In Toronto’s Kensington Market, Colin Marshall talks to Corey Mintz, author of the Toronto Star column “Fed” and the book How to Host a Dinner Party. They discuss what makes a dinner party a Torontonian dinner party; the city’s “uptight” reputation; how he bottomed out in his initial cooking career, winding up working the kitchen at a dinner theater; how he converted to writing and also found a way to take a friend’s advice that he “should host dinner parties for a living”; the time he made lunch for Ruth Reichl, and what his editor appreciated more about the blog post he wrote about it than the actual column he did; his dinner party with the disgraced head of the District of Toronto School Board, pre-disgrace; what it means when some like what you do and some dislike it for the same reasons; the art of mixing personalities at the table; why to recognize that “important people can be blowhards,” and indeed that blowhardiness often makes them important in the first place; how he keeps the smartphones in peoples’ pockets; “Toronto” versus “Toronno”; how he came to regularly invite the city, whatever the pronunciation of its name, into his home for dinner; his food-paradise neighborhood of Kensington Market, which through accidents of history now exists “outside reality, a little bit”; his questioning of his Councillor at dinner about why the neighborhood doesn’t have trash cans, and what he learned from the attempt; how Torontonian multiculturalism translates into food; what took him into the secret VIP room of a suburban Nigerian restaurant; and whether he considers his dinner parties the revival of a lost art.
Download the interview here as an MP3 or on iTunes.
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