A good time to be had with ‘Bottomless Brunch at Colman’s’
Colman Domingo has a thing for curated experiences.
As a former longtime bartender and restaurant worker, the actor, director and writer best known for roles in “Fear the Walking Dead” and “Zola” likes to have the food, drink, people and general atmosphere to work together to create experiences that his guests will remember.
Which is what he endeavors to do on his web series “Bottomless Brunch at Colman’s,” which streams Sundays on “The Walking Dead” YouTube channel and AMC.com. Filmed remotely from his home in Los Angeles, Domingo invites in celebrity guests via video chat to partake in food, drink and conversation, sending them the ingredients for a cocktail – which they’ll mix on camera – ask them to make something delicious for breakfast/lunch and talk to them about their life today in the era of the pandemic.
The idea came from a show Domingo had already been developing for AMC about cocktail culture that was then expedited and adapted to life during social distancing.
“I think that’s the moment we’re all missing right now ...,” he explains. “So I’m always having people over to the house and I thought, ‘Well, we can send them virtual packages, we can send them packages of mixers to make the cocktail and we can have a conversation and get to know each other and invite the audience online . ... It was more of the case of I think this responds to the moment and it’s a bit of entertainment and fun and inspiration that I think we can put out right now.”
The 20-minute episodes are very lighthearted and can get downright hilarious when the celebs attempt with varying degrees of success to mix the drinks. In the first round of six installments, actors such as Anika Noni Rose, Jay Ellis, Niecy Nash, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun and Common have tried their hand at video mixology. The new batch begins with actors Brett Gelman, Alycia Debnam-Carey and Kim Dickens sipping a Bulleit Bourbon black Manhattan. The shows continue each week with various food and drink pairings.
All guests are friends of Domingo.
“I wanted to create a show that was not necessarily about promoting anything,” he says. “I’m very much of the old school, Dick Cavett aficionado of interviewing style. I like the idea of bringing a guest on and getting to know them in a way that no one else knows them.”