Ever since he appeared on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” — and continuing on into “Iron Chef,” “Top Chef” and “Chopped” — Ted Allen has been the traveled, sophisticated, bespectacled foodie America has looked to for culinary wisdom.
When he spoke of a great laksa, or the proper elements of a tomato sauce, it sounded like the words of a man who had actually spent time in Asia and the Mediterranean. (Yes, he has been to both.)
The host of the Food Network program “Chopped” hadn’t had a break in a long time when the New York Post spoke to him a little while back; he had been shooting 12-hour days, as well as hosting dinners, like a Pepcid Taste Maker’s dinner at Andy Ricker’s Pok Pok in Columbia Heights, Brooklyn that was co-hosted by Eater.
Still, Allen is not easily dulled by a busy schedule. Even early one Saturday morning from his home in Brooklyn, he was sharp and eager to chat food and travel.
Where did you want to travel when you were a kid?
England — in particular, London. I grew up in central Ohio, which was not particularly full of the old castles I wanted to visit. England and France were definitely at the top of my list, and that later expanded to Italy. My first international trip was when my parents took us to London, York, Liverpool — we did a week in England and a week in Paris. I was 15, my sister was 12; I remember, my sister ordered a seafood platter at a restaurant in Paris, and she was unaccustomed to seeing a langoustine with tentacles intact.
Now, food dictates where I want to travel — it plays a huge role in where we go. If it’s winter in New York and we want to go some place warm, instead of the Caribbean we’d rather go to Mexico, which has astonishing, staggeringly awesome food.
You spent a lot of time in Chicago — where do you eat when you go back?
I’ve been gone so long now that the references I make to Chicago are going to be dated, but I like Rick Bayless’ restaurants; Rick is major force to have educated most of us in the variety of cuisine Mexico has to offer — it’s more than carne asada. We owe him a great debt. But things change so fast in this business. I eat at Spiaggo and Max’s Italian Beef, where I always have my sandwich dunked in the juices. It’s a treat — some of the greatest food is street food.
Where do you stay?
I usually stay with friends — but I like the James. It’s a great location. Usually if I’m there for business, they put me up pretty well, like the Park Hyatt.
How did you first figure out you wanted to write about food?
I was at Chicago magazine and I had an epiphany. Sarah Stegner was cooking at The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton [in Chicago], and she made this multi-course dinner. At the end she had a chocolate cake which she paired with a white dessert wine, and it was such an epiphany that a white wine could possibly compliment something as rich and dense as chocolate cake — and I remember thinking, “Wow. Now I’m beginning to get the relation between food and wine.”
How do you travel these days?
We take a cooking class everywhere we go — Barry [Rice, Allen’s husband] and I went to Bangkok, where they took you to a market and you get to see all these crazy fruit and fish and then we went back to the home of the cooking school and cooked lunch. It’s a chain called the Blue Elephant; they have a Blue Elephant Cookbook and the classes take place in a beautiful old colonial house. … It really paid off. I think it was $75.
One of the ways I love to travel is I have a group of close friends, this Chicago gang, when a friend got married in Maine we rented a giant old shingle house; 15 stayed there and subsequently we went on to rent houses in Costa Rica, Umbria, the upper coast of Michigan. And it’s affordable. This pallazo in Umbria amounted to $250 per week.
What’s the most underappreciated food city in America?
There are so many. It’s really such a great time to be an American food lover. I feel we’ve just awoken from a generation that was trying to get away from cooking and produced terrible food. Now there’s been a long renaissance. Particularly with food trucks. What I think is profound is they’re making available for office workers food from scratch, like Korean tacos by Roy Choi.
I love my job for a lot of reasons — and one is exposing me to these kinds of things. Until you go to Portland or Seattle and see parking lots full of food truck, you don’t know. In Portland, that’s a permanent collection of stalls and carts.
I take it you cook — what’s your specialty?
Ironically, considering where I work — where I force people to cook very quickly — I’m a slow food person. I like to cook food that take a long time to develop flavor, low and slow, like barbecue. I like to put a pork shoulder in a smoker, turn it down to 250 and cook it for eight hours. I don’t do a lot of delicate fancy fussy stuff. I do a little bit of Asian, Thai-inflected, for most part.
You own a house in Clinton Hill — why did you want to be there?
We ended up finding a brownstone we could swing. Previously, we had a condo in Chelsea. It was a nice place. But there was no dirt to stick plants into — I like having outdoor space and Brooklyn makes it slightly easier.
Where do you like to eat in Clinton Hill?
Tonight we’re going to Umi Nom, which is by a guy named King Phojanakong, who was a contestant on “Chopped” who’s also got a place called Kuma Inn on the Lower East Side; that’s sort of the stuff I gravitate towards, a blend of Malaysian and Vietnamese and possibly Thai. It’s BYO, the chicken wings are super hard crispy — I literally burned my lips. There’s Walter’s. There’s Dino, a small, beautiful Italian restaurant on Dekalb. And there’s Lulu & Po.
Now that you’re famous, where have you been recognized?
Food Network gets picked up in places that nobody tells me — I might find out that we’re big in Peru or something. It’s funny, when I’m recognized on the street in Rome, it’s usually by tourists.
What’s the one food that you’d risk a bust by customs to bring back to New York?
I would never! But what I love to do is bring home a leg of prosciutto from Italy. I try to go to the market and bring home spices — but I’m a relatively law-abiding guy, not a big smuggler. The things I bring back are probably not illegal, like peppercorns. In Mozambique once I brought back five pounds of raw cashews — that might be frowned upon.
What’s on your travel bucket list?
I think Charleston is the trip I’m going to be proposing to friends next. We’ve also been kicking around Mexico City, north of Puerto Vallarta. This is not a new discovery, but there’s a boutique hotel [called Casa Kimberley (Calle Zaragoza 445, Puerto Vallarta)] which used to be Richard Burton’s house.
What’s the food you would never eat?
Andrew Zimmern from “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” won’t eat walnuts. I don’t understand it, but he hates walnuts. The show I’m on now I kinda felt my obligation to taste anything, even though I’m not one of the judges. But on one episode of “Iron Chef,” Ken Oringer was on and the ingredient was squab, and he served squab brain. I absolutely did eat the pigeon brain on the half-skull. He somehow sawed a squab head in half, sideways, including the beak.
I’ve always thought that for a competition to be fair, the judges need to thoughtfully taste everything. Although I will admit that organs sometimes give me a little pause … But he celebrated that complicated, tiny bird in a bunch of ways — his dish was amazing, and he won. And now, at Toro, he and Jamie [Bissonnette] are the toast of downtown!