Review: Alton Brown skewers AI recipes, slings heat, for his ‘Last Bite’ with Tampa

When eating a fantastic meal, you usually save the best bite for last—and celebrity chef and TV persona Alton Brown is taking that to heart.

With a recently-released memoir and celebrity retirement on the horizon, the 62-year-old is taking one final lap around the continental U.S. for a farewell tour, showcasing his well-loved approach to the culinary world, the science world, and everything in between.

Brown—who just started his behemoth, four month-long tour last week—stopped at the Straz Center last Wednesday night to give a few thousand Tampa fans one “last bite.”

Brown’s variety shows are a notorious mix of comedy, crowdwork, science, storytelling and of course, culinary education—all characteristics on full display at Tampa’s nearly 90-minute show, for perhaps the last time ever.

Brown, who recently told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay why he was taking a break, first came onto our TV screens in 1999, when The Food Network debuted the first season of “Good Eats,” an educational culinary program that delved into the who, what, when, how and why’s of specific ingredients and cooking techniques. 

Brown stayed in the Food Network sphere as a narrator of the American “Iron Chef” series in the mid-2000s and also hosted the increasingly-silly competition series “Cutthroat Kitchen.” But for the past decade or so, he’s toured the country and beyond hosting different versions of his beloved variety shows.

Donning a bathrobe and pajamas, Brown started the Tampa show in a relaxed and nonchalant manner, with a minimal backdrop and just a few props. It felt as if the audience was joining Brown in his home for a cup of morning coffee—a more personal, relatable approach instead of immediately unleashing his larger-than-life TV persona.

There weren’t many dull moments during the culinary variety show, filled with Brown’s archetypal dry humor, quick quips, and quirky anecdotes. Throughout the many bits and skits of the night, his performance never strayed from the tenets of his classic approach to cooking and the science behind it: curiosity and playfulness.

Despite the near-constant laughter, crowd banter and PG sexual innuendos, Brown’s performance never lacked practical cooking advice. The first act revolved around Brown’s “culinary concerns,” which included an educational tangent on the importance of a good recipe—and the importance of actually reading it properly. His hatred for AI-generated recipes was definitely communicated during the first act, as he implored all of his fans to intentionally seek out bona fide recipes with the correct ingredients instead of asking their computer to do it for them.

His final culinary concern had to do with the concept of heat and the conductivity of different metals. After a thorough explanation of thermodynamics—which included an entertaining skit with his first volunteer from the crowd—Brown decided to spill the tea on how the heat of a cooking surface transfers energy into the food that’s being prepared.

“One thing that TV shows can’t teach is heat. Recipes tend to focus on the temperature of something, but temperature and heat are not the same thing,” Brown explains to the crowd. “Not all metals are created equal.”

And it wouldn’t be an Alton Brown live show if there wasn’t at least one cooking demonstration. Since there was “no open flame allowed” according to Brown himself, he made his favorite breakfast on a pre-heated carbon steel slab to demonstrate how that type of iron-based surface can conduct and retain heat. Although iron is a “crappy conductor” it holds onto energy for a long time; a thermal thermometer depicted how evenly Brown’s breakfast was cooked on the slab.

His “$100 omelette,” which gets its nickname because it uses 12 eggs (insert laugh track), was finished with cheddar cheese, Kosher salt, scallions and pickled jalapenos. Throughout the night, Brown kept cracking relatable jokes about the economy, poking fun about the prices of groceries and electricity bills in Florida.

After a 20-minute intermission and an outfit change from Brown, the performance picked back up with a quick story about his uncle Barnabus, a steamworker and amusement park employee who had dreams of creating a steam-powered hot dog machine.

Following a quick scientific explanation of how steam works at a molecular level, he then unveiled what he described as “what took up most of the budget for this show”—a massive, steam-powered hot dog assembly line that was put to the test by participating audience members. Four Tampeños operated Barbanus Brown’s Wiener Wonder, quickly assembling and garnishing hot dogs as fast as possible—the performance’s final dose of feel good, physical humor.

The Tampa team also prepared 80 hotdogs faster than any other squad Brown’s brought onstage in the early days of the tour.

For the last bit of the night, Brown dawned an acoustic guitar for his rendition of an old 1960s tune “Dunderbeck’s Machine,” a morbid, sausage-themed song that he remembers singing as a young Boy Scout. If you’ve been to any of Brown’s previous shows over the last decade, you may have noticed that food-centered musical numbers are kind of his thing. At Tampa’s Wednesday night “Last Bite” gig, Brown saved the serenading and crowd singalong for last.

Before the song commenced, with the help of a steam bass drum, Brown thanked the lively Straz crowd once again.

“I’ve performed in this city tons of times, and I’ve always had a fantastic time here in Tampa,” Brown told local fans one final time. “Just in case we don’t meet again, it’s been a privilege to entertain and hopefully educate you throughout the years. Thank you!”

With Brown’s possible retirement from celebrity life on the horizon, his Boomer humor about getting older was well received with Tampa’s Wednesday night crowd, which also skewed a bit older. While the funniest moments of the night seemed to be Brown’s crowd work and improvised jokes (like his line about hating pickleball), none of the night’s sketches came off as too corny or too scientific. There was a proper flow throughout the night that seamlessly blended Brown’s signature comedic timing, educational bent and hard-and-fast culinary opinions.

If this was Brown’s final tour throughout the country, his “Last Bite” performance felt like a “greatest hits” album of sorts—a pinnacle of his nearly 30 year-long career in televised food media.
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This article appears in Feb 20-26, 2025.