Dining Critic’s Death Reveals Crime Probe : Officials wonder if popular Mike Kalina was selling favorable reviews to restaurant owners.

It wasn’t just Mike Kalina’s suicide that shocked his many friends in Pittsburgh last week.

It also was the news that Kalina--a successful cookbook author, the host of a nationally syndicated Public Broadcasting Service cooking show and a newspaper and TV dining critic in the city since 1978--had been under investigation by a federal grand jury in connection with the selling of favorable reviews to restaurant owners.

Kalina was buried Friday, eulogized by friends who said they were still trying to understand why he took his life during the weekend of Jan. 25-26.

A memorial service ended a week in which his own newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, reported that federal investigators were looking into an apparently long-running scheme by Kalina and another man to accept payoffs of between $1,000 and $2,000 for the favorable reviews.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh has refused to comment on the case, but an apparent outline of the investigation emerged as nearly 40 area restaurateurs were subpoenaed and asked to produce records of their financial dealings with Kalina and his friend and business associate, Lou Adams. Some of those restaurateurs appeared before the grand jury Tuesday.

The Post-Gazette, like most newspapers, has strict rules against reporters or critics accepting anything of more than nominal value. Post-Gazette Editor John Craig Jr. said last week that Kalina would have been fired if it had been learned that he was taking payments for reviews.

Over the years, Craig said, there had been anonymous reports that Kalina had improperly used his position as a dining critic. But Craig said he was unable to substantiate those reports.

Recently married and the father of a 16-month-old daughter, the 49-year-old Kalina was a funny, likable media character who in person was intensely driven, self-absorbed and full of life. He seemed to spend 24 hours a day pursuing national fame and fortune, hatching ideas, concocting deals and working on projects, all the while firing off one-liners and puns with food themes.

Friends said he was an idea machine who would go on creative binges. He wrote screenplays and produced a TV pilot for a food game show. He co-founded a culinary institute. He did commercials. He spoke before women’s clubs.

In the last three years, Kalina had achieved several national successes--so much so that by the time of his death he was only working one day a week at the Post-Gazette while pursuing other ventures. His self-produced PBS cooking show “The Travelin’ Gourmet” took an irreverent, pun-and-fun-filled approach to food preparation, toured great European restaurants and also provided tips on how to poach salmon in a dishwasher. Thirteen installments of the show had been carried on 250 PBS stations and were also seen in 20 countries from Finland to China.

Kalina also had two columns--”The Lazy Gourmet” and “The Travelin’ Gourmet”--in national syndication, plus a cookbook, “Mike Kalina’s Travelin’ Gourmet.”

This year looked like it was going to be Kalina’s biggest ever, said his attorney and personal manager, Ron Herisko of Palm Springs, Calif. The corporate owner of Pittsburgh TV station KDKA, was preparing to distribute “Kalina’s Korner,” a short cooking segment prepared weekly for insertion into news shows across the country, Herisko said, adding that he and Kalina were negotiating with PBS stations in Chicago and Pittsburgh to possibly return “The Travelin’ Gourmet” to production.

Kalina, who last Christmas learned that the throat cancer that first emerged 25 years ago had recurred, was seen Jan. 25 talking to Adams in a bar near Kalina’s home, the Post-Gazette has reported.

At this meeting, the paper reported, Adams told Kalina he should hire a lawyer because five restaurant owners had told federal investigators they made payoffs to Kalina for favorable reviews or for being included in “Mike Kalina’s Pittsburgh Cookbook,” which Kalina published last year.

On Jan. 30, the Post-Gazette reported that Adams and Kalina might have been working together to get money from restaurants.

Adams, a food consultant, would approach a restaurant that had received an unfavorable review from Kalina, according to the investigative scenario outlined by the newspaper.

Adams, according to this outline, would tell the owner he could arrange for favorable mention in Kalina’s newspaper column or on his “Phantom Diner” TV feature on KDKA. Payment was made to Adams after the favorable mention appeared, the newspaper said.

Kalina never returned home after his noontime meeting with Adams. Later in the day, as a storm dropped about four inches of snow on Pittsburgh, Kalina went into a local hardware store to buy a utility knife and a garden hose to replace a smaller hose he had bought there the day before.

His body was found last Monday morning in a snowy parking lot just across the Monongahela River from the working class South Side neighborhood where he lived. He had hooked the garden hose to his car’s tailpipe, sealed his rear window shut with masking tape and sat in his front seat until the carbon monoxide fumes overcame him.