Interview: Before Tampa show, chef and ‘Good Eats’ host Alton Brown explains why he’s ready to take a break

Alton Brown doesn’t need a break, but at 62 years old, he’s thinking about the arc of his career.

“I’m entering last chapter territory, and I want to know what that looks like,” he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, adding that the media world is changing quickly and in a way he doesn’t necessarily enjoy. “Where am I going to put my energies for whatever time I’ve got left?”

For now, that energy goes onstage for what Brown—the cook and chef who rose to prominence for his scientific and wildly entertaining show “Good Eats”—is calling his final tour.

The “Last Bite” tour kicks off in Melbourne just before Valentine’s Day and criss-crosses the country for 89 days, and it stops in Tampa in February.
Brown said that if he lived in the Sunshine State, he’d call our city home. But this show takes him to towns with names that he can’t pronounce, which is one of the reasons he wanted to hit the road one last time, just like Steinbeck in “Travels In Charley.”

“I feel that our country is very disconnected from itself. I love getting out. And I guess I want to see just one more time, the country that I think I live in, I want to see if it’s still real. I want to feel connectivity with things besides media generated by a handful of coastal communities—so I kind of need the realness of that,” he said.

Onstage, he’ll look to keep connecting with people, who energize him even on bad nights.

“This show, I hope, is kind of the culmination of that evolution of theatrical form,” he added. The presentation will be familiar to anyone who’s seen Brown in-person, but it’s more cinematic and more personal. And it’s more like “Good Eats” onstage than anything else he’s presented.

“This is more for me. This is like what I want to do more than anything else, but hopefully it’s a lot of fun because of that,” Brown added. “‘Good Eats’ was like my baby. And I think that this show, more than any other, will hearken to people that enjoyed that program.”

The big screen will be activated more than ever, and there’s more crowd work, too, Brown added, revealing that the second act demonstration is “the hugest thing we’ve ever done.”

Brown said the apparatus he’s bringing to Tampa’s Straz Center this month is 30-feet long, takes four volunteers to run and makes an incredibly popular American food, which he wouldn’t name. (This writer’s guess is Cheetos.)

“It’s a hands on, potentially messy, hopefully not dangerous, piece of the evening,” he added. “That’s all I’m going to say about that, but it’s very complicated, and steam-powered because I’m kind of obsessed, not only with thermodynamics, but I’m obsessed with steam, and have been most of my life, so I’m finally kind of doing this.”

And after this, Brown just wants to blow off some steam, get off the merry-go-round for a minute, and see his life more clearly. He has other interests in the food and spirits world, but when he does anything, Brown becomes immersed; he needs to figure out if immersion means another big media project or something else.

He also wants to give some energy back to his wife, restaurant designer and painter Elizabeth Ingram, who’s been pouring a lot of her own creative spirit into Brown’s projects in the six years they’ve been married. “I took some of her juice. Now I need to go put her juice back, replace it with some of mine,” he said.

“I think to anybody that’s in media, or anybody that’s looking at moving into another chapter, you’ve got to know when to stop for a second,” he said. “When to step away from the party, go out on the balcony, have a cigarette, whatever, and figure out what it is you are of, what it is you want to be.”

Tickets to see Alton Brown’s “Last Bite” tour inside Morsani Hall at David A. Straz Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday, Feb. 19 are still available and start at $35.

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This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2025.