I love food, probably more than I should, but it’s a love affair I am not ready to end at this time. Good food gives me comfort. It feeds my mind, body and soul and sometimes there are even leftovers. While I enjoy dining out, to me there is nothing better than a home-cooked meal. Fortunately, I know how to cook, so this is a privilege I get to enjoy often.

I fell in love with food at a young age. My mother and father knew their way around the kitchen and grill, so we always ate well. I remember standing outside next to my father as a kid, my eyes level with the grill top, tearing up from the smoke and heat but unable to look away. I wanted to know how that hunk of raw, slimy meat could turn into something so delicious. It seemed like magic.

I started helping out with dinner to find out. I’d chop things, stir pots and act as the official taste tester when there was nothing else for me to do. When I didn’t help out, I’d watch mom and dad cook. It’s a habit that has stuck with me throughout my life. Good things happen in the kitchen and I want to be a part of it.

There is no better way to learn how to cook than by doing it yourself or watching someone else, but when you can’t do either, you might be able to watch it on TV. Before the Food Network, there were PBS weekend mornings. In between episodes of Voltron and the Thundercats, I was watching Julia Child get down on a soufflé. These early TV chefs were the real deal and I learned a ton from them.

Having grown up with the TV chefs of yesteryear, I was a natural convert to the Food Network when it first reared its ugly head. Originally, the shows were actually about cooking and I learned a lot while high in my dorm room, but eventually the Food Network went the MTV route and eliminated that one thing that made it great: the cooking.

It didn’t take a genius to see that Guy Fieri and restaurant makeovers weren’t going to teach me to feed myself, so the Food Network and I ultimately parted ways. By that point, I was already pretty handy with a set of knives and eager to try new things on my own. I picked up some cheap cookbooks and messed with some of those recipes, tweaking them to suit my developing palate. Eventually, I even came up with a few recipes of my own.

Now I can make meatballs like nobody’s business. I’ll cook you a breakfast so good that you will want to go back to sleep afterward just to wake up and have breakfast again. I can throw together a sandwich with the contents of your fridge that would make Jared stop molesting little kids and just go back to being a fat slob. But I don’t rest on my laurels.

It’s good to be adventurous when cooking and I like to experiment with new recipes. It helps to have someone to cook for that can give you some feedback. So far, my girlfriend has been happy with the results of my work. Cooking and eating together brings us closer and makes our relationship stronger, plus it’s fun! Being able to cook has similarly strengthened my bonds with friends and family as well, and has even served as a means for me to meet others and learn about their cultures.

Cooking gives you the opportunity to learn about the world while filling your belly with delicious food at the same time. For crazed diet people or those prone to conspiracy theories, there is no better way to know what’s in your food than by cooking it yourself. It doesn’t even have to be difficult. Crack an egg in your ramen next time and toss in some soy sauce, green onions and Sriracha to go with it. So long as you don’t burn the house down, you are in for a real treat!

Comedian Sammy Obeid sets a milestone in consecutive nights of stand-up

Sammy Obeid is a workaholic of the highest order. While most people strive to have their weekends off after five long days in the office, this comedian plans to work the stage every single night for 1,000 nights in a row. After a few months of working and realizing that he hasn’t had a day off since Christmas 2010, Obeid asked himself, “Why not just keep it going?”

Submerge caught up with Sammy over the phone on day 804 and the 10th anniversary of his first time stepping up on stage as a comic.

“I reached 100 [days], and I said, ‘You know I can make a full year record out of this and go to 365.’ I did that,” Obeid said. “When I made the 365, I got a Facebook message from my friend who said, ‘Hey man, I heard a comedian once did two years in a row performing every night…’ I said, ‘If I do that, I’m going to do 1,000 days.’”

Obeid has been working so much in the past two years, he considers his afternoon gigs as a “day off” or as he joked on Facebook a day off is a night performing comedy in pajamas. Recently he has cut down the workday by performing one or two sets instead of three or four in one night.

“I’m on my eighth wind right now or something. There was a point earlier when I was getting really burnt out and I kind of just took it easy, rested and regenerated. The last 100 days or so I’ve been resting and trying to get my health back,” he said. “It’s been one heck of a ride that’s for sure. I’m definitely looking forward to the end, but I feel like I have a wind right now. I’m going strong. And I’m so used to this, it’s becoming normal.”

Obeid has not only broken the previous record of performing stand-up comedy for the most consecutive nights on day 731, but he has plans to take it to the next level of performing.

“I needed to set up the margin so nobody else ever beats it. That and 1,000 is a nice round number,” Obeid explained.

Since the comedy bar is set so high, he knows that his final day is going to be a special one and is hoping to catch more attention to the public. In order to document his crazy comedy life correctly, he matches his everyday show with an everyday blog update on his website, Sammyko.com. You can keep track of what city he will be in and the type of challenges he goes through on a daily basis. Aspiring comedians can find helpful tips from a traveling comic, or people interested in what life would be like for a performing comic can find hilarious tales from his everyday life. You can read how he conquered performing on Monday in San Francisco, dealt with a “horny heckler,” how he got called a “genius” by the legendary Louis C.K., and received a compliment from Howard Stern while performing on America’s Got Talent.

“‘Well Sammy, I think you made the right choice.’ The crowd cheers. ‘I really like what you’re doing, and you know me, I love racial comedy. I think you’ve tapped into really something special there,’” Sammy wrote in his blog after day 441, after receiving honest words from Howard Stern.

On top of keeping up his blog and working a show every night, Sammy is being followed by a cameraman throughout his shows to film the comedy marathon.

“The whole time I thought it would be really cool to get a guy to follow me around, and I wouldn’t have to pay anything because I don’t have any money. It turns out I met a guy who’s been waiting to find the perfect project to put himself into,” he said. “We are going to turn it into a full-on movie, and recently I’ve a lot of good financial success, so I can actually pay him now and we can get better equipment. It’s really coming along.”

Originally from Oakland and a UC Berkeley graduate, Obeid first started comedy after one of his college professors suggested he try it out. After bombing the first time on stage, he became discouraged and decided that maybe comedy wasn’t the right career for him. But a few years later he enrolled in a public speaking class and ended up winning one of the national tournaments. After realizing his speaking skill, he decided to brave the stage once more in San Jose for a comedy competition. Although he didn’t get the winning title, he performed very well on stage getting plenty of laughs.

“I found out what I was good at, which was public speaking, math and making people laugh,” he said. “I left college with knowing that’s what I’m good at, which didn’t tell me at all what I should be doing in life [but] that’s how I ended up becoming a comedian.”

He graduated with a 3.9 GPA double major in Business and Mathematics. But Obeid’s education is used every day on stage to come up with jokes that are creative and smart.

“I think about comedy mathematically, jokes are equations in a way. I have a very technical way of looking at things,” explained Obeid. “Everybody has a different comedy style, some people are off the whim, some people are very structured. I have a mathematical intuition when it comes to comedy.”

His natural intuition has paid off, on top of attempting to complete the most consecutive nights of comedy, he as appeared on NBC’s America’s Got Talent, the Food Network, and is a current member of the Coexist Comedy Tour and the Axis of Evil New Generation Tour. He also started his own comedy enterprise with a group of friends called KO Comedy, where they promote and perform shows. Throughout his success he has noticed how much stronger and funnier his set has been.

“The comedic growth that I’ve experienced is pretty immense and (this is a double negative) but you can’t not get good from doing comedy every night. It’s inevitable, it will just happen,” he said. “I’m just amazed of how much more power I feel like I have, how much more control I feel I have over a crowd, and having more material. I would have never thought this was conceivable two years ago.”

The last day of work for Sammy Obeid will be on Sept. 21, 2013, making it officially 1,001 consecutive days of stand-up comedy. Now working on this eighth wind, quitting is not even an option for him but he does look forward to his future day off.

“I don’t even know what I’m going to do yet. But it’s going to involve locking myself in my room or a few days,” joked Obeid.

Sammy Obeid will perform a free show with Mike E. Winfield at Sacramento State’s University Union Ballroom on April 4, 2013. On April 7, Obeid will headline a show at Punch Line in Sacramento. Tickets for the latter are $15.

Pizza Rock’s owner Tony Gemignani played his part in the revitalization of K Street and now looks to bring his recipe for success to Sin City

When Pizza Rock opened in 2011, its owners joined area entrepreneurs in helping transform K Street from a dim portion of downtown to a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood in the midst of revitalization.

The city has a ways to go, but Pizza Rock owner Tony Gemignani says he and co-owners George Karpaty and Trevor Hewitt have had success, choosing K Street because of its great potential and the steady business of the co-owners’ clubs—Dive Bar and District 30—in the area.

“It was a concept we had talked about for many years,” Gemignani says of Pizza Rock’s nightclub vibe—from the rock music rendition of Michelangelo’s Adam painted on the ceiling to the savvy music system allowing for sound to be simultaneously transmitted between Pizza Rock, Dive Bar and District 30.

Gemignani credits the restaurant’s success to his hardworking management and staff, top quality ingredients, diverse menu and unique atmosphere.

“We are always updating and changing so it’s a diverse menu,” he says. “We keep our core pizzas and [appetizers] and everything but we tend to change parts of the menu to suit the customers. Sacramento likes substance, Sacramento likes value and when you look at our bigger pizzas, the Sicilian and the Romana, you get more for your money, so those have really taken off.”

Ironically, one of the biggest sellers is also Gemignani’s burger, ordered anywhere from 80 to 100 times each day, he says. It’s something he’s looking to branch out with down the road.

In the meantime, Gemignani and partners have decided to open a second Pizza Rock in the ideal place for the concept—Las Vegas.

“For the new Pizza Rock in Vegas, we got together to plan everything, and that’s part of us,” Gemignani says about the team’s enthusiasm to design the entire place from the bottom up. “[In Sacramento] we were a big part of every decision, from the carpet, menu, vibe, all the way down to the people we interview. It’s an experience, a package and that’s what we look at, from how the restaurant should look to how the servers should act. They’re a little edgy, but that’s what’s cool.”

When it comes down to it, however, Pizza Rock has repeat customers not just because of the vibe, but because of the food, which is made with fresh local ingredients as well as specially imported items from Italy.

An award-winning pizza maker and instructor who owns three restaurants in San Francisco and has four other projects in the works, Gemignani had 20 years of experience to bring to the Sacramento table when restaurant talks first began.

In 2007, Gemignani took first place at the World Pizza Cup in Naples, Italy, in the Neapolitan category with his Pizza Margherita, becoming the first American in history to win the honor. Today, Pizza Rock and Tony’s Pizza Napoletana in San Francisco recreate that award-winning pizza using the exact ingredients and oven.

He won first place at the 2011 World Championship of Pizza Makers, has won several Food Network challenges and landed in the Guinness Book of World Records for spinning the largest pizza dough base (33.2 inches) in two minutes. Gemignani also owns and operates the International School of Pizza in San Francisco, teaching several styles, certifying professionals and instructing non-professionals for home cooking.

At his restaurants, you will not only find his classic Italian pies and dishes, but also authentic Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Detroit and other styles of pizza.

“When I won a bunch of awards, I traveled worldwide and nationwide, and during those stops, I ended up working with a lot of great independent operators who had different ingredients and different customers,” Gemignani says. “When you looked at those styles [in other places], people had not been doing them correctly or not at all. I wanted a restaurant with multiple ovens, multiple flours, multiple tomatoes to make each one authentic. I’ve been lucky enough to work with great people and go back to my restaurants and bring those styles.”

Asked which style is his favorite, Gemignani laughs and says he likes them all, if they’re done right.

“It’s like saying which pasta you like best, like you like spaghetti but hate linguini, but you can’t say you like one and hate the other because it’s still pasta,” he says. “If the pizza is light, not too weighed down, the dough is matured properly and you use fresh ingredients, I like it. But you can really screw that up.”

Freshness, Gemignani learned at a young age, is key. Growing up on a farm in Castro Valley, Calif., Gemignani watched his mom cook every day with the ingredients they grew. Coincidentally, he also gets his design interests from his mom, whom he watched decorate an inviting home for his family for years.

At 18, Gemignani started working at his brother Frank’s Pyzano’s Pizzeria in Castro Valley (which closed its doors just last year after 21 years). He later attended Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli to become a certified pizza master and has worked nonstop since.

For those who can’t visit his restaurants or attend his school, Gemignani has written two cookbooks and is working on a third, which is, of course, pizza-related.

But for the man who eats, breathes and dreams pizza, he still has a lot of new ideas up his sleeves, and will continue to roll them out at Pizza Rock in the near future. 

Bacon & Butter
1119 21st Street – Sacramento

Our parents were always quick to emphasize taking our time when they were nurturing us. Chew your food. Walk don’t run. But the age old axiom to stop and smell the roses seems lost in our modern culture of efficiency and impatience with download speeds, commuter traffic and restaurant ticket times. Local chef Billy Zoellin’s new breakfast and lunch restaurant Bacon & Butter is a friendly reminder to take our time, because even slowing down is valuable.

At 28, Zoellin has climbed the ranks of local artisan cooks at an impressive speed. He began as a busser at BIBA and Andiamo, while still in high school. When he wasn’t keeping the tabletops orderly, he helped with prep work out of a natural curiosity with the kitchen, which he claims is in his blood.

“My grandma used me as a kid for catering,” Zoellin said. “It went from being a busser and enjoying cooking to having a kid and needing a full-time job. So, I quit baseball and started cooking.”

His fast rise in status continued with his education at the American River Culinary School. After enrolling as a student, he quickly became a TA. From there it was prep cook at Mulvaney’s. It was only his third job in a kitchen. When he took over the head chef job at Golden Bear last year, his menu caught the attention of Food Network’s Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. “Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve never been satisfied,” he said. “It’s part of my personality, I’m very meticulous with how I like things. If I see something I like, I will follow until I can go off on my own path with it.”

With 18-and-over nightclub Bar Fly, formerly and ironically called Club 21, in need of a liquor license, Zoellin was asked if he was interested in opening his own restaurant in the front of the building.

“This place is a club at night,” he said. “For liquor licenses you typically need food. Instead of working for other people and signing off on my menus that I create, the items I put my heart and soul into, I decided to do it for myself. It was time to roll the dice a little bit.”

On such a fast track with his career, Bacon & Butter appeals to a need for Zoellin to slow down in order to adapt to the learning curve of running his own business. Early criticisms of Bacon & Butter (located on 21st Street between K and L streets) mostly leaned on an annoyance with the wait, either for a table or the ticket time. It was an issue not lost on Zoellin and his staff.

“Our biggest issue has been time,” he said. “But I challenge any one of those critics to open a restaurant and serve top quality food in a timely fashion to 500 people on a weekend and see how it goes. See how many weeks it takes to get that ticket time down and have everyone feel good about their meal.”

It was said not out of frustration, but as a matter of fact. It’s the sort of challenge that would make for a great new Food Network competition show. Zoellin hopes his patrons will come to Bacon & Butter to enjoy the simple pleasures of a well-prepared meal with many appealing environmental guarantees. At Bacon & Butter the meat is all grass-fed; the bacon is nitrate-free; the vegetables are sustainable, seasonal and local fare; the bread comes in daily; and the coffee is from Old Soul.

“We’re not a greasy spoon. We have a commitment to local and seasonal fare,” Zoellin said. “Breakfast places will cut corners because prep time is at a minimum. Here you won’t find a lot of boxes and bags in the back. You won’t find a freezer. We want to make things from scratch like grandma would or mom would.”

Was it not always worth it to wait for grandma’s made-from-scratch cooking?

The morning I visited Bacon & Butter, I cleared my schedule and allotted myself a rare chance on a weekday to eat breakfast–a ritual usually limited to a pot of coffee or Cheerios. Mayor Kevin Johnson held a business brunch of 30 that same morning. The meeting was scheduled to begin at 8 and end at 9 a.m. I arrived at 9:10 a.m. to two empty tables littered with discarded napkins, used utensils and plates with only sauce stains remaining. It’s unwise and unfair to criticize a new restaurant’s ticket times, especially when it’s an owner not named Paragary, but given the efficiency apparent from that morning’s remains, Bacon & Butter have worked out the kinks.

My mountain range of country potatoes, hash and eggs over easy, topped with corn salsa was well worth the wait and a larger portion than I expected for the price. The hash needed no salt, while the corn salsa had just enough jalapeños to give it a subtle kick in spice. The server ribbed me that I barely put a dent in it, but it felt as though even if it was only a rolling hill spread, I’d eaten my fill. The menu at Bacon & Butter is crafted for the adventurous or even the average Joe or Jane. If biscuits and gravy or flapjacks are all you need, your desires will not be compromised.

“I’ve cooked a lot of dinner in my career,” Zoellin said. “It became a challenge of how do I apply what I know to breakfast and make it acceptable. You put fried sage on things and have your whimsical takes on fare, while staying within the guidelines of local, sustainable and always seasonal.”

As I sat post-meal near the bay window alternating sips of Old Soul coffee, a mason jar of water, and a mason jar of Greyhound, I took in my surroundings. Chef Zoellin told me for their refurbished interior, they had a picture in mind. It was of a sharply dressed man in the Depression era going out for a job interview. The idea was to create a place that man might have stopped into for coffee. The interior is of simpler times, when items were handcrafted and plastic was barely existent. Above the community table is an old wash bin, hung upside down from the ceiling, with a clock that never quite ticks on time attached to the bottom. Small light bulbs hang from the bin to light the table. It is both a piece of history and a piece of modern art. Along the outer walls are plywood-framed photos of cowboys (frames built by Zoellin), and shelves hosting trinkets that Zoellin found in antique stores.

“It fits my personality,” he said. “It fits what we do, putting a sustainable practice to recycled and refurbished products. We are modern post-Depression era, that’s where we are.”

As Zoellin and I sat with the community table within an arm’s length, I had to know, “Why do you think people fear the community table?” After a good laugh and a shared confusion, he offered, “Don’t be afraid to sit next to a neighbor.”

“Start a conversation with someone,” he went on. “Ask them ‘how’s the hash?’ Maybe their review will help you decide what to have next time.” He’s not giving up on his experiment to get his customers to relax and say hello to their fellow neighbors. He hopes that someday the community table will be the place to sit, rather than a compromise. For now, his regular, Dave, sits there most mornings, reading the paper and making small talk with the service staff. Strike up a conversation with Dave sometime.

Yelp is an outlet for blowing off steam. If you want to read a review of Bacon & Butter, flip through the encyclopedia pages in your check booklet that’s dropped off at the end of the meal, an idea Zoellin stole from Mulvaney’s. In it, you’ll read short and sweet thank you signatures of people who hope their favorite items never leave the menu and who can’t get enough of those pancake shots (a treat I intend to try on my next visit). These are the messages from people who took the time to hand-write their appreciation in ink, rather than blog bullet points in haste.

Anthony Bourdain is the very picture of the jaded, over privileged foodie that he used to despise. No really, it says so right here on page 195 of his latest book, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. Truth is, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone even remotely interested in food who doesn’t love–maybe even idolize–the guy. The self-proclaimed “former chef” earned the now well-worn and maybe even up-for-retirement title of Bad Boy of Cooking 10 years ago when he dragged into daylight the up-‘til-then unspoken (in public, anyway) seedy stories from the back of the house in his best-selling chef’s memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

Properly braced to talk food and, ahem, bodily functions, but instead regaled with pontifications on the current affairs of cinema and the idea of adoring baristas as rock stars, Submerge spoke with Bourdain about his upcoming lecture at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, the topic of which not even the speaker will know until he arrives on stage. “It’s going to be like Spinal Tap on tour,” he says. “You know, without the entourage, the equipment, the rest of the band…one night only, in and out.”

It seems a lot of the stuff you talk about in your book is so current; how much more, current-event wise, can you get in your talks? Or do you just go off on anything?
I’ll go off on anything, I mean if I saw something on TV last night, I might well talk about that.

I saw in your bio that you even give team-building talks?
Yeah, that was kind of weird for a while. Early on, I was [part of] a speakers’ bureau. And I was invited mostly to do the sort of corporate retreat talk. Shortly after Kitchen Confidential, Harvard Business Review had done an article, a really big article, outlining the takeaway from Kitchen Confidential, sort of extrapolating strategies and tactics for managing. And for me, it was like a vicarious thrill for managers of companies who could never actually institute any of the policies or management strategies that I was able to in the kitchen. I mean if you work for a bank, you can’t fire somebody with no warning and no notice, just for listening to Billy Joel. I used to do that [laughs].

Really? Billy Joel?
Yeah, I think enjoying the music of Billy Joel or the Grateful Dead excessively was grounds for dismissal. I just couldn’t work with you. It was problematic. But I think there were those in the business community who got a vicarious kick out of imagining how great that would be if they could live their life like that or with companies like that. So I did that for a little while, but very quickly the bulk of my speaking engagements came from promoters who book theaters and sell tickets and put me in just to talk about anything, more like a band than the usual lecture circuit.

And there’s nothing else on stage with you. Just you and a mic and whatever comes to mind.
Yeah. Me, a mic and a local beer.

This book seems to mirror your approach to these talks. It almost seems like a bunch of mini-manifestos. I half expect you to say, “And another thing!”
[Laughs] Yeah, you know, I write like I talk. And in fact, two or three chapters in the book were kind of put together on the road. I wrote them in my head as I was standing on stage, talking to audiences. It’s sort of an immediate way to find out whether a sentence or a paragraph works. You get that immediate feedback from an audience. Is this funny or not? You find out awful quick in front of 2000 people.

What was the impetus behind the book? I know some topics arise while you’re giving talks, but there’s other, more personal…
Well, Kitchen Confidential is still selling like crazy; it’s been 10 years, it’s still a big book, selling very well all over the world. And my life has changed so much in 10 years, and the restaurant business that I was writing about in Kitchen Confidential has changed so much in 10 years, that I felt it was… I don’t know whether I’d say important, but I wanted to update things. I just thought it was worth saying, “I’m no longer a chef. This is how my life has changed, and also the business I was writing about has changed so much, let’s look at these things.”

Talking about change, there’s a genre of the food celebrity on the Food Network, but it almost feels like there’s an undercurrent of another type of food celebrity. The New York Times did a story on butchers becoming the new rock stars. And I’ve worked with baristas who are the super hipster cool cats…
[Laughs] Yeah. You know, I don’t know… I certainly like the idea of butchers being empowered in the way that chefs were. I think that’s a good thing. But…at this point, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I’m suspicious as to whether we’re going to start seeing barista-related programming or whether there’ll be rock star baristas… But let’s hope so! Better a barista as a star of a reality show than Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, for sure. At least they’re doing something useful. But I don’t know. I think they might be taking that a little seriously. We should be learning that from websites and blogs, rather than the Times’ dining section.

It seems that if you’re spending time around food and writing, music tends to be right up there. Do you have a particular music you listen to either when you’re traveling, writing or cooking?
For cooking, I like a pre-disco funk. Bobby Womack, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, I love that era. Iggy and the Stooges are still prominently featured on my iPod. Old [Rolling] Stones, some more recent stuff but not that recent. I’m certainly not plugged into new bands at all. I don’t have time. I’m amazed at my friends who stay really current on the latest indie bands and spend a lot of time listening to new music. I envy them that they have the time. For me, there’s still movies and some television shows that I really like that I don’t have time to stay up on.

What do you watch when you have time?
Mad Men. Treme, I’m very, very excited by. I mean with The Wire, David Simon, I think anything he does is amazing. Breaking Bad I like, though I’ve fallen behind there. I think it’s kind of awesome that movies are so bad now that television to some extent has sort of taken up the slack. They’re telling stories on television of all places and no way would Hollywood allow those stories to be told in films. Try to imagine The Wire in a film or a series of films. It would never happen. Or Breaking Bad. I mean, a high school science teacher turned meth-cooking hero? I think that’s kind of a reason to hope.

On to your show, No Reservations. This last season just started.
We’re ending our sixth season of shooting and will be going out on the road again in the fall and shooting our seventh.

Do you pick the locales?
Yes. Absolutely. That’s the number-one most important part of the equation of making television for me. I get to choose where we go, and I decide with my production company and with my partners and camera people and editor–I decide how we’re going to tell that story. I have to say, I’m really grateful to my network for letting me do that. I have an unprecedented amount of freedom to tell the stories I want to tell, where I want to tell them and how.

I’ve read Cuba is a place you haven’t filmed but that you’d like to. Is there a place you would not like to go, or not like to return?
I’m not so happy in Eastern Europe, as it turns out. Central Asia, the ‘Stans, I don’t really have a feel for. I don’t like clean, orderly countries with no social problems. I like hot, messy, passionate countries. I’m sick. I’m a Mediterranean at heart.

I have to ask, only because I thought it was hilarious. Do you really initiate black propaganda with your daughter when it comes to McDonald’s?
[Laughs] Um… maybe I exaggerate a little bit. If it comes to that, I will, though.

And I’ve read she’s already got a pretty experienced palate.
She’s Italian like her mama. And we spend a lot of time in the town where my wife’s from. I bring them with me to Europe a lot. So it’s not like we’re trying to make her into a little foodie, she’s just growing up around a lot of interesting food choices. You know, she sees her mother and father eating interesting foods, then she’s free to grab stuff off our plates. Now and again, we’re surprised by what she likes.

So, Alice Waters would be impressed with how she’s eating?
Yeah! They’re a lot alike, actually, Alice and my daughter. She eats only organic food, she likes Paris, so yeah she’s got that going for her.

Catch Anthony Bourdain at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium September 17 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $46.50 and $36.50 and can be purchased at the Convention Center Box Office, by phone at (916) 808-5181 or (916) 225-2277 or online at www.tickets.com.