Anna Chlumsky recalls her brush with restaurant reviewing
You’re just out of college and you have no idea of what you want to do for a career. Ideally, you’d go into the field of your education, but maybe that’s no longer appealing or realistic.
What’s a recent grad to do?
If you’re like Anna Chlumsky, who was just out of the University of Chicago in the early 2000s with a B.A. in International Studies, your thoughts turn to your talents and your interests. And ideas start to come, some better than others.
“You’re like, ‘Well, I can write and I like traveling and I like eating ...,’ ” recalls the 36-year-old actress, who is currently in the midst of a five-episode guest-starring arc on the Saturday AMC drama “Halt and Catch Fire.” “So I found a posting at Zagat.”
Zagat, the print guide and website that has been publishing restaurant reviews and ratings in more than 70 cities since 1979, felt like a natural fit to the former child star of the 1991 theatrical hit “My Girl,” who, like her friends, was a foodie before the term became popular. So she accepted a position as a fact checker with the ultimate goal of becoming a food critic.
But there was one problem.
“(I realized) once I was there, they’re a polling site,” the Chicago native says. “Really, the happiest people at Zagat were the mathematicians, because it was a survey. It’s a survey, so the same type of folks who would be happy at Gallup or Nielsen or something are also happy there because it’s a lot of data collection.
“And if you opened up a Zagat guide,” she continues, “you realized that all the blurbs are in quotes and that’s because they actually don’t write them; they only grab what the surveyors have written and then they turn those into the reviews . ... ”
“We knew we were never going to get close to writing a review,” she adds with a laugh, “unless you filled out a survey.”
And while she never did get to write for Zagat, she did have several articles published online, including one about Ovaltine. But she ultimately found acting to be more satisfying, and thus went back to her original career.
As for her current role on “Halt,” Chlumsky stars as Dr. Katie Herman, chief ontologist who plays a crucial role in the Search business venture in the series’ final season.
Not being technologically inclined, the actress had to look up what an ontologist is (“They’re categorists. They’re really good at drawing relationships between all things.”). But she immediately dialed into the character and her ability for independent thought.
“You can tell it by the way she dresses and her musical tastes, she’s kind of – for lack of a better term, a ’90s-type term – an ‘alterna-chick,’ ” Chlumsky says. “And so I think she’s always been open to the fringe. You know, I think that people who think differently are not strange to her. I think she’s a person who thinks differently. So I think that all of the coders and all of the collectors at Comet are just like this delightful motley crew for her to lead.”