Excerpts from
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The Kitchen Sessions With Charlie Trotter–It’s always good to see a cooking show from Chicago (with a vaguely Prairie School set and jazzy end credits, no less). I say this despite the fact that traffic in front of Charlie Trotter’s restaurant blocks the way to my therapist’s office every other week, despite his slightly off-putting uber-ambition and also despite his goofy and confusing cameo in My Best Friend’s Wedding (he was supposed to be in New York?). Charlie Trotter is an appealing, buttoned-to-the-neck, intense, cute, hunched-over culinary nerd, with the requisite intense culinary mania you might expect from a man who runs a 5-star restaurant. He speaks in the zealous, fervent, but strangely bland (despite the barrage of adjectives) language of restaurateurs; he uses the word “product” a lot. It’s kind of the foodie equivalent of police lingo. He comes across as friendly and unafraid of anything gastronomically, which is appealing (don’t often see people use duck fat in vinaigrettes). Altogether a very fun, somewhat inspiring show. He knows his stuff. Obviously.
Gourmet Ireland (With Paul and Jeanne Rankin)–The word “sportif” bounces through my mind every 2 seconds when I watch this show. It is hosted by a very tall and energetic skinny married couple on a futuristic, blue-ish set, intercut with location shots. They seem determined–at the same time that they work with a lot of traditional Irish foods–to demonstrate that Irish cooking doesn’t have to be: (fill in the blank: boring, bland, stodgy, uninspired). I probably would like the show much more if they would focus on boring traditional Irish fare. On some level contemporary cooking from every country starts to look the same–seared on the outside, rare inside, on a bed of mesclun, with infused oil blah blah blah. But they really do crack me up. The wife, especially, is very afraid of pauses, and chatters herself into corners sometimes, as if the whole show would come to a crashing halt if she didn’t stop talking. Sportif! Sportif!
