Dishing it straight
TV host tries meals ‘so wrong, they’re right’
John Catucci may be a comedian, but he’s also the kind of guy who will “talk about food while eating other food” — a sure sign of a man who takes what’s on his plate seriously. But not so seriously that he won’t poke fun at “food porn,” or eat a bastardized version of tiramisu made with beer (yes, that makes it “beeramisu”). Catucci is the host of You Gotta Eat Here!, a new Food Network program that premièred last week that’s a sort of a cross between the decadence of Guy Fieri’s Diners,
Drive-ins and Dives and the national pride of Top Chef Canada.
The show sees Catucci travelling across the country to sample some of our nation’s tastiest comfort food — and if you’re thinking that means hearty, healthy stews and chicken noodle soup, you’re way off.
“One chef told me that people go out to eat because they don’t have deep fryers at home, and that’s . . . well, if you deep-fry anything, it’s delicious,” Catucci says of some of the items he tasted while filming the show’s firstrun, which included crab and lobster mac and cheese, a burger made with grilled cheese sandwiches instead of buns, and deepfried poached eggs at Toronto restaurant Hadley’s, which he tucked into shortly after completing this interview. (We tucked into them, too: They can be best described as food so wrong, it’s right.)
“But you definitely hit a wall when you’re eating so much food that’s fried,” Catucci says, noting that he now travels with a jump rope to avoid packing on the pounds while on the road.
“I did gain a little weight while filming. Not much, but a little. I learned that I had to stop feeling sorry for myself, after those big meals, and get up off the hotel bed.”
Catucci and his crew spent two days at each restaurant they visited, spending the first in the kitchen filming with the chef, and the second in the dining room talking to regular patrons.
It’s this mix of behind-thescenes access and front-of-house schmoozing that Catucci says proves the show is a unique experiment in making food accessible to regular folk. That, and Catucci himself is a comedian, not a chef.
“I think that’s what we liked about the show, and what we wanted, was that I was a fish out of water” he says. “We wanted me to go in and say, ‘What is that?’ ‘Why are you doing that?’ ‘Why is it at that temperature?’ — just all the questions regular people want to ask.”
Of course, being a regular guy means a lot of stuff hits the cutting-room floor. “They love it when I screw up,” Catucci says, adding that his background in improv gives the show a dose of added spice — or, at the very least, a pinch.
“There’s just so much s—t coming out of my mouth,” Catucci says.
“Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I trust other people to make that decision.”