‘Travelin’ Gourmet’on PBS: Cooking With Fun

On PBS, where, let’s face it, most food shows have treated food preparation as a quasi-sacramental act, Mike Kalina is the culinary equivalent of a pie-throwing priest.

Kalina is the host-cum-standup-comedian of “The Travelin’ Gourmet,” a new PBS food and travel show that peppers its 30 minutes of practical tips on cooking and back-kitchen visits to famous European eateries with a most untraditional PBS ingredient--fun.

In high-concept terms, think Robin Leach meets Ralph Kramden meets Steve Allen for dinner and jokes.

Kalina, a heretofore obscure restaurant critic from Pittsburgh, knows exactly why he’s so popular with local PBS station managers and little old ladies from Texas who are writing in for copies of his recipes.

“I’m like Everyman in the show,” says Kalina, 46, in his home on Pittsburgh’s proletarian but rapidly yuppifying South Side. “I don’t take myself or food seriously.”

He’s not aiming at hard-core Bicoastal foodies, and French IV is not a prerequisite for his show. “I don’t care about foodies. They can watch Pierre Franey and get the Rosetta Stone to understand what he’s saying. My geographical location has helped me to be a very ordinary common man, and that’s part of the charm of the show. Everyone can relate to me. It’s hard to be haughty when you live on the South Side of Pittsburgh.”

Mixing fun with food is also getting to be profitable for Kalina, a chunky, videogenic dynamo who’s on the verge of becoming a one-man, multimedia conglomerate of food.

In addition to “The Travelin’ Gourmet”--seen on nearly 180 PBS stations from Boston and Manhattan to Nome and Huntington Beach (it debuts on KCET on Saturday, Jan. 27 at 2 p.m.), and shown overseas in places like Hong Kong--Kalina has just signed a two-cookbook deal with New American Library.

His two weekly newspaper columns--”The Lazy Gourmet” built around fancy-but-easy recipes and “The Travelin’ Gourmet” for Sunday papers--are being readied for newspaper syndication by King Features.

And the latest buzz from Kalina enterprises is that the Nederlander Group in New York City is talking about producing a five-day-a-week, 30-minute food show for a major cable network.

It would star Kalina, of course, who describes the show as “Phil Donahue with cholesterol. I’d have guests and cook food and go on location and review cookbooks and interview the token bulemic,” he says in his best standup-ese.

Also in the works is a syndicated radio insert-show of one-minute food blurbs called “Off the Eaten Path.” It features such Kalina-istic specialties as tips on how to poach salmon in your dishwasher or make grilled cheese sandwiches with a steam iron.

There’s more. How about a Museum of Food in Pittsburgh? Kalina, who co-founded the thriving International Culinary Academy here, already has got a headful of research and plans.

How about a food-trivia game show? Kalina’s already shot a half-hour demo of “A Piece of the Pie.” He conceived it, invented such “Jeopardy”-like categories as “Edible Quotes” and the final “Pressure Cooker Round,” and wrote the questions.

Kalina is no accident. He’s quick to point out that he knows his way around the kitchen, and that he’s calculatedly spent the last 15 years researching food, thinking food, eating food. He’s taken cooking classes all over the world.

“Here’s the bottom line,” he says seriously. “I feel like the only game in town. The entire world, not just a few people, the entire universe--other than me--has neglected the commerciality of food.

Kalina is a nonstop idea factory specializing in food spinoffs. “Life Styles of the Rich and Famished” was the original title for “The Travelin’ Gourmet.” Kalina pitched it to a Hollywood producer whom he met at the Pittsburgh airport. The producer liked the idea and Kalina soon found himself jetting to L.A.

“I met these hot-shot executives with New World,” Kalina recalls. “These guys were all driving cars that sounded like pasta-- Lamborghinis, fettuccines, Ferraris. And they all had tans on the telephone, you know, typical L.A.”

Kalina, who wrote and sings the rappy theme song “Born to Eat,” shot 13 shows in seven European countries. Each show starts with him in somewhere like Scotland or Rome and ends with him demonstrating how to make things like apple strudel or pasta in his own kitchen.

Now Kalina wants to raise more financing to shoot more episodes of “The Travelin’ Gourmet.” “I may just end up a flash in the saute pan if I don’t get the money,” he says. “I want to become--and I say this with all humility--the Jacques Costeau of food. I want to go eat whale blubber with Eskimos. . . . I want to explore the whole dining experience all over the world, and make it fun--bring the whole realm of the food-lover’s joy into people’s homes.”

Kalina may be on to something. He has found his audience out there. Just the other morning a Pittsburgh city bus driver recognized him as “The Travelin’ Gourmet” and let him on the bus for free.