People also respected my culinary acumen and my intelligence, and that was their whole thing. They flew me over, and it was this immersive experience.

That was another incredible thing: the opportunity to be in Greenland, a place I had read about in NatGeo a decade before. Suddenly I was staying there and hiking there, and we took a mini iceberg out of the water and chipped it up and used it as ice cubes and made cocktails with it. It's surreal.

I thought maybe I would be everyone's favorite dude-food friend.

I've always been a massive Beastie Boys fan, so if you look at their style aesthetic on Check Your Head, that was the headspace I was in for a minute. Whatever that was, that was me.

There are soccer athletes that are known the world over except in the U.S. Thierry Henry, for example.

To be asked to do the pairing menus by Alamos Wineries in Argentina [was the most interesting opportunity]. There are so many chefs out there, and so if you were to say, "The dude who used to host Man V. Food is doing pairing for Jim Beam," you'd say, "Okay, that's kind of conceivable." If you're talking about the dude from Man V. Food is doing pairings for fine wine, then I think people might not necessarily anticipate that.

I'm not a plumber who accidentally blew up or a math professor who accidentally backed into notoriety. I have a master's from Yale drama, and I auditioned for this. So obviously I want to be in the limelight in some capacity, or I want to be in entertainment in some capacity.