When the first 70 percent of your show's name is pronounced "Feasting on Ass," you'd better make sure that you're producing a quality program. Fortunately, Feasting on Asphalt is an Alton Brown vehicle, and getting Alton Brown involved with a project has historically been a good idea.
The context for Brown's crusade for "real food" couldn't be any more hostile to his philosophy. The American highway system is a vast sewer of Burger Kings, Taco Bells and plastic-wrapped gas station sandwiches. And the Food Network's food-related ads are exclusively of the Hamburger Helper, Prego "spaghetti sauce" and Manwich variety.
Still, Brown — by sticking to smaller highways and dodging the Interstate system — seems to do pretty well for himself. As one might hope, the new setting is liberating for Brown — it's a palpable relief for him to break free of the often strained novelty themes and wacky props that define much of Good Eats.
The show trades on a sort of take-it-as-it-comes honesty that seems both deliberately engineered and sincere. Brown stops at a beautiful old art-deco railcar-style diner — and openly disparages the cookie cutter herbed-chicken breast sandwich/middlebrow hotel fare that it serves up. The place offensively violates his show's commandment for road food — know what you're trying to do, stick to it, and do it well — "don't betray your DNA."
Not that "authentic" is always delicious. Brown also tries a pickled hog foot, grimaces, and declares: "Well, here's the good news: it's astoundingly good at ridding you of your hunger."
Shockingly, one of the things Feasting does best is the "talking with real people" part of the show, where Alton Brown chats with small-town restaurant folk about what they do for a living.
In the hands of animatronic statues such as Marc Summers or Rachael Ray, this kind of segment tends to be as excruciating as a long weekend at Abu Ghraib. But Brown actually makes the real-person interview enjoyable with a combination of a legitimately warm, gracious affect and a dead-on sense of comic timing.
On the debut episode of Feasting, Brown visited "The Biscuit Place," a place in Georgia that... uh... makes biscuits. While chatting with one of the owner/operators, Brown talked about how he'd had his grandmother on his regular show, Good Eats to cook biscuits with him. The biscuiteer thought that this was just wonderful.
BROWN: And then she died.
BISCUITEER: How old was she?
BROWN: Eighty-nine.
BISCUITEER: Well, that's a wonderful life.
BROWN: She owed me money.
Brown's ability to actually crack up the people he meets on the road stands in sharp relief to the groan-inducing pre-written one-liners that conventional hosts tend to sling around, producing forced grins and sympathy laughs from their hapless "real" victims, who are often visibly frustrated about having to force amusement for the benefit of an equally un-entertained national television audience.
When Brown talks to the proprietor of "Shirley's Sole Food Cafe," he's delightfully non-condescending when he asks her for her own description of what soul food is. And her definition — "you just know how to fix it" — feels, well, real. It's a particularly nice moment on a show full of similarly unadorned stuff.
There are only three more episodes left (Aug. 5, 12 and 19), so it's not a bad idea to catch them as they air. Amid a vast tidal wave of Kool-Aid and Tyson chicken strips, Feasting on Asphalt is an all-too-transitory dose of old-school cool.
— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)
