaker 01 Oh, I'm a total control freak. Absolutely.
1:21 Dan Pashman? With your food and eating? Like, what's an example of that?
1:24 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, I like things, you know, a certain way. I like a certain amount of butter to go on a potato or whatever, at a certain time, in a certain way. Yeah, I like things my way. I don't like too much of something or not enough of something.
1:41 Dan Pashman? What's the exactly right time to put the butter on the potato?
1:44 Speaker 01 Well, you don't want to do it right away when it's super, super hot. I don't.
1:51 Dan Pashman? Why not?
1:52 Speaker 01 You know, well, because then it just sort of, it sort of liquefies and separates. I want to sort of like slow melt and still be able to see soft butter on there. Is that just me?
2:02 Dan Pashman? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, right? You don't want to just infuse the potato with butter flavoring. You really want butter on top.
2:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I want potato flavored butter sometimes. Exactly.
2:13 Dan Pashman? You want potato flavored butter, not just butter flavored potato.
2:15 Speaker 01 Thank you. Call me, call me old fashioned.
2:23 Dan Pashman? This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. And before we get to the show, listen to this. Couple of years back, we did a Sporkful Valentine's Day show where we actually solicited, you, our listeners, wrote in, we picked a few folks and we played matchmaker. And then we recorded the dates and tried to see if we could make any couples. Well, guess what? Next Valentine's Day, we're bringing back our version of the dating game. We're gonna send a few pairs of lucky listeners out on dates, record the whole thing and find out if the Sporkful can ignite a grease fire of passion between listeners. If you're in the mood for love, please head over to sporkful.com/matchmaker to fill out our questionnaire and we'll use our extremely unscientific methods
3:08 Dan Pashman? to match up some folks for real, live dates. Again, that's sporkful.com/matchmaker. The survey won't be open forever, so fill it out today. All right, let's get into it. Tony Shalhoub is an actor whose roles skew toward the quirky and neurotic. And often, his character's quirks come out through the way they relate to food. He played an immigrant chef in the movie Big Night, which remains beloved by food people nearly 30 years after its release. He was a cab driver on the 90s sitcom Wings. Then he really became a star playing Adrian Monk on the long-running TV series Monk. Tony won three Emmys over the years for that role. He won a fourth more recently, playing Abe Weisman, the title character's father on the marvelous Mrs Maisel. Now, Tony's hosting a new CNN series called Breaking Bread,
3:53 Dan Pashman? where he travels the world to meet bread bakers, eat all kinds of bread, and connect with people and cultures. He eats deep-fried accorajé in Brazil, black-eyed peepanice in France, and volcano-baked bread in Iceland. In one episode, Tony goes to Wisconsin, which is where he grew up, in a Lebanese-American family in the 1950s and 60s. He's the ninth of 10 children, and a lot of his siblings still live in Wisconsin. As he told me, there's one bread from his own childhood that looms large, something they called dirty bread.
4:21 Speaker 01 Well, dirty bread is a flatbread with zata on it, which we ate as a kid. But, you know, when we were younger, we weren't, that wasn't something you were like, you know, scrambling to grab and eat. It was more of an acquired taste, you know? We saw the adults eating it all the time.
4:39 Dan Pashman? Right.
4:39 Speaker 01 But... It was like a certain age when it, well, try a bite.
4:44 Dan Pashman? Right.
4:45 Speaker 01 It's okay. Then all of a sudden, I can't explain this. One day, he took a bite of zat, and it just like, the penny dropped. And it was like, oh, my God, that is really special. And then from that point on, you just couldn't get enough of it.
4:59 Dan Pashman? The actual word for it is manikish?
5:02 Speaker 01 Well, we didn't call it that. We called it dirty bread.
5:05 Dan Pashman? Why, though?
5:06 Speaker 01 Because it looked like you were sprinkling like gravel or dirt.
5:09 Dan Pashman? Oh, because the zat are looking...
5:10 Speaker 01 Dirt, yeah. It was dark and it, and there was oil and it just kind of get sort of like muddy, muddy and greenish and brown and blackish.
5:18 Dan Pashman? Tony's mom grew up in the US. Her parents came from Lebanon. Tony's dad came to the US from Lebanon as a kid. He was a meat peddler who drove around the state delivering all kinds of meat.
5:28 Speaker 01 He had a refrigerated truck and we lived out of that truck.
5:33 Dan Pashman? Yeah.
5:33 Speaker 01 We really did. I mean, you know, if ever we were short on something, if somebody would just run out to the garage, pop up in the back of that truck, pull a box of, out of a box of, whether it was summer sausage or brats or ring baloney, we're not sure what was in there, but it was delicious. That truck was kind of our salvation, really.
5:55 Dan Pashman? I would imagine, I mean, your dad sort of built up this business through hustle. He must have been a good salesman.
6:02 Speaker 01 I think he was. I think he was. Well, he was a very handsome guy, very charismatic. He really knew how to sell, yeah. But he also was gregarious, you know? He just, he liked people. He could schmooze really well. People were drawn to him.
6:20 Dan Pashman? Eventually, Tony left Wisconsin and went to Yale Drama School. Then he moved to Cambridge, Mass., where he spent four years with the American Repertory Theater. It was a dream job for a young actor. It was good, steady work. He started off in smaller roles at first, but every year, the roles got bigger.
6:35 Speaker 01 And so by my fourth year there, I was doing leading roles and really feeling like I had landed.
6:43 Speaker 01 But there was also a feeling of like, oh my God, now I, I, I want to get back to that feeling of striving and not getting too comfortable, not getting cocky, really. I, I felt like, I, I, I don't know, this has been a recurring kind of motif in my life. Whenever I felt like I, I, I was doing okay, I felt like I needed to move on.
7:08 Dan Pashman? So in 1984, that's what Tony did. He left Cambridge to go to New York to try to take his acting career to the next level.
7:14 Speaker 01 You know, you're scrapping, you're, you're a new kid in town sort of feeling. And, uh, and then after four or five years, okay, now I'm starting to feel like I'm not terrified to walk into an audition. I'm not sweating when I go into a, a casting, to meet a casting director. And after six years in New York, I have that same psychotic feeling again of, uh, wow, this is almost feeling like it's, the road is too smooth. And so I went to LA.
7:47 Dan Pashman? What do you think is underlying that sort of like that desire to, to find the bumps in the road and to, and to feel like you're striving, to use your word?
7:57 Speaker 01 I think it has to do with, you know, certain part of it is just masochism, I guess, or.
8:03 Dan Pashman? Probably like a personality type.
8:04 Speaker 01 I guess. And maybe it has something to do with being the second youngest of 10 kids. There was almost a sort of a striving to be noticed, to be heard, to be taken seriously. I haven't really tried to analyze it too much. It's just, just something that's hardwired in me, I guess.
8:24 Dan Pashman? A few years after arriving in LA, Tony landed a part playing primo in the 1996 film Big Night. Now, Big Night has a place in the food world as a legendary movie for its careful depictions of the cooking and for the questions it raises about what it takes to run a restaurant. The movie includes an iconic scene featuring a dish called a timpano, which we'll talk about. I know that scene so well that I put a timpano in my pasta cookbook and referenced Big Night in the headnote. Stanley Tucci wrote and directed Big Night, and he starred opposite Tony. They play Italian immigrant brothers who own a restaurant on the Jersey Shore.
9:00 Speaker 02 Where? To a movie.
9:04 Speaker 02 You want to come? No. What is the movie? You want to come? No, I don't. Come on, you want to come? No. Come on. Come on, call up the flower lady, call Mr. Canna, what's her name? Anne?
9:14 Dan Pashman? For the role, Tony needed some help to be able to look like a real chef on camera.
9:18 Speaker 01 Stanley connected me up with this chef. He actually was a chef at a restaurant that I loved in L.A. called Chianti Cucina. Fabio, his name was. He and I would, we'd go into this test kitchen facility or something. And he just taught me how to chop food, how to flip food.
9:39 Dan Pashman? You mean like in a pan, like in a saute pan?
9:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, in a saute pan.
9:42 Dan Pashman? The way that a chef will like toss something in a pan without using a spatula, just by like a flick of the wrist.
9:47 Speaker 01 Right, and the food kind of goes up eight, nine inches in the air and all lands back in the pan, not on the stove, or on the floor, or in your face.
9:56 Dan Pashman? Yeah.
9:56 Speaker 01 And, you know, there's a certain thing of like just sort of rolling food in a skillet. But also flipping it where it's really getting airborne, that's a little harder. I believe what we did was we, he put me over a sink with a skillet full of ice.
10:11 Dan Pashman? So you could flip it and if it fell out, it wouldn't, nothing bad happen?
10:14 Speaker 01 Worked this, worked this for a long time until my forearm was on fire. And, but it was really good, it was good training. Because I was able to, after a number of hours, a number of days, to keep all that ice in the pan. And then we went, we graduated to the stove. It's interesting because all those skills that I, that he taught me, I still use them today. I mean, I'm, before that time, I wasn't that comfortable in the kitchen. I was a passable cook, but I always felt it was a little too daunting to get into too seriously.
10:49 Dan Pashman? And then after that, you went home and you were flipping things in the saute pan?
10:52 Speaker 01 I'm getting things all over the floor, yeah.
10:57 Dan Pashman? The basic plot of Big Night is that the restaurant these brothers own is struggling. Their grand plan to keep it afloat is to impress a famous singer who's supposed to come eat at the restaurant. So Primo prepares an elaborate, showstopping meal. The crown jewel of that meal is the timpano. It's basically a gigantic pie filled with pasta, meatballs, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and tomato sauce. When it's all assembled, it's basically the size of a basketball with a flat bottom. Tony had to do special preparation for that timpano scene.
11:25 Speaker 01 Stanley had invited me to his parents' house, and we made it with his mother, who's an expert at this dish. And it was so labor-intensive, incredible. I mean, watching her put together, because this is something they do as it's a special occasion dish.
11:42 Dan Pashman? Right. This is not like a Tuesday night, weekday meal.
11:44 Speaker 01 No.
11:45 Dan Pashman? Right.
11:46 Speaker 01 This is a once-a-year, I think, he said. Because, and also, you know, it's heart-attack food, let's face it. We worked with her and watched her do it, and it was just so eye-opening and beautiful the way she did it. When we brought it out in the movie, we, you know, we had a kind of memory, a sense memory of what went into it.
12:07 Dan Pashman? The movie's action centers around this gambit to keep the restaurant open. But the real conflict of the film is between the art of a restaurant and the business of it. Tony's character, Primo, the chef, he represents the art. He's frustrated by American customers who don't understand real Italian food. He loses it when one of them requests a side of spaghetti with their risotto. Combining two starches like this would never be done in Italy.
12:29 Speaker 03 I want to know for who? Just make me a side of spaghetti, please. I want to know for who is it for? For the lady with the risotto. What? Why are these people in America? How can she want? They both are starch. Maybe I should make mashed potato from the other side. She's a criminal? I want to talk to her.
12:46 Speaker 01 You know, he's a purist. He's comes from the Old World and all of those traditions, and he aspires to be as good as the people who taught him. I carried that idea.
13:01 Dan Pashman? I heard you say that your character, Primo, was a lot like your father.
13:05 Speaker 01 I think so, yeah. I do. In the sense that Primo is sort of uncompromising and Old World, because my father, you know, I think, even though he came over when he was a boy, he still carried with him that sense of the Old World. Yeah, I feel like I drew from him for this character, although I have to say I've drawn from him for other, other things too, and other members of my family, certainly my siblings. I feel like there's a piece of them, a piece of one of them in everything I've ever done.
13:39 Dan Pashman? Primo's brother, Sacundo, played by Stanley Tucci, is the more suave guy who deals with the customers. He represents the business side of things. He says Primo should make the customers happy, give them what they want. The brothers are trying to run a business here and it's not going great. They gotta make some compromises if they want to stay open, he says. But Chef Primo doesn't want to compromise. He says at one point, "If I sacrifice my work, it dies. It's better that I die." But that mentality could spell the end of the restaurant. So the question is, at what point does sticking to your guns become self-sabotage?
14:10 Speaker 01 Well, that's the question that the movie raises and doesn't actually fully answer. The reason Stanley wanted to do this movie, one of the many reasons why he wanted to write this film, you know, as young actors, we were struggling with that very question all the time. We wanted to do good work, but we didn't want to be starving artists our whole lives. And we got offered things that we, you know, were lucrative, but maybe we didn't, our hearts weren't fully in. And we were constantly struggling with that. I mean, we still struggle with that. Even today, that question comes up for me in almost every project.
14:53 Speaker 01 But back then, it was a little more weighted, I believe, because we were young and poor and, you know, we were clawing our way up. And we wanted to make money, of course, but we didn't want to do schlock. And every once in a while, you just, you just do it because you have to and, or you don't think it's going to be schlock or some, whatever reason.
15:16 Dan Pashman? Right. I won't ask you which ones were the schlock projects.
15:19 Speaker 01 Please don't.
15:22 Speaker 01 Ninety percent of that, no, no.
15:25 Dan Pashman? But I think that what you're talking about is something that any person who works in the arts is gonna struggle with, whether they're a chef in a restaurant.
15:33 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
15:34 Dan Pashman? Or an actor or a writer, or whatever it may be.
15:36 Speaker 01 That's the dilemma with any creative pursuit, or, you know, you struggle to, to find your place, and what is it that you do that's, that people are gonna respond to? And then you, if you're lucky, you land on it, and then, but the problem is, is then that's what, what people want.
15:53 Dan Pashman? Right.
15:54 Speaker 01 And that's not exactly what you always wanna do. You wanna move off of that, and you wanna expand and test your versatility.
16:01 Dan Pashman? It's like a chef who's not allowed to change their menu.
16:03 Speaker 01 Exactly, or a painter who, you know, paints a sunset, and they go like, oh, just do that sunset fifty different ways.
16:08 Dan Pashman? Right, for twenty more years.
16:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. You don't wanna get into that rut.
16:12 Dan Pashman? So much of the kind of talk about Big Night focuses on the big final meal, and the tempa no, and the other dishes that Primo is making, and that's all very memorable, but I love the final scene of that movie. Spoiler alert, the previous night's dinner that the whole movie's been building up to didn't go the way they hoped it would go. They just had this big fight, and that was the next morning, and Stanley Tucci, his character, makes a frittata, like plain eggs in the pan. It's all shot, one shot, real time.
16:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:42 Dan Pashman? Your character walks in, in this quiet morning.
16:45 Speaker 01 And Cristiano, the, you know, the busboy.
16:48 Dan Pashman? Right, he's there too. He's actually played by a young Marc Anthony, and there's this tense moment of like, how are these two brothers gonna relate to each other after having sort of like, broken up? There's almost no dialogue in this scene.
16:58 Speaker 01 There's no dialogue.
16:59 Dan Pashman? Yeah, it's, it's, it's one camera, no cuts, and no dialogue. What are your memories of that scene?
17:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, we had to rehearse it a lot, as you always do with a wonna. But because we're using a live stove, you know, more things to go wrong.
17:15 Dan Pashman? Right, he, he can't burn the frittata, like, the timing has to be just right.
17:18 Speaker 01 Stanley really had it down, and, to be honest with you, the trickiest part was, those eggs were coming right off the stove, and eating those eggs, they were frickin' hot.
17:28 Dan Pashman? I had that thought. I rewatched this scene like, two days ago, and I was like, man, aren't the eggs still hot?
17:32 Speaker 01 If you watch it close, you can see Marc Anthony, and, and he's...
17:38 Speaker 01 He's, you know, he's kind of opening his mouth and blowing out.
17:41 Dan Pashman? Yeah, yeah.
17:41 Speaker 01 And on a normal breakfast, you put it out, you wait, you wait till it cools.
17:46 Dan Pashman? Right.
17:46 Speaker 01 But we had to just do it.
17:47 Dan Pashman? Yeah.
17:48 Speaker 01 And we had to do it six, I think we shot that thing six or seven times. And by the fifth or sixth take, you know, our tongues are kind of
17:56 Speaker 01 raw at this stage. But they were good eggs, by the way, I have to say, hot or not.
18:03 Dan Pashman? Coming up, we talk about Tony's legendary character, Monk, a detective with OCD who has very particular opinions about how he wants his food. So how similar is Tony to Monk? Then later, Tony tells us what he learned from breaking bread with people all over the world. Stick around.
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18:32 Dan Pashman? As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things, I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf, whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean, whether it's their boots, their Scotch plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. Start the day strong with Quaker protein products. Quaker makes it easy and delicious to get a good source of protein. No matter what the day has in store, Quaker protein products give you a variety of ways
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21:36 Dan Pashman? Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. And you know, we used to have like a paid service for people who wanted to listen to old episodes. You'd have to pay to be a subscriber. And then we got rid of that. But then all the old episodes weren't there. And a lot of you wrote in, you said, what about the old episodes? We want to hear those. We missed them. We want to go back. Want to hear it again. We want to share with a friend. So we invented reheats. Every Friday, we go into the Sporkful's deep freezer and reheat one of our very favorite episodes from the archive. Some of the recent reheats include a call in show in which a couple fights about whether it's okay to wipe greasy hands on your legs after eating popcorn. Another is a deep dive into why people are so obsessed with hydration these days. And then the same week, we had our episode with Paul Hollywood. We reheated the interview with Nadia Hussain, one of Great British Bake Off's most famous winners. There's so
22:19 Dan Pashman? many good episodes. And guess what? We take requests. So if you have one you want to hear, drop me a line at [email protected] . All right, back to Tony Shalhoub. As I said, Big Night remains a classic of the food movie genre. And while none of Tony's other roles are as food centric as that one, it seems a lot of his characters have something to say about food. In the early 2000s, Tony played the private investigator Adrian Monk on the USA show Monk. The character has OCD and a lot of phobias, including some to do with what he eats. I reviewed those with Tony. He didn't like mushrooms, egg whites, kiwi, milk, mixed nuts, mixed vegetables, salted peanuts. I mean, the list goes on.
22:59 Speaker 01 And he didn't like his food touching. That's most important.
23:02 Speaker 07 And I'll have the veal?
23:03 Speaker 08 Okay.
23:04 Speaker 07 And I wonder, could I get separate plates for the potatoes and the vegetables?
23:10 Speaker 08 You want them all on separate plates?
23:13 Speaker 07 Please.
23:14 Speaker 08 You don't like your food to touch?
23:16 Speaker 07 I believe most people don't like their food to touch. They just don't have the guts to admit it.
23:21 Dan Pashman? Are you that way? Do you not like your foods touching?
23:23 Speaker 01 No, I'm not that way. I mean, I'm some, in some ways, like Monk, but not when it comes to food.
23:29 Dan Pashman? I did read a profile with you in GQ a while back where this reporter went out to lunch with you. And you ordered crab cake, eggs Benedict, hollandaise sauce on the side. And the writer notes that you dissected the dish so you could eat each component separately.
23:41 Speaker 01 Really?
23:45 Speaker 01 I don't always trust hollandaise. It involves things that may or may not have been sitting around for a while. So I always have it on the side so I can kind of test the waters. Because once it's on that, on the eggs, you're screwed.
23:59 Dan Pashman? I would sometimes keep things separate, especially like in a dipping situation. Like when I have a burger, I don't ever put condiments on the burger. I like it with ketchup and mustard. I'll mix them together on the side and then dip the burger for every bite. And that allows me to control the ratios of condiments and also how much is in each bite and where exactly and all that.
24:17 Speaker 01 I like that, yeah. I sometimes do that.
24:19 Dan Pashman? Okay.
24:20 Speaker 01 Where we'll all, you know, have a butter knife or something and I'll spread it on as I like it. Yeah. And the problem with putting it on the burger too is that some parts don't have enough and some parts have too much.
24:30 Dan Pashman? That's right.
24:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, I like your style. You and I would have a good meal together.
24:37 Dan Pashman? Well, it also gets into a very fundamental issue of eating that I have been thinking about for, some might say, far too long. Which is the idea of like bite variety versus bite consistency. Like when you're eating a certain food, do you want all the bites of it to be consistent? Or do you want the bites to be different?
24:54 Speaker 01 I think you need to get out more. That is a, that is a deeper dive.
25:01 Dan Pashman? All right, all right. You're not the first person to say that, Tony.
25:06 Speaker 01 Perhaps, perhaps a hobby of some kind.
25:10 Dan Pashman? There is a very memorable scene in Monk where he's in this lab and he encounters square tomatoes.
25:17 Speaker 01 Yes, oh, Pam Adlon, fantastic episode, and Bradley Whitford.
25:22 Dan Pashman? Yeah.
25:23 Speaker 01 Love that episode. Yeah, they, they're scientists and they've developed a square tomato.
25:30 Dan Pashman? Is that a square tomato?
25:32 Speaker 04 Yes, it is.
25:33 Speaker 01 So that means...
25:35 Speaker 07 Every slice is exactly the same size. You're doing the Lord's work.
25:40 Speaker 01 And Monk loves that because it goes on the bread perfectly. If the bread is, you know, he gets square bread. Yeah, that was clever on the part of the writers.
25:49 Dan Pashman? Well, and but the the rationale of the scientists in the lab is that square tomatoes can be packed more tightly and therefore you can transport more tomatoes.
25:58 Speaker 01 Oh, economically, it's more efficient.
26:00 Dan Pashman? And in theory saves on packaging also. So it's supposedly environmentally friendly and economically friendly.
26:05 Speaker 01 I had forgotten that.
26:06 Dan Pashman? But I want you to know, Tony, do you know that they're they in this is real now. They're working on developing square watermelons.
26:13 Speaker 01 Really?
26:13 Dan Pashman? For the same reason, because they'll pack together more tightly.
26:17 Speaker 01 Wow. So maybe I've started something.
26:19 Dan Pashman? Yeah.
26:21 Speaker 01 I've always wanted to have a, you know, a positive impact on the world.
26:28 Dan Pashman? And we can't possibly cover every one of Tony's iconic characters from his 40 plus year career. But there is one more I wanted to touch on with him. Abe Weisman, cantankerous father from marvelous Mrs. Maisel. In season two, the family spends some time at a resort in the Catskills in upstate New York. Tony's character Abe drinks tomato juice nonstop, which apparently was a thing in the Catskills back in the day. And he has a few cocktails, but he has a system for trying to make sure he doesn't get too drunk.
26:53 Speaker 01 This is my Catskills alcohol consumption index. I drink more up here, but I've devised a system to keep from getting tipsy.
27:04 Speaker 09 No, Abe, you're drunk. Your calculations were off again.
27:08 Speaker 01 Give me another pickle. The brown in the pickle counteracts the alcohol.
27:12 Speaker 09 You've had 10 pickles, Abe. Your pickles aren't working.
27:15 Speaker 01 Well, he's a mathematician, so everything has to do with numbers and percentages and.
27:19 Dan Pashman? Right.
27:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:20 Dan Pashman? To me, it ties into a little bit of what you were talking about earlier, this idea of striving. Of there's something about Abe that was always kind of striving to figure out a better way to to break things down and to analyze and overanalyze to the point of of discovering something.
27:34 Speaker 01 Right, and he also did, before they get to the Catskills, while they're still back at the New York apartment, he is working out the geometry or the physics of packing the suitcases into the trailer. Everything has to fit perfectly. I just love that. Everything in his life, every day, every mundane thing in his life has to be analyzed and organized and.
27:57 Dan Pashman? And optimized.
27:58 Speaker 01 Exactly, optimized.
28:04 Dan Pashman? So let's talk about the new show, Breaking Bread. Aside from the fact that bread in all its forms is delicious, what made you want to center a show around it?
28:14 Speaker 01 Part of it is, I think, I've been feeling for a while that we're, we've gotten away from simplicity, the basic things, the things that nurture us physically and emotionally too. And I've always loved, I mean, I've always loved bread. Who doesn't love bread?
28:30 Dan Pashman? Right.
28:31 Speaker 01 Bread is, is a, it's a thing that we all can agree on and we all share a love of.
28:37 Dan Pashman? And there's something so, so elemental about bread, something so fundamentally human, like it's such an old food that's been around about as long as people have been cooking anything, they've been making bread.
28:49 Speaker 01 And also, I like free food and free travel. There, I've said it.
28:53 Dan Pashman? Yeah. Yeah, but also that like, the whole world feels like it's getting sort of more virtual.
28:58 Speaker 01 Exactly.
28:59 Dan Pashman? Eating, bread in particular feels not only so like essentially human and universal, but also very tactile. You can only do it with your hands.
29:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I've started to think about it as the OG social media. You know, I think about people sitting at a restaurant, for example, and everyone's sitting at a table on their phones in their separate little bubble. But if the bread comes, guess what? Down go the phones. Everybody has this simultaneous communal experience.
29:31 Dan Pashman? Maybe that's the solution. We just gotta put like baskets of bread on every street corner.
29:35 Speaker 01 That's not a bad idea.
29:36 Dan Pashman? One of the things about doing this show that might not be apparent to people, but that I would imagine could have been challenging is that you're being yourself. You're not, you're not playing a part, which obviously you've been interviewed a million times being yourself, but like, I don't know that you've ever been yourself on camera for such an extended period of time.
29:55 Speaker 01 No, it, it, it was daunting, I got, I have to say. I got so much more comfortable over the many decades saying other people's words and having a director that hands me a performance on a silver plate. This was hard. And people will say, well, there's nothing to it. You just, you just, you know, be yourself. No idea who that is, no idea what that looks like. I mean, I'm sure I've been in many, many interviews and but when I'm the interviewer, it's sort of a whole different, whole different, as you know.
30:26 Dan Pashman? It's a different role. One of the episodes is in Brazil.
30:30 Speaker 01 Love Brazil.
30:30 Dan Pashman? Which I am embarrassed to admit that I'm pretty ignorant about.
30:33 Speaker 01 I was too.
30:34 Dan Pashman? Parts of South America, but I do know that Brazil, well, first off, they have apparently phenomenal pizza in Sao Paulo and other parts of Brazil. And you also learn when you go there, there's a big Lebanese population in Brazil.
30:45 Speaker 01 Huge. Bigger than anywhere else in the world, I think.
30:48 Dan Pashman? Wow. So what was it like to find that community?
30:51 Speaker 01 It was heavenly. I met so many great Lebanese people and ate so much amazing. And I grew up on really good Lebanese food and I've, you know, we have great Lebanese food in New York too, but in other places I've traveled, the Middle East, of course, in Lebanon itself. But, um, boy, I don't know, they're, they're doing stuff there that's beyond.
31:13 Dan Pashman? Was there one dish or meal that stands out in particular?
31:16 Speaker 01 There's one restaurant there, actually, we don't feature it, even though we, we feature the chef and the owner, a guy named Freddie, who was so great. But we don't feature it in the episode, but it's called, the restaurant's called Make Hummus Not War. And this guy, it's a small place, tiny place. I've been eating homemade hummus my whole life. I grew up on this stuff. Now, this is next level. He's doing so many variations of it and it was really good. I don't want to give away another thing that I ate there, a variation on something I've also been eating my whole life, called fatoush, a salad.
31:55 Dan Pashman? Yes.
31:56 Speaker 01 That has bread in it.
31:57 Dan Pashman? It's like the crispy pita chips usually.
31:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. There, this guy, oh my God, you just have to watch the episode.
32:03 Dan Pashman? Okay, we gotta watch the episode.
32:04 Speaker 01 The Brazil episode.
32:05 Dan Pashman? That's a tease.
32:06 Speaker 01 It's so good, so brilliant.
32:07 Dan Pashman? One other episode from the show I want to talk about is Tokyo. There's a real theme in that episode about all these craftspeople in Japan who are kind of pursuing perfection in a way, like refining their crafts.
32:22 Speaker 01 It's called kaizen. Yeah, kaizen.
32:26 Dan Pashman? In one episode, Tony meets chef Seizo Mietani, who owns a famous tonkatsu restaurant. The chef spent years seeking out the perfect panko breadcrumb combination for coating the meat. He finally landed on a specific Japanese milk bread that was light, crunchy, and sweet to then turn into panko. It's now a staple at his restaurant. What did you take from that episode?
32:44 Speaker 01 This pursuit of elevating things and pursuit of perfection is, it's in everything, everything they do. Architecture, art, food, of course. They take things that maybe, you know, so they're original, maybe they're from other places in the world, and they enhance them in some way. It's beautiful to see.
33:07 Dan Pashman? And it seems like that episode in particular ties to a lot of the themes we've been discussing, this idea of kind of a pursuit of perfection, or at least a type of striving, whether it's in your career, or whether it's primo and his integrity, whether it's Monk and his wanting things a specific way, whether it's Abe Weisman and trying to figure out how to pack the back of the car.
33:31 Speaker 01 It's a recurring theme here.
33:32 Dan Pashman? Right, right. It's a recurring theme in your life and in many of the characters and in that episode.
33:36 Speaker 01 That carries with it a certain level of psychosis, really, because especially when I've talked to bakers, they're always in pursuit of like the perfect loaf of bread. This idea that, you know, they want this loaf, this thing they're doing today to be the perfect loaf. This is what they're after, knowing that they're not going to get it. And even if they do, happen to one day accidentally hit it, they're probably, most likely, not going to be able to recreate it. It's always alive, it's always in flux, and it's never going to come out the same. And yet they are hell bent on aiming for that bullseye every time.
34:21 Speaker 01 Knowing that even if it's not perfect, people are gonna probably love it, cut into it or break it open, and they're going to experience that one individual loaf that has a uniqueness and a character all its own. And there's beauty in that, too.
34:49 Dan Pashman? That's Tony Shalhoub. His new show is Breaking Bread, or it airs Sunday nights at 9:00 PM on CNN, or you can stream it the next day with CNN's All Access subscription. Also, one quick correction. I said in the interview that square watermelons were in development, but they actually exist. They've been sold in Japan and Canada. They're grown inside a frame or box to make them square. Only problem is that according to one Canadian news outlet that did a story back in 2014, they don't taste very good. But they look cool.
35:16 Dan Pashman? Next week on the show, you know New York pizza, you know Chicago deep dish. You might even know New Haven pizza or tavern-style pizza. But not so many people have heard of Colorado-style pizza. Where did it come from? And is it even a legitimate regional style of pizza? One intrepid reporter has been on a years-long quest to find out. He shares that story next week. While you're waiting for that one, check out last week's episode with legendary baker and cookbook author Dory Greenspan. I go to her home in Connecticut to see how she develops a recipe. So many people in the world of food say Dory writes the best recipes. What's her secret? I ask her, and I get a peek inside her butter fridge. That one's up now. Check it out. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels
36:01 Dan Pashman? curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful.
36:22 Dan Pashman? This episode was produced by me along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern. And senior producer
36:26 Speaker 01 Andres O'Hara.
36:27 Dan Pashman? It was edited by Camille Stanley. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. Our interns are
36:31 Speaker 10 Morgan Johnson.
36:32 Dan Pashman? And
36:33 Speaker 10 Jasmine Sutherland.
36:34 Dan Pashman? Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
36:42 Speaker 11 I'm Willa from Appleton, Wisconsin, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
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