What's Eating Andrew Zimmern?

After a tumultuous year, Andrew Zimmern is back with a new TV show. The chef talks about not talking, when to eat the coleslaw, and "What's Eating America?"

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I’ve known Andrew Zimmern for almost 20 years now: He started writing a column for Mpls.St.Paul back in 2001. And two decades is more than enough time to understand that I shouldn’t ever try to pronounce Latin in front of him at the dinner table.

“I’m glad you said ‘annus horribilis’ and not ‘anus horribilis,’” he says.

I agree. I came a little too close to the latter.

“Yeah you did,” he teases. We’re at Bull’s Horn, Doug Flicker’s gastro dive bar in south Minneapolis. Zimmern has known Doug Flicker, the chef and owner, even longer than he’s known me. “Doug sent a very nice email from Japan saying, ‘I hope everything is going to be okay tonight,’” he says. In 2010, Zimmern famously coaxed another of his old friends, Anthony Bourdain, to dine at Flicker’s acclaimed (and now gone) Piccolo—and bring “the Bourdain bump” to the business.

“Tony was doing a Midwest show,” Zimmern recalls of his gone-but-not-forgotten Travel Channel colleague. “And he said, ‘I need a dude that I’m going to like and connect with. And you know what I like and the kind of people I connect with. So just pick a place.’”

As far as Zimmern picking his own place, these days find Zimmern living alone on the west side of the metro, near his production company’s offices and studio kitchen in St. Louis Park. When Travel Channel put his show Bizarre Foods on the shelf, the plan was to step back and start spending more time in Minnesota. Chill on all the travel for a minute. “I would have thought so,” he says. But he’s still a man on the move.

Our server comes by to take our order. Zimmern has kind of a rumpled metrosexual lumberjack thing going on tonight. He’s wearing a designer blue-and-green plaid flannel with Smokey Bear’s face embroidered on the back. (A local label called Angry Minnow Vintage designed it, he says). A navy-blue watchman’s cap covers his famously shiny bald pate, and his chin looks roughed up by a little salt-and-pepper stubble. He’s wearing glasses, but not the ones with the bright orange design flourishes that you’ve seen on TV. You might think he was going incognito if it weren’t for the chunky Breitling SuperOcean watch, with the mesh band, around his left wrist.

Zimmern is drinking Sprecher root beer—he’s been sober since moving to Minnesota to dry out at Hazelden 28 years ago—and he’s famished. Zimmern’s horrible year hasn’t taken any edge off his appetite. We order cheese curds and the fried chicken and drop biscuits and a fried bologna sandwich and the coleslaw. Zimmern loves coleslaw. In fact, when the coleslaw comes out, he actually coos at it.

“My boo!” he exclaims.

Zimmern has another new boo, too: Mid-month, his new show about food and politics, What’s Eating America with Andrew Zimmern, will debut on Sunday nights on MSNBC. But I’m the kind of old friend who hasn’t really talked to him in a while, so that means we have to talk about his horrible annus first.

In the last 15 months or so, Zimmern has finalized his divorce; watched his Chinese restaurant, Lucky Cricket, open to rough reviews before closing and opening again; and hit the terminus of his old TV show, Bizarre Foods. He came within a wonton wrapper of getting  himself canceled after offending most of the Asian chefs in this city, and the entirety of woke Twitter, with his remarks about “horseshit restaurants masquerading as Chinese food” in a clumsy video interview with Fast Company.

“We started to go down a rabbit hole in that conversation,” Zimmern explains. “He had a nice gotcha moment after we’d been recording for six hours on a hot day at the State Fair. It was a stupid thing to say, and I wasn’t making my point clearly. And I’m smarter than that, and I apologized for it, and I moved on.”

I ask him about the most painful consequence of his “horseshit” comment: What was the worst part?

“The worst thing for me is to hurt somebody’s feelings,” he says.

He tried not to react to everything that was written online afterward, but he couldn’t help but fixate on some of it. Lucky Cricket was opening—that’s why he did the interview in the first place. So of course he read critic Soleil Ho’s accusation of cultural appropriation on Eater.com.

“One of the things that hurt was I sort of sat there and went, wow,” he says. “Listening to people you respect, especially young voices that you respect a lot, and I respect hers tremendously.”

I asked him if he felt compelled to argue with his critics, especially since so many of them were one tweet away.

“Well of course, Steve,” he says, “But what’s going to make it better is me going out and learning from that.”

He had a friend in Toronto who told him to talk to as many people as he could and to listen—really listen—before responding to anybody. He went on a six-month listening tour, and then he did a conversation series at the Culinary Institute of America.

“So I could actually talk to young culinary students about the timely civic and cultural issues of the day that are literal kitchen-table issues, right?” he says. “Like equity, like who gets to cook what, like hunger and waste. Actual real conversations where we brought in stakeholders and experts from all kinds of fields.”

He says he learned a new set of rules that govern when he gets to open his mouth.

“The rules for me are: Is it true? Does it need to be said? And if it’s true and needs to be said, is it up to me to say it?” 

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Zimmern put these new rules into practice over the past year while filming his new show. “I saw stories in the food space that had national impact on our civic and political conversation that nobody else was telling,” he says. “And I thought, since food is something everyone loves to talk about, let’s talk about issues through food.”

Each hour of What’s Eating America will focus on a political issue: the U.S. food system, addiction in the restaurant industry, climate change. Zimmern feels stoked that the show is on MSNBC, and he intends to do real journalism, changing the ratio of education to entertainment that was such a successful formula for him on Bizarre Foods.

“People saw a fat white guy going around the world eating bugs. And it was an entertainment show, and they laughed at the double entendres, and I was occasionally funny and amusing.” What’s Eating America, by contrast, finds Zimmern sitting down with former Florida Republican governor Charlie Crist and confronting him about voter suppression.

Zimmern feels he has to represent his audience’s interests in a completely different way. “There were moments on the show where I thought to myself, What if I don’t ask the right questions?” he says. “This shit is so important. This means so much.”

I ask him if, before landing this new show on MSNBC, he got nervous that his platform might shrink, or maybe disappear entirely.

“No, because I knew it would stop.” Zimmern explains. “My faith is, When it stops, I’ll be OK.” Zimmern says he first found that faith by working through his recovery decades ago. He says that he never felt happier than when he was 60 days clean of drugs and booze; living in Hazelden’s Fellowship Club, a halfway house in St. Paul; and washing dishes at Dubin’s diner on Snelling. And that work, he says, is ongoing. “I know I’m the luckiest motherfucker in the world,” he says. He still gets up every morning and meditates. “I ask for help in the morning, and I say thank you in the evening.”

This is the community that loved him up and saved his life. And while he had a helluva year last year, he’s still with us, eating all the cheese curds and coleslaw.