His cookbooks give an insight to Alton Brown’s fascination for food and the science that lay behind it. The 2002 book I'm Just Here for the Food was one of the bestselling cookbooks of the year, selling over 300,000 copies, and featured a variety of recipes. His second book the following year, Alton Brown's Gear for Your Kitchen, was a homage to tools and gadgetry, an essential guide to all the “hardware” you need in the kitchen. Packed with practical advice and tips, this book takes a look at what’s needed and what isn’t, what works and what doesn’t. It even includes 25 recipes and a six-month plan to overhaul your kitchen with the most effective, innovative and even surprising culinary tools available.

 

TIME actually recently included Good Eats, along with Food Network’s Iron Chef America, in their “6 SHOWS WORTH THEIR SALT” in 2005. However, for all his culinary joie de vivre, Alton Brown is incredibly anal retentive. Watching him micromanage a meal can zap all the fun out of cooking. Sure, his recipes usually work, but he uses flow charts and slide rules to figure out serving sizes and cookie diameters.

All this makes Brown an unlikely candidate to host a food-based travelogue. But not only is he the host, the show is a fine blend of motorcycle’s, road-trip and dining ‘Americana’ style.

The show, Feasting on Asphalt is a series of specials featuring Brown and a crew of six (four on bikes, three in a pickup truck). Avoiding interstate highways and avoiding any major chain restaurants the mini-series has proven to be a culinary Easy Rider. Wanting to make the show as much of a motorcycle road-trip as it is a food program, the crew set out with camping gear fully prepared to use it if a hotel wasn’t conveniently located.
Alton begins his trip in Savannah Georgia, then winds his way through the western edge of the Great Smokey Mountains to the great blues and BBQ states of Missouri and Kansas, next crossing the great plains of Oklahoma to the hill country of Texas, then meandering southwest through New Mexico and on to the Rocky Mountains and the great pioneer state of Utah, then due west to Las Vegas and the California coast.

There is the question of why this show’s concept included a motorcycle.

“As far as I’m concerned, there’s no better way to experience the road than from the back of a bike. Being exposed to the elements presents thrills and challenges alike, most of which can’t be captured in a ‘cage’” said Alton. “Although we’ll stay in the occasional motor lodge as needed, many nights will be spent under tent or stars. For vast majority of human history, hotels didn’t exist and eating meant lighting a fire. The social aspect of sitting around that fire is one of the things our culture lost by taking most of our meals locked inside our cars.”

What main ingredients is this particular chef using for the mini-series?

When the rubber meets the road
So does the show deliver on it’s high expectations?

Along the way, he talks to the proprietors of these out-of-the-way eateries, and laments Dwight D. Eisenhower’s approval of interstating our nation’s infrastructure. It’s more interesting, however, to hear how a soul food impresario “prayed” for a restaurant (and was eventually given a chance to run one by an understanding businessman) than to listen to Brown bemoan the loss of curb service. Large blue notebook in hand, he seems too invested in his old-timer complaints about how travel has become an edible adventure.

Thankfully, no amount of Brown’s wistfulness can corrupt a truly inspired pit stop. Take Phil Tanner’s Biscuit Place in Washington, Georgia. Run by the entire Tanner brood (since father Phil likes to head off to the local sports fields to mow the grass, free of charge) and serving nothing but mouth-watering homemade biscuits, dripping with butter and crammed with all kinds of fatty fried meats, when our host starts explaining the differences between leavened and unleavened breads, we honestly couldn’t care less. Just watching the Tanner gals mix up a mess of fresh hot heaven keeps a fussbudget like Brown at bay.

We are similarly moved when the gang stops off at Shirley’s Soul Food Café in Toccoa, Georgia. When the proprietors heap a plate full of chicken, beans, mac and cheese, collards and cobbler (with a steaming hunk of cracklin’ laced cornbread on the top), basic cuisine never looked better. Even Brown’s Q&A with the proprietress is so genuine-seeming that we don’t that how he stumbles over each query, seemingly unable to make this conversation sound as passionate as the food looks.

Indeed, when it sticks to the food, Feasting on Asphalt is endlessly inviting. As with Tony Bourdain’s visits to exotic locales, it’s an education to see how individuals at each stop celebrate mealtime. Part of the thrill in such programs is the chance to live vicariously through our gastronome guides. Yet Brown’s personality keeps busting our balloon. One moment he’s touting the pharmacy lunch counter as a turn of the century meeting place, the next he’s providing an in-depth discussion of the term ‘soda jerk’.

However well the show does with ratings or it received by an obvious mixed demographic of viewers, much of the success or blame will sit with its host, Alton Brown. As demonstrated by a stop in Georgia where Brown, a former film director, blocked out camera angles and discussed lighting with his crew. He even sent the local folks home for more suit jackets, so the "extras" in the segment would look better dressed.

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