Andrew Zimmern: Award-Winning Chef, Author, and TV Personality

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. This episode's remarkable guest is, the one and only, Andrew Zimmern.
I adored his TV series called Bizarre Foods. Like Remarkable People, the title explains it all. Andrew went around the world eating bizarre foods and learning about different cultures. It was a program that my family watched, and whenever I traveled, I tried to watch an episode of Bizarre Foods to give me ideas for where to eat; not that I would eat what Andrew eats. For example, I would not eat rotten shark in Iceland because I prefer ammonia on my window, not my plate.
Bizarre Foods lasted fifteen years, and there are over 100 episodes. Andrew also won four James Beard awards and started many other culinary and cooking shows, and he wrote four books. His latest TV series is called What's Eating America, and it is a window into Andrew's soul because he uses food to investigate, understand and explain some of the most divisive issues facing America.
This episode is not all unicorns and pixie dust about eating great food. Many people don't know this, but early in his career, Andrew struggled with drug addiction. We go into this in great detail in our interview.
By listening to this podcast, you will learn some very important practical tips, such as: how to get a job, why you really don't want to eat tainted cumin, and how to pick a good restaurant. The only thing about Andrew that disappoints me is that he hates Spam. That is blasphemous for someone from Hawaii like me.

I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People, and now, here's Andrew Zimmern.
Andrew Zimmern:
I'm a complete and total mess. I'm in New York. I'm an active addict and alcoholic. Horrible, low-bottom story. Wind up homeless for nine, ten months. I try to kill myself, it doesn't work. I reach out to a friend in what I believe was something inspired by something bigger than me.
My whole life, I acted in a way completely contrary to what I did that one morning where I picked up the phone and asked a friend for help. I can't remember in the first twenty-nine years of my life actually performing an act that I would say matched the humility of that moment to call someone and say, "I don't know what I'm doing. I want to live. I'm a complete and total mess. I need help. Whatever it is, I'm willing to do it. I need help. I'm broken. I'm done."
Guy Kawasaki:
Was the arc of that…you had success early?
Andrew Zimmern:
Sure.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did you fall off the cliff?
Andrew Zimmern:
Oh yeah. I mean, you can sustain it. If you're a really good addict and alcoholic, you can sustain it for a while and be manageable, right? And if you're a talented person, your talent is there in whatever it is that you do. Think of great musicians who've died young from addiction and alcoholism.
Janis Joplin was great. It gets to a point where it's not manageable anymore, and the minute that I called my friend, I started to dial it back. I was like, "Oh, my gosh, what have I done? I've opened up a Pandora's box here." And, "Lend me some money. I'm going to figure this out." Asking, hustling, shifting, and back on that trickster triangle again, the humility was instantaneously gone, but it was too late because my friends knew where I was, they had a hold on me, within forty-eight hours there was an intervention; I wind up in Minnesota.
I start my sobriety waking up that first morning in Center City, and it took me about five years to get to the point-- and I'm talking about active in recovery, really working on changing myself, behaving in a different way, like showing up for work, being accountable, not lying, not cheating, not stealing, but trying to make a difference, positive difference in the world instead of taking from everything, let's think about giving to stuff, mentored by an incredible recovering community. They're very active in the 12 Steps, and got a job and started my career again and was a chef and a partner in a restaurant.
I got to a point, in my recovery, that I was, I mean, so blessed to be at where I realized my insides were not matching my outsides in the sense that I wasn't going to be happier, fulfilled continuing to do what I was going to do in that restaurant. On one hand, it sounds like ego to say, "Well, I wanted a bigger platform," but what it really came down to was I was telling stories through food on the plate in my restaurant.
I was telling those stories sometimes literally to my staff, right? "Here's where this dish comes from. Here's why it's important. I was telling stories to our guests, on the plate, figurative sense, but also going down to the dining room, practicing the art of hospitality, engaging with them, talking to them about what was driving my passion.
I realized that I needed to tell stories to more people if I really wanted to be happy. This is 1998. I'm six years sober. I'm realizing that I'm frustrated with the reach of my life that I undershot, in a sense, the arc of my ability, that I was capable of more, and I just thought back that here I was again, that little kid getting the second-grade report card that said, "Andrew really is the smart, young man if he ever lives up to his potential and applies himself."
Had I stuck with the restaurant thing, at that point, I'm sure I would have been successful, I'm the type of person who likes to grow businesses, I would have grown that company, but I realized that what I wanted to do was get another education.
So what I decided to do was put the goal up on the wall, which was television, because that was the biggest audience at the time, internet being what it was back then, and I decided, "Okay, let's try to go for TV." And then I mapped out-- I'm a really big fan of making maps from my life and writing things down, putting things on paper and visualizing them-- I realized, "Well, I had never really done that before." I'd done a couple like little guest things. As a chef, you show up on a local news program and it's like, "It's Easter. Andrew Zimmern's here to show you how to make leftover ham hash with these." I'd done that kind of thing, but I hadn't really done television.
I'd written before in college, when you’ve got to write papers, and I realized that I needed to create my own syllabus for this. There was no school that was going to teach me, and I realized that the thing that I had done best in my life, which was learn how to cook, I didn't do in a school. Kind of like if you want to play in an orchestra or teach music or whatever, go to music school, if you want to be a rock star, play in a band and just start and go start touring, playing, get in the van with your friends and play every gig you can.
When I came up in the food business, that's what I did. I went to cooking school for a day and they were showing how to cut a chicken, by the way, in the French way, in the white, European way and I say that because the Chinese cut their chickens differently than they do in Colombia and South America, and I had already traveled and worked in restaurants and so I knew that there was a whole world of food out there that these people were forgetting.
So I traveled. I went to Hong Kong and worked in a hotel restaurant that was really world-class. I went to Paris and worked in a three-star Michelin restaurant. I went to Venice and worked for four months in restaurants there, and I spent a year on the road because I kept getting kicked out of college, so it was an easy thing to find the time to do this.
I remembered back to those days when I was sitting there sober at age thirty-six in Minnesota, that I had created my own education then, I was going to do the same thing. I had enough savings to live for a couple months, and so I went to a local magazine, a local TV station, a local radio station and said, "Hey, I'm the thirty-six-year-old intern. I'll do whatever it is that you want me to do. I want to learn this business." And they all said, "Yes," which was shocking to me, proving once again that if you don't ask, you don't get.
My sponsor, my spiritual guru, a man who I owe almost everything to, gave me one piece of advice. He said, "Just make yourself indispensable,” and I thought that was a really fascinating thing. Like he knew I would work hard. He knew that I was smart. He knew I'd pay attention. He wasn't worried about me showing up on time or bristling if someone asked me to stay late or do more. He just said, "Make yourself indispensable."
If you're just like the other players on the team; problem, right?" But sometimes it's better to be the only than to be the best. So I just made myself indispensable in those places and within 120 days, all three offered me a piece of a sort of a job. They didn't really have a place for me, and so the local TV station said, "Yeah, we'll pay you a little bit of money and you can do three packages a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Friday, we'd like it to be a live food demo. Monday, Wednesday, you can take food stories and make packages."
So I finally was in a position to have a camera person as a teammate and learn how to edit and write and make-- I was finally making TV. There were little three-minute stories for a morning show in Minnesota, but if you expand on that and get good at it, that then can become really serious television, however you choose to define it.
It was a great, great, best job that I had, except for my other job that was doing radio on the weekends, because radio taught me consistency and storytelling and engagement and listening, and if someone's tuning in... I think my first radio gig was 10:00 to noon. So if someone tunes in at 10:15, you better be the same personality when they tune back in at 11:45. Right?
Eventually I did drive time radio for a year and expanded on that, and I started writing for a magazine, our local glossy magazine, Minneapolis, St. Paul Magazine, and I got a great editor who, like my grade school English teacher, really worked on having me read, write and think critically in a different way and taught me so much about storytelling. Not quite in as short a format as Twitter, but I was doing like four or five columns a month for that magazine.
So one would be a food review, one would be a 500-word essay on the back page of the food section. Another one would just be the 200-word blurb, and those I found the most fun, right? To write a 200-word blurb about an old restaurant or heritage food situation in Minnesota and sell it to the audience, have them want to go as much as I wanted them to go.
So I created the syllabus for myself, and then I, literally, at that same moment that I had those three jobs, I just went out trying to push TV ideas to anybody who would listen and it was at a time when all the doors weren't shutting automatically. I mean, you could actually-- people would accept your... Everyone wants to make TV. Right?
Guy Kawasaki:
This is Travel Channel?
Andrew Zimmern:
I actually approached Food Network, a whole bunch of places. Travel Channel was one of the later networks that I went to. I tried to sell shows wherever I could. I think one of the first things I tried to sell was a half hour show about local Minnesota food to Twin Cities Public Television, our local group there, worked with them.
A lot of people wanting to work with me. I was lucky I had some ability in terms of storytelling. I was engaging. People liked me on camera, and so other people in the production space, in the network space were willing to take a rider on me. Just nothing clicked. It's not easy.
Finally, I got in front of the folks at Travel Channel, an amazing man, Pat Young, who was the head of Travel Channel at the time, and I did not know this, but he was trying to put together a team of immersive explorers and he had Sam Brown, and he had Tony Bourdain and he was looking for someone else who could own their own night. So you want to have at least one show on each night on your schedule that other shows could fall in around and that can be a tune-in reason for the audience.
I, nervous as heck, I explained to him my idea for Bizarre Foods, which was not called Bizarre Foods at the time, and he said to me, "That show that you're describing is a PBS show. It's seventy-five percent smarts and twenty-five percent entertainment. We're an entertainment network." He says, "You can sell that show about exploring culture through food and stories from the fringe and really lessons about patients' tolerance and understanding and equality." He said, "That's a great show."
As I described it to him, he said, "That's PBS. Your peers are going to applaud. You'll get eight episodes. It's great, and every year going to be struggling to find sponsors." He says, "But I'll make you a deal." He says, "You come back here tomorrow and you turn this idea around and go twenty-five percent intelligence and seventy-five percent entertainment," he says, "That show will go into 170 countries on our network and be a huge hit." He said, "We can figure that out together and more people are going to hear the messages that you want to hear,” and I went home, back to the hotel that night, and I thought to myself, "Well, this is a Faustian bargain. I'm selling my soul."
I woke up in the morning and I realized it wasn't a Faustian bargain, it was a golden ticket. That I could accomplish everything that I wanted and the people wanted to hear my message were going to hear my message, that I was going to have a large enough megaphone.
We shot a small piece of tape and then a bigger piece of tape and then a pilot and then the series started, and in that first year, Tony had just finished doing Cook's Tour on Travel Channel. They had bought that from Food Network where he had started Cook's Tour and was transitioning that into No Reservations.
He had had a season on the air while I was shooting my first season, and they had us do a crossover episode and do some TV promos together and stuff like that, and I remember this day on Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn bridge, we were in this little park, shooting some of these network promos and I told them about this integrity, like, "Geez, I made this huge mistake. I made this Faustian deal. I don't know what's going on." And he said, "The moment you sign a contract with any TV network, you've already lost your integrity." He said, "You're accepting a check and someone else is going to tell you what to do and where to do it."
He said, “The key is holding on to what parts of your integrity that you can and be authentic and get your message, the message you want to get out there,” and I realized that what I had actually done was sold the network a little bit of a Trojan horse and that, at that point, I could make it a little more of a Trojan horse in the sense that television is a talent-focused thing.
Seinfeld wouldn't be Seinfeld without that cast, or Friends wouldn't be Friends without that cast. Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show wouldn't be... It's a talent-driven thing, and I realized that if I did the best job that I could, when this show aired, if it was good, eventually the leverage would shift over to me and I would be able to put more of what I wanted in the show in the show.
So the first season, it was all big eye movements and slapping my head like the Three Stooges and eating the craziest crap we could find, right? And that was the driver. What's the craziest crap we could find?
Fascinatingly, it was a complete accident and a scene that had no food in it that made the show as popular as it was and last for as long as it did. We shot a show in that first season, before any episodes aired in Ecuador and we were in Otavalo, largest outdoor market in South America, up in the Highlands. I think I bought a sheep or something at the auction for like five dollars and we're going to go eviscerate it and I was going to eat its organs with some grandma. Typical sort of Bizarre Foods, wonderful story.
We had a couple hours to kill because everyone was taking a break at the animal part of the market, and at this point, it's me, a producer and a photographer who was doing sound. There's just three of us in our crew.
Today, my crew, when I shoot shows, it's fifteen, eighteen people. There's three of us, and driving the rental car and we're walking around and I saw this sign that looked like it had some trippy wizard on it and it said "brujero" or "bruja,” and I recognized that from seeing brujera in a market in another little town and someone who told me that was a witch, a woman who read cards and sold you potions.
I said, "Oh, is this a witch doctor?" And someone spoke English and said, "No, he's a shaman, but he performs exorcisms." I said, "Oh, my God, we got to go talk to this guy." So I grabbed my producer and her husband, who was the shooter, and we went into this place and we said, "Can we take pictures of you while you're performing an exorcism on me?" And he said, "Yes."
This is that scene in Bizarre Foods where the guy spat up on me, lit me on fire, beat me with bushes into my whole body, burst out into welts, got inflamed. He killed two guinea pigs by swinging them by their legs and beating me with them and then laid them at my feet. That part didn't make the cut because the network-
Guy Kawasaki:
Because animal rights.
Andrew Zimmern:
Yeah, animal rights, and the whole idea was to put all these living things; the fire, the plants, the animals, kill them on my body to suck out all the evil spirits. Then he would take all those things that he beat me with-- by the way, he's getting drunker and drunker while he's doing this; drinking this homemade booze and then lighting it on fire and spitting it on me-- and by the way, I'm standing there naked, and he then burns it all and dumps the ashes in the river and his work is done. I'm exorcized.
When that episode aired, I think it was like eighth or ninth episode we shot, but it aired as episode number three, and a booker at The Jay Leno Show at the time saw it and showed it to Jay and two nights later, I was on The Tonight Show with my first visit with Jay, and at that point, this show on a mid-sized cable network that had just started got the kind of lift that you just hope and pray you get, then the rest has just been trying to hang on to the surfboard in waves that are much bigger than I've ever handled and learning as I go and trying to be as best I can, a decent human being along the way.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I would say the powerhouse shifted towards you.
Andrew Zimmern:
I don't know. I mean, it's tough out there, Guy. I mean, it's all Shakespearian. I mean, everything has its cycles and its sagas and I feel like I'm in yet another one of the Richards or one of the Shakespeare history plays and it just, we've got another one to go but I'm not planning on stopping anytime soon…
Guy Kawasaki:
Cool!

Andrew Zimmern:
And it's... I mean, a great transition point in my life having left Travel...Well, Travel Channel left me a year ago. Travel Channel became Trvl, T-R-V-L. They had a vowel movement, and they went from being a rock and roll station to a classical music station.
They went from being food and travel to ghost and paranormal and I don't do ghost or paranormal shows, so they were like, "Hey, sorry, we've made this change." And I was like, "Okay, great, no problem." And so I spent a year on the bench and then started making television for a couple of other networks that all premier in 2020.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is one of them on Amazon Prime?
Andrew Zimmern:
No, I wish. Amazon-
Guy Kawasaki:
Because then when you got the... What's that Jeremy Clarkson, the automobile show?
Andrew Zimmern:
Oh God. Yeah, it's fantastic. Amazon is a fantastic, fantastic company. Right now, their business model is shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Jack Ryan, super premium TV and movies and they are crushing it.
They have a different model than Netflix and Hulu and all that other kind of stuff. One of the TV things that I have crept, it hasn't been announced yet, and it won't be until January, but it's crept out on Twitter because we've shot the first season of it and so all I can say is that it's on MSNBC and it premiers in the first quarter of 2020, and it's a huge change in shift for me, which I'm really excited about, and the other one is on a lifestyle network that hasn't been announced yet but will be announced at the end of January.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can't wait.
Andrew Zimmern:
So yeah, it's really cool. I've gotten an opportunity to tell stories that other people have ignored in terms of being able to do it through food, right? I think you can tell any story through food, and because it's something that we participate in everyday, we swim in it, right? Food culture is culture and so I'm just, super, super grateful that I get to do that.
You know what it is? I'm super grateful that for a reason that no one can explain, because otherwise programmers would all be geniuses and they'd never make it mistakes. Audiences allow me to come into their house and entertain them. That's an incredible privilege. I mean, what a blessing, that people actually want to follow my crazy adventures when there's lots of other people that are smarter, funnier, better looking, more hair, whatever it is, but those shows don't make it and no one can explain why.
I mean, taste is such an ephemeral thing, but somehow, I have found acceptance from an audience, and that's just, that's the greatest gift of all. So I have that platform. So then what do you do with that?
Guy Kawasaki:
I think, from the outside, as a fan, I think it's just your bare-naked enthusiasm. The episodes that I love, you eat something and you say, "Oh, my God, the salt and the fat is rolling off my tongue and it's so hot I'm sweating it. I've never had a guinea pig like this," whatever you're saying. I love that. Nobody else does it that way.
Andrew Zimmern:
The tribal, the food description, I've been told I described food pretty well.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, I would say. That's like saying LeBron James can dunk. Okay.
Andrew Zimmern:
You flatter me. My favorite shows that I've done have those tribal shows. We've gotten a chance to spend time with, oh gosh, twenty-four, twenty-five first peoples of the Americas, about sixteen different protected tribal peoples, first peoples around the world. In some cases, it took us two years just to get in to shoot with the Juntwazee in Botswana. Petitioning the government, talking to them, call after call after call, sending them tape, because so many of those first peoples are protected by conservancy organizations within those countries, mostly because they'd been abused before.
In other words, photographers have come in and then just done some sort of magazine spread and been abusive or spent time there and actually took things from the tribe and put them in positions that they shouldn't have been put in. But those shows were, for me, the greatest travel adventures of taking nothing away from spending a week in a room at the George Cinq in Paris and eating my way across that city, which is a pretty good week. Not going to lie to you. I liked those weeks.
Being in a rainforest and living in a tiny little tent or Leentu and participating in activities that nobody who looks like me has ever gotten to participate in, and one of my big talks in the Lecture Circuit is about the skillset that we've lost in our modern times. So folks like you and I, people who are listening to this podcast, we have a really high skillset. We can do a lot of things.
But you spend a week, I'm talking about the real tribe, I'm talking about real first peoples, folks who are living in the exact same lifestyle that their ancestors lived as represented on cave paintings, and you realize how dwarf, the most emasculating feeling in the whole world because there's fourteen-year-old-boys there that they're architects and veterinarians, doctors, pharmacists, soldiers, hunters, warriors.
I mean, you have to do everything. You have to do everything, and it's a survival thing, and they're taught day after day after day from infancy how to survive and live in their world and that skillset is massive and just to be able to live that with them is amazing.
Guy Kawasaki:
With all your travels, do you think people are more different or more the same?
Andrew Zimmern:
Oh, way more the same. Infinitely similar. One of the things that we never put a circle around it or announced it or put a chyron or lower third underneath it, or put a big arrow saying, "Pay attention, here's the family meal,” but people who’ve watched my content, because I do it in every show, I don't think I've made an episode of TV... Actually, having said that, I'm sure there's one or two that I have. We always document a family meal. Always, always.
Even in Zimmern List, one of the last shows that I made for Travel Channel, we'd always make sure that one of the meals in the restaurants was with a family or a group, because I knew that Bizarre Foods airs still in a 170 countries around the world in reruns, I knew other people in other countries, there's people in Japan watching a Norwegian family, Laplanders from the most Northern most part of that country, eat reindeer, and people in Norway were sitting down at night in front of their TV and watching me in Okinawa with a bunch of ninety-year-old grandmothers cooking a traditional Japanese dinner from that part of the country.
I wanted the world to see how similar we were, because we have the same hopes and dreams for ourselves and our kids. We ask ourselves the same questions about our relationship to the universe. In fact, here, in the West, we actually have complicated matters tremendously. It was not lost on me, the opportunity that I had, the handful of times that I felt I was with somebody who was in a position, in their lives, to have dedicated themselves to connecting to something bigger in the universe in a very special way, whether shamans or witchdoctors, religious men of certainty, not just belief or faith, but certainty, right?
The five or six people that I met over the course of the thirteen years of making those shows for Travel Channel, I made sure to ask them the same question man has been asking, "What's my relationship to the universe? What am I doing here on this rock hurdling through space? Why am I here on earth?"
And as corny as it is, I wanted to hear from these people that I really, really thought... I mean, one of them was a shaman in the Juntwazee who anthropologists at research universities around the world believe are one of the only three people who can astrally project himself into other places. So, I mean, we're talking about people who did things that we documented that are super human by any definition.
I remember asking Bam, one of the shamans in the Juntwazee tribe in the Aha Hills of Botswana, after this trans stance, you know, "What are we doing here?" And he literally laughed at me. That's the one thing they all have in common. Whenever you ask this question of a truly, truly holy person, they laugh at you because it is a stupid question and because I get the same response from the shaman in Botswana, the fishermen, the Sakalava tribal fisherman, who was the most beautiful human being I've ever met in my life in Madagascar, to the witchdoctor in the Amazon with the trippy hippy dippy potion that got everybody messed up for three days, every person who I spoke said the same thing to me, "We're here on earth to love each other and make where we live a better place." That's what we're here for, to love each other.
We forget that and complicate that here in the craziest of ways, and so at its simplest, not only do I think we have an incredible commonality with people all around the world. I think the rootsier you get, the more you discover, which is why I tell people to go to the last stop of the subway, right? We will discover the things that will help us simplify and pare down our lives. We make it so, so complex.
Guy Kawasaki:
I want to ask you some short questions. Okay? So the politest people in the world?
Andrew Zimmern:
Wow. Most polite people in the world…those that have the least.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, that's profound.
Andrew Zimmern:
The minute you asked me, I thought to myself, "Oh, what country or what city?" But whether it's the last group of Q'eqchi' families, Maya, that are in the mountains of Belize who had two pigs and four chickens and killed a pig and two chickens to feed us their traditional meal even though they should've waited six months for the holidays, they gave us half of their possessions.
We went into Jeppe’s hostel, which is arguably the most dangerous four-square blocks on planet earth in Johannesburg. Army doesn't even go in there. There were people who came up, they'd never seen a white person in their neighborhood because they... I mean, a really, really, really dangerous, dangerous place.
But there are Zulu grandfathers and great grandfathers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers there trying to teach their tribal culture to the young kids amidst horrific gang violence. People who in other areas of the world that were so impoverished up in the Alto in La Paz in Bolivia. Everywhere we went where the people have the least, they're the most generous, the kindest and it's not because they think that we're going to give them something. We're not paying people, right? We're documenting lifestyle. That's what the show is about, were the kindest, most generous people.
That Sakalava fisherman that I told you about, we spent a day and a half him and at the end of the day and a half he apologized because he sold all his fish that we went and caught with him but he had saved a couple of heads to make a simple broth. His wife dug in the ground outside one of their little thatch plant huts, and there was a little jar with this pale brown, almost tan-looking powder, and she got all these cracked dirty little cups and set them up and boiled water from the little stream behind their house and started to stir this stuff in there.
I realized it was, like, ten-year-old instant coffee. That's what she was giving. It was her only possession that she could share with us to entertain. She'd been waiting a decade for someone to come where she could perform an act.
By the way, sending out little tea cups and saucers and ten-year-old Sanka is not as Sakalava tradition. That's learned behavior that she thought was something that would impress us. Those kind of things don't happen in other places and when you're the recipient of that kind of respect and dignity given freely by someone from who agencies of equity have stripped away or tried to deny them respect and dignity, it is a very powerful transformational experience for someone to be a part of that.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have to ask you this, because when I'm watching with my family, there's so many times we've asked each other, which is, how often and how severe do you get sick? Some of shit you eat, oh, my God.
Andrew Zimmern:
This is the funniest thing, and nobody believes me but my family. It's the honest truth, the answer is almost never.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't believe you.
Andrew Zimmern:
I can count on one hand. There's a couple of reasons why. Number one: regardless of what I'm eating, like my kid watched me eat a pig blood and guts stew with poached iguana eggs floating in it in a scene in Nicaragua and looked at me and said, "Dad, that night you had to be on the toilet all evening. I mean, there's no way you weren't." And I said, "Dude, that pig was killed three hours before, everything was super fresh in it. It may not look pleasant to a young boy who grew up in Minnesota and lives in the house that you live in and eats the food you eat, but everything in there was super fresh and someone's grandmother made it and it's ancient food tradition there. It's good. Someone's grandmother made it."
That's number one. No matter what it looks like, it's fresh, someone's grandmother made it. There's so many reasons that make it really, really tasty.
The other thing is that, for the most part, the world, especially the world on the fringe where we're reporting from, understands how to those products, right? It's Western culture that puts a thousand pounds of chicken every five minutes through a conveyor belt, Henry Ford style, and we put things that make you sick into meat and chicken, things like E. coli and stuff like that so we've done more to taint our food system than anybody else.
I've spent more nights-- I love mussels. They're my favorite. One of my favorite foods. If I had to just pick one animal protein, it might be mussels. That's how much I love them.
I would say, once a year, I'm up all night the bathroom because I get a couple bad mussels in a place that I eat them in. It's here in America. I've gotten sick more in America in restaurants on my own as a civilian than I have doing eight million episodes of Bizarre Foods.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm astounded! Okay, next question. How does someone who's not... How do you tell if a restaurant is good?
Andrew Zimmern:
Oh, easy, easy. I call it the American Museum of Natural History hotdog stand test.
So you come down the steps of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and in front of you, Teddy Roosevelt is on the big horse right outside it if you come out of the Central Park West exit entrance, and if you stand on the top step, there's three or four hotdog vendors within about 200 yards. Like every fifty yards, there's a different hotdog vendor.
There's four of them, where do you get a hot dog. Two of them are doing no business at all and the guys look sad and the carts look dingy and your gut just tells you ‘No.’ They're ruled out. One guy, doing a decent amount of business, people standing around eating hot dogs and every minute or so someone else comes up to it. The fourth cart, WNYC is cranking opera and on this old AM/FM radio with an aluminum foil antenna that the hotdog vendor is Jerry, and he's singing along with it.
There's a little line built up and people are standing around. If you wait long enough, you notice that people get back on line and get another hot dog, and he's asking people if they want onion, sauerkraut and mustard, just like all the other hot dog stands in New York. But up on the top rack, he's got two or three little jars with homemade spicy pickles and stuff that his wife makes. You see him dipping in there for certain customers that know enough to ask, and he's singing and he's smiling and the people standing around that cart are laughing and having a good time. Which hotdog cart do you eat at?
So that's how my father raised me. It's like hunting, get quiet and just wait and watch and see what happens. So when I go up with friends, first time I ever went to Toronto, which has five Chinatowns, by the way and I love Chinese food, eat it all over the world, it's my favorite, and I'm in one of the five Chinatowns with six or seven of my buddies as a civilian.
I've not been to any of the restaurants on that block and we're hungry. I mean, we've been out all day, we've skipped lunch. Everyone's like, "We got to eat." So I just told everybody, "Stand here,” and I went in and out of three or four restaurants, and we ended up eating at the one where the customers were laughing and smiling and have a good time. The food smelled and looked good. The people working there looked like they were having a good time and there was an energy in the room that was projecting happiness and hospitality. It's really super simple.
You just have to quiet your mind and just soak in that vibe. If you walk into a restaurant and those things are not present, it doesn't mean the food's going to be necessarily bad, but the chances are, it's not going to be as good as if you were in a place where those things were present.
So regardless of whether I'm eating a hotdog on the street or a fancy meal, it's why the temples of gastronomy that I like to eat in are the ones where people are actually allowed to laugh. There's a lot of places where white tablecloth, a lot of fancy silverware, a lot of glasses, expensive menu, twenty courses, famous chef, that puts some people off. I love it. I love both high and low cuisine. I like symphony. I like pop music. I love it all, but I have to eat in a restaurant that's fun.
Thank God the food world is democratized so there's even the great restaurants in the world that are fun and exciting. So it's the type of thing that if people aren't having fun, the people who work there, people were dining there, and if you don't get that feeling like that hot dog guy singing Verity and sharing his wife's little spicy eggplant pickles, don't go there.
Guy Kawasaki:
But would Nobu and French Laundry and Symphony pass all that?
Andrew Zimmern:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
Pass the test?
Andrew Zimmern:
To a certain degree. Well, Nobu's restaurants are all noisy and you mentioned Nobu is, I've been lucky enough over the course of my career to consider him a good close friend, and I've gotten to spend time with him in Japan and here in America.
When I'm traveling, if I'm flying through London from Africa and I've just spent like ten days eating raw green bananas and goat meat and river fish, believe me, a meal at Nobu on your sixteen-hour layover in London before you're flying home is pretty darn good, and I'm amazed at how he's able to replicate his system. His restaurants are such high quality, even though in a sense, and he hates this word, it's a chain. I mean, the menu is the same.
What he's got now? Two, three hotels. The Ryokan in Malibu, he's got twenty-four cities. He's got restaurants and they're absolutely fantastic, but there's great music playing, people are laughing, people are having a good time, right?
Thomas Keller's restaurants, yes, there is a different playlist there. There is more seriousness there, but his restaurants understand hospitality. They're there to make you happy, and there was a sea change, even with those chefs at that level where they realized that it was no longer hush tones while food was being served and that shift happened over the last ten years.
My last meals in the TAK Room, his new place down at Hudson Yards, absolutely fantastic, and certainly the most fun concept he has in terms of energy and stuff like that.
At the French Laundry, you generate your own energy to a certain degree. Everyone is so excited to be there because you've arrived. It's like going on pilgrimage and you've arrived at Our Lady of Lourdes and you have a private moment in the crypt. I mean, it's, you're like, "Oh, my God, I'm going to eat oysters and pearls, maybe, for the first time, one of his classic dishes.” So yeah, for the most part, and obviously, I dine in fancy tablecloth restaurants the least of any genre that I eat in, but I'll only done in the places that are fun.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Your last meal.
Andrew Zimmern:
Easy. Twelve cherry stones, not little necks, they’re too small. Twelve cherry stone clams that I've taken out of the waters of Long Island's sand myself earlier in the day and purged them and shuck them as the sun is setting. I've spent all day riding waves on Indian Wells Beach or Georgica Beach in Long Island.
Guy Kawasaki:
You surf?
Andrew Zimmern:
I body-surf. I tried board surfing a whole bunch and I'm the worst board surfer in the world.
Guy Kawasaki:
We can fix that.
Andrew Zimmern:
But I am a badass big wave body surfer. I even have fins. I'll go out into seventeen, eighteen-foot surf and body surf and then body-surf-
Guy Kawasaki:
Andrew Zimmern?! Holy shit, this is a whole new aspect of you!
Andrew Zimmern:
I have a set of Australian hand and foot fins, planers for my hands so that you can actually stay on big waves and really hard cut. Because that's the issue, especially in barrel breaks with big waves, and yeah, it's my big thing. Hawaii, Costa Rica.
I seek out beach vacations during big wave times in beaches that are surfers' speeches. And then I go out there and everyone yells at me because I'm a body-surfer. I've got fins and I don't get in people's way.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have friends who can take you to Mavericks…
Andrew Zimmern:
Dude, that's a bad-ass break! I've got surfer friends who are-- I mean, that is a bad-ass break.
I follow more surf websites, surf accounts, on my Instagram than even I do food accounts because there's something tranquil about watching surfing videos. I'm obsessed with it. I've gotten my kid obsessed with it too.
Guy Kawasaki:
One of the other people I interviewed, I actually interviewed two surfers. One is Shaun Thompson.
Andrew Zimmern:
Sure. Know Shaun. I know of him.
Guy Kawasaki:
And the other is Chris Bertish. Chris Bertish is the guy who paddled across the Atlantic.
Andrew Zimmern:
Absolutely.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. So anytime!
Andrew Zimmern:
I'm in awe of some of those people, and now with technology mean what it is, you can watch live from Mavericks or Nazaré in Portugal or wherever the big break is, there's people with cameras loading up on Instagram, and that's pretty thrilling.
Last meal. Anyway, the clams, I'm on the beach, and then I make my grandmother's roast chicken, and I don't care if I eat it hot or cold, it's my grandmother's roast chicken, and then I have a pint of espresso ice cream from prince Puckler's in Eugene, Oregon, and yeah, that's it. That would make me very, very happy.
Guy Kawasaki:
Good to know. I'm going to out that on my bucket list. And where would you be living?
Andrew Zimmern:
Where would I be living? A beach. Give me a beach.
I grew up in New York City and I was lucky my father had gone out to Long Island in the late forties and the early fifties, got his first place out there and so before the South Fork of Long Island became really a blight, in my opinion, culturally, and it's still one of those beautiful places on planet earth. It's just become the playground of the rich and famous and I think something dies when that happens.
But in the sixties and seventies, when I was growing up there, we went out every weekend. In the winter time, I spent from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and whenever a school wasn't in session, we were out there and I spent my life on that beach out there. First, Main Beach in East Hampton, then Georgica Beach, and then my father built a house a little further out in Amagansett and on Indian Wells Beach.
I tell my son all the time, and I did it when he was little so now it's roped him. I tell him, "When is dad happiest?" He says, "Swimming with me in the ocean." I'm like, "That's exactly right." So there's my happiest place where I would want it to be, if I had to pick anything, anytime, anywhere is in the ocean with my son. That's where I'm happiest.
Guy Kawasaki:
If somebody asks me the same question, I would say surfing with my four children.
Andrew Zimmern:
There you go.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's the same thing.
Andrew Zimmern:
It's the same thing. First of all, the energy of being in nature with your kids is incredible. I get that same feeling when I'm skiing with them on a mountain or doing whatever.
Guy Kawasaki:
How old is he?
Andrew Zimmern:
He's going to be fifteen in February. An amazing young man and I just adore him and he's the light of my... The happiest, greatest joy of my whole life is being a dad. It's my favorite title ever.
Guy Kawasaki:
I relate, bro.
Andrew Zimmern:
It has taught me... If you want to learn patience, tolerance and understanding, if you want to grow as a human being, become a parent.
Guy Kawasaki:
In one of your, the Hawaii version episode, you expressed the utter disdain for Spam.
Andrew Zimmern:
Yes.
Guy Kawasaki:
I love Spam!
Andrew Zimmern:
It's horrible! I'll tell you two things about Hawaii. We'll talk about Spam first.
You have seen enough of my shows. People should know that we've been corresponding by email for years, and finally were able to make this happen and meet and do this podcast. So we've had a mutual admiration society for a long time, and I had a feeling this question would come up.
So I eat Taylor Pork Roll, which is a New Jersey minced ham. I mean, it's got more fat and salt and other crap in it, but it's not put a can and made shelf-stable. It's not loaded with chemicals the way Spam is.
Now look, I have my guilty pleasure foods so I'm not trying to yuck on someone else's yum, right? However, what I tell people is I would rather have those same ingredients, which are feet and snouts and ears and tails all ground up, I'd rather have that in Filipino sisig. I'd rather have that in a Latino chanfaina stew. I would rather braise that, pull out all the bones and tendons and pack it into a terrine like tête de veau.
I would rather eat those parts in a different way than stuffed in a can, cooked in it, and made shelf-stable. That's the part that freaks me out. So it's really the commercial preparation side. It's not the ingredients or the flavor, right?
Guy Kawasaki:
You're killing me….
Andrew Zimmern:
Second thing, Hawaii, I shot like seven shows there over the course of my TV career to date, and it endlessly fascinates me. Here's a group of islands discovered by Polynesians, who I believe had the ability to literally sail around the world. I mean, their boats were flexible, right? They were joined by rope. They were meant to move with the water. They weren't stiff. They didn't break apart in storms.
They were the fastest boats because they still are among the fastest in the world, which means that a thousand years ago, for sure they were the fastest in the world. Taking nothing away from the Vikings, all right?
These Polynesians were brave. Their spiritual system taught them to be brave. They were not in fear of things the way medieval Europeans were where everything was about angering God and staying in your place.
So these adventuring Polynesians make it to Hawaii, create a culture there that the farming, the aquaculture, the lifestyle, the empire that they built was, when you study the history and the people, was so impressive, and then Captain Cook sails into a harbor, right? They love them up, he loves them up. He sails in during a time of one of the deities that means good things so they think he's a good sign.
Cook sails back out of the harbor, his boat breaks and three weeks later, he sails back into the harbor after kind of fixing it but not really, only this time, he sails in during a time of one of the gods that did not mean such great luck and he dies in the surf on the beach, clubbed to death, and Hawaiian culture changes forever because it's touched by outsiders and it becomes this, in a sense, the ultimate colonizers' story, Dole pineapples and sugar companies, and Hawaiian culture, literally beaten down into the ground.
Guy Kawasaki:
In World War II they bring Spam.
Andrew Zimmern:
Yeah. And over the last twenty years, I called it in my last show that I did there, we titled it, The Hawaiian Renaissance, because there are young people there. I'm talking about twenty-four-year-olds who have grown up in houses where great grandpas and uncles and aunties have said to them, "You can't forget our language and our dance and our music and how we fish and how we build things and what we do."
And now, not only has that culture risen up from, not the ashes, but through the mud, but now there is a tourist trade built around people going in and experiencing that because people want to. So to me, the stories that you can tell in Hawaii about culture through food are the ones that are the best example of the things that we need to be studying.
I mean, the island is now, because of their problems with produce and energy and some of it is going back to being self-sustaining in a way that we can really learn from them in a very, very, very profound way. So, yeah, I'm all about that, except the Spam. But I will make you a homemade version of Spam and fry it up and put it on a sandwich. It'll make your toes curl.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm coming out to speak for your friend.
Andrew Zimmern:
Yes you are.
Guy Kawasaki:
And when I do that-
Andrew Zimmern:
Oh, you're coming!
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll come to your... Well, that for sure, but I'll also come to your company, talk about evangelism and do whatever you want.
Andrew Zimmern:
I would love that. I would love that. But we have only thirty somewhat employees, more, depending on how many shows we have in production at a time, but you're coming to speak at Studio/E in Minneapolis as part of their Explorer series, I think?
Guy Kawasaki:
Mm-hmm.
Andrew Zimmern:
And the three people who own that company are three of my four board members. One of them is also... All three have been friends of mine for... Well, two of them for twenty-five years, one for just the five years that he's been there. One of them is my lawyer and partner and owns part of my businesses, so they're my closest and best friends, and the Twin Cities is going to be really excited to host you, but I'm really glad because I told Tom, I said, "Look," I said, "Make sure this whole travel arrangements and all the rest of that," I said, "We'll go to one of my restaurants, we'll eat there, but we got to come to my kitchen lab and studio for lunch so that I can actually cook you lunch."
I'll make you my homemade version of Spam, fried head cheese. I put mustard on one side of the white bread and grape jelly on the other. I learned how to do that in Asheville, North Carolina, and it is delicious. Yeah, you're going to love it.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't want lutefisk.
Andrew Zimmern:
No, lutefisk should never be... Lutefisk is a food that should be laid down and avoided, and this comes from the Scandinavians who originated it and wonder why Scandinavians who moved to Minnesota still eat it in church basements. They hide it. It's awful.
It's fish Jell-O. It's putrid fish Jell-O. And it's like, I've tasted a bunch of times. Everyone says, "Oh, you just got to eat it with enough butter on it." I'm like, "There's not another butter in the world to make that good.
Guy Kawasaki:
What was the episode where you ate rotting sharks?
Andrew Zimmern:
That was in the Iceland episode. It's called hákarl. It's a very specific kind of shark. It's a Greenlandic ice shark.
Now, all sharks and all skates are uremic. They're very special animals. They urinate through their skin. So all of that uric acid, that pee taste is in their flesh. So when they rot, when you just hang them to rot, in a weird way, well, if eat during the first two weeks, you'll die because there's so much poison in it. But eventually, the good bacteria eats the bad bacteria and all that's left is the worst kind of fish stink you've ever smelled in your life and when you taste it, it's amplified. It's turned up to eleven.
Curing it and aging it just out in the wind and the weather of an Icelandic summer is an art. So in the spring, they bury these things, then in the summer, when the sun is out the longest and the weather gets up to fifty degrees, maybe a little warmer in the sun, they hang these chubs of rotted shark meat.
Yeah, it's horrible. By the time I left, and I've subsequently gone back to Iceland a lot, I now like it, because it's... Do you ever have a really crappy pork chop at someone's house? It's really tough and overcooked and then you eat a pork chop three weeks later at someone else's house or in a restaurant and you're just like, "Oh, my God, I love pork chops. This one melts in my mouth. Why can't they all do that?" That's the type of pork and the technique of the person who cooked it. So you can make a good pork chop or bad pork chop.
I learned that with any bizarre foods, whether it's bugs or rotted sharks, if you tried enough places around the world, you find someone who's like... I'm like, “Oh, my God, how do you do this? It's so good!”
So we found farmers who took hákarl and they were like, "Yeah, I don't know why they let you eat that raw." I mean, or just plain. No one really eats it plain. Slice it thin and pile it high on buttered brown bread so that as you chew it, it breaks up and the ammoniated dumpster juice taste has a chance to really work its way around your mouth and it's actually quite enjoyable, and I found that with a lot of foods.
There were places that I've gone that I can't believe they boil the big coconut grubs, because the best way to have them is soaked in sour orange juice, wild oranges, and grilled until they're crispy. They taste like chicken skin. I mean, so there's a good way and a bad way to cook everything. It's a lesson in life.
Guy Kawasaki:
So the most important thing I learned today is you can eat anything. You don't get sick all the time.
Andrew Zimmern:
I don't, I don't.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would have never, ever predicted that.
Andrew Zimmern:
I don't. I did contract-- this very strange though. Episode one, show one, not the pilot, episode one, season one, we shot in Morocco, in Marrakesh, and at the Jemaa el-Fnaa, the very first night there, I fell in love with the méchoui, this whole roasted lamb that's cooked buried in the ground.
They pull it up and the lady will point at different parts and you nod your head and so you get a little bit of cheek, a little bit of shoulder, a little bit of loin, a little bit of leg, a little bit of foot, a little bit of tail, whatever it is, a little bit of belly meat, and they put it on a piece of paper, and she scoops this cumin, salt and chili mixture, three spices, you mix a little pile on your paper plate.
Depending on how much weight they give you, they judge that; that's how much they'll charge you and you dip it into this stuff. Six months later, I contracted this horrible virus that is called burning mouth syndrome. It's awful and there's only two ways you can contract it, and one of which is by eating tainted cumin in Morocco and I got that virus and I had breakouts of it.
The first five or six years that I had it, it would just pop out of nowhere so I had to carry this magic mouthwash with me. The pain was unbearable. It was just awful and now it's completely in remission.
I still have it. I test positive for it. So if it ever pops out again, I haven't-- six, seven years is the last time it emerged. So I haven't escaped completely unscathed.
But I think the other reason that I could eat all those foods is I'm the right man for the job. I think if I had a sensitive constitution, even after season one and its success, I would have pulled the rip cord and bailed out and parachuted to safety. I mean, who would want to keep doing that if it was physically uncomfortable, right? So I'm going to will my stomach to this torture and, yeah, I-
Guy Kawasaki:
How about the Mayo Clinic?
Andrew Zimmern:
Sure. Well, they're local.
Here's the thing. I appreciate a nice grilled piece of chicken. I love it. I eat chicken two or three times a week. Love it.
But the excitement of having this library of foods and flavors inside my head that may not exist in another human being's, I'm not sure who's traveled as many places, lived with as many tribes, tasted as many weird potions, animals, crazy things that it's not possible anymore to eat. Two of the foods that I ate in Samoa, they literally don't exist.
In some of my first people's shows, I ate foods that are culinary unicorns. No one else is ever going to get to try that again. I ate 3000-year-old bog butter that was discovered in Ireland by people. I mean, they essentially took the stuff out of a museum to let me taste it. Who else gets to do that?
I mean, I just think we've-- once you get that library, you got to keep adding to it. It's like collecting baseball cards, right? So wherever I go, I'm still seeking out that kind of stuff.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, my God. Someday. I'll go on a trip with you.
Andrew Zimmern:
Anytime you want, my friend. Anytime that you want.
Guy Kawasaki:
We'll go to Hawaiian together.
Andrew Zimmern:
My kid will literally-- that is the easiest invite in the whole world.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah?

Andrew Zimmern:
Love it there. Are you kidding me? I get to be in the ocean with my son. It's the best thing in the whole world.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going this Christmas.
Andrew Zimmern:
Hawaii is such a magical, magical place, and when you get to know the communities of people out in a lot of the small towns, some of the fishing...We've shot three shows, well, we've shot seven in total, but three in this one particular little fishing village, at least all or part of it, simply because of the group of people that are still doing... They have a foot in two cultures, the modern twenty-first century American culture…

Guy Kawasaki:
What are they?...

Andrew Zimmern:
and the ancient world. Right? Hawaii. The big island.
I'm just fascinated, fascinated by Hawaiian culture because it's…I mean, Darwin's theory of islands, like things stay on islands, things don't go on. I mean, it is, as a culture geek, as a cultural anthropologist, it's amazing.
I try not to get too like intellectual about it, just enjoy myself when I'm there, but even stopping at a little place for huli-huli chicken on the side of the road or something is a lesson in culture. Oh, my gosh, I just, now I'm talking about, I'm just like, "Oh, my God, I love it."
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's go. I'm going this Christmas. Where are you going to this Christmas?
Andrew Zimmern:
I'm going to be shoveling snow in Minneapolis. My son and I were doing a staycation this Christmas. He wants to spend the time at home and it's going to be a lot of fun. So I'm excited. Here's the thing, I'm always traveling for work. Right? So the new series that I've made, while they haven't been in travel like Bizarre Foods, there's still a lot of travel. And so it's super... My idea of a good time, being at home.

Guy Kawasaki:
Me too. But I want to-
Andrew Zimmern:
Well, sure, because you have to keep an eye on your daughter.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I once played in the Minnesota ice hockey pond tournament on Lake Nokomis. Oh, my God, those guys are nuts, man.
Andrew Zimmern:
Pond hockey, we go and watch it. The winter carnival with the pond hockey, the ice, they cut holes in ice, they cut holes in ice and jump in, there's ice fishing. I adore it. Minnesota and the Twin Cities are where I live. I just think it's one of the most overlooked places for people to come, and in winter time, we approach it the way the Scandinavians do, which is you don't shy away from winter. You jump into it with arms wide open.
Look, I play disc golf. I'm a disc golf enthusiast. We play in the winter time with mylar ribbons on our disk in case they go into a snowbank. We go wolf watching. We do snowmobiling. We snowshoe. Anything you do. You drive your car on the ice. Turn hard to the left at 70 miles an hour and bang that emergency brake and you literally spin doing circles, hundreds of them down in giant open expansive ice. It's the greatest thing. You got to jump into winter there. You got to jump into it.
Guy Kawasaki:
I was born and raised in Hawaii.
Andrew Zimmern:
I got it! Look, isn't it interesting that people who live in cold weather love going to where it's warm, but people who were born and raised in warm weather, the reverse is not the same.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, it's not.
Andrew Zimmern:
So I'm with you on that.

Guy Kawasaki:

So now you have the most important career advice you'll ever hear: make yourself indispensable. Indispensable people get jobs, keep jobs and dent the universe, and if I see you at a rundown lonely hotdog stand in New York, I will be very disappointed.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to Jeff Sieh and Peg Fitzpatrick or indispensable to me. Mahalo also to Tom Weiss and Sean Hall for making this interview happen.

This is Remarkable People.