It's just starting. I think it's going to take another year and a half to get up to critical mass, but everybody loves Chinese food, Thai food, Japanese food, and it's all been exploited. The Filipinos combined the best of all of that with Spanish technique. The Spanish were a colonial power there for 500 years, and they left behind adobo and cooking in vinegar - techniques that, applied to those tropical Asian ingredients, are miraculous.

The food to me is just a hook, it's a button, it happens to be the social construct and the cultural totem that I'm most familiar with. So of course I built the show around food because it's where I'm familiar.

I was just thrown out of the barista parlor. Came to close to the Slayer. Amazing place!

I think right now the focus of people involved in food issues have to be legislative resolution at the county, city, state, and national level. I just don't think we can run away from it anymore.

There's a great book by my friend Nate Garvis called Naked Civics that was very important in my development as someone with a social conscious and that has become, I guess, something of an activist.

You never know when the next person to shake your hand at an autograph session, or the next guy you bump into on line at the pizza parlor, that could be your best friend for the rest of your life. Or it could be the person that two years later pushes you out of the way of a speeding bus. I mean, you just don't know.

I'm always surprised on my social accounts that people assume that because you have a job in television you don't have a political opinion, or don't have a family, or don't have an interest in the rest of the country. It's just absolutely shocking to me how closed minded some people are.