By MARK KENNEDY
NEW YORK (AP) — To make bread, you want flour, water, salt and, often, a rising agent, like yeast. To break bread, NCS has enlisted somebody particular — Tony Shalhoub.
The Broadway and “Monk” star enters the crowded area of movie star journey hosts this fall with “Breaking Bread,” which follows the actor throughout the globe as he explores cultures and meals through the lens of bread.
“It is about bread, but bread really as a kind of a vehicle, a vessel, to illustrate and billboard history and culture and people and find out what they do and why they do what they do,” he says.
The series, which debuts on Sunday evening, follows Shalhoub as he samples baguettes and bouillabaisse in Marseille, France, and scarfs down fluffy milk bread and pink bean paste buns in Tokyo.
‘Delicious bread’
The first episode is about in Shalhoub’s present hometown of New York City and he eats old style pumpernickel and rye breads, in addition to Irish soda bread scones. He goes to Chinatown for fried dough and the Little Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn for black cake and currant rolls.
“I don’t know how you convinced people to make this a show. We just get to eat delicious bread,” visitor Lin-Manuel Miranda tells Shalhoub as he munches on an all the pieces bagel with cream cheese and jam.
Shalhoub finds himself in Brazil in the second episode, reveling in the influences Lebanese immigrants like him have given to São Paulo’s meals scene: Flatbreads, za’atar, pistachios and kibbeh. He visits a cassava farm, learns about fermentation and Afro-Brazilian heritage in issues like a deep fried bread ball made out of black eye pea flour.
It could also be a present about completely different breads, however Shalhoub and his group are completely happy to attempt varied native meals and drinks. “This used to be a show about bread,” he jokes onscreen after pounding a caipirinha, the Brazilian cocktail. (“Because of the schedule, there’s no shortage of day drinking,” he notes in the interview.)
Crowded area
Shalhoub is a part of a crowded area of celeb journey hosts, which incorporates Rainn Wilson, Eugene Levy, Stanley Tucci,Orlando Bloom, Zac Efron, José Andrés, Chris Hemsworth, Will Smith, Eva Longoria and Ewan McGregor.
They are all following in the wake of the late Anthony Bourdain, whose “Parts Unknown” series on NCS was half travelogue, half historical past lesson and half love letter to meals.
Amy Entelis, govt vice chairman for expertise, NCS Originals and artistic improvement for NCS Worldwide, labored on Bourdain’s present and greenlit Shalhoub’s.
“No one we work with tries to be Tony Bourdain and nobody thinks they’re going to be,” she says. “We try to work with people to go on that mission, but to make it theirs.”
Shalhoub collected three Emmy Awards for his work as obsessive-compulsive personal detective Adrian Monk over eight seasons. After the present ended in 2009, Shalhoub went on to earn three Tony Award nominations, profitable in 2018 for “The Band’s Visit” and starred in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” profitable one other Emmy.
“I don’t want the show to be about me. I feel like I’m acting more as a tour guide, so to speak. I want it to be more about the other people — the people that I meet, the people I interview, the new places that I get to visit,” Shalhoub says.
“I don’t know that TV audiences need to see that much more of me after all these years. I certainly don’t want to see that much of me.”
Bringing the household
“Breaking Bread” is a journey and meals present, but it surely’s additionally a household affair, with Shalhoub’s oldest baby, Josie, becoming a member of him in Marseille as they hint his father’s 1920 journey through town. His spouse, Brooke Adams, and daughter Sophie be a part of him in Iceland, whereas his siblings and nephews function in a Wisconsin-based episode.
“Bread to me is tied to memory, tied to our childhood, tied to our parents and our grandparents and all their contemporaries,” he says. “We’re drawing from the past, but it’s also something that we want to pass down to my grandchildren and forward and onward.”
Entelis says Shalhoub’s present is endearing in giant half as a result of he’s by no means finished one thing like this, coming off as a fish-out-of-water who reveals an open coronary heart wherever he goes.
“You get somebody who’s really fresh and new to this kind of work but comes at it with a sort of deep love and passion for food and people and travel,” she says. “This is the Tony behind the actor and I feel we’re really getting a good understanding of that person.”
But there’s one second that will rankle some natives of his present hometown. During the New York episode, Shalhoub is lured throughout the river to Jersey City, the place he’s launched to the “finest pizza in New York.”
The greatest New York pizza is in New Jersey? “I’m going to be going incognito now for probably the rest of my life,” he jokes.
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