Lots of Buzz
by Ivy Knight

                                                                                                 Photo: Tapas Productions

I first met Kevin Brauch at a City Bites Picnic last summer; I approached him at a table where he was holding court with a group of people from HGTV. I introduced myself and told him I’d like to interview him, he said sure and introduced me around as if I were a long time friend who he hadn’t seen in years. To say that he is friendly and charming is a huge understatement. Naturally, I wondered if I could get him drunk and see a different sort of person emerge.

We arranged to meet for drinks (of course) one afternoon about a month later. It took a month because of his busy schedule with “The Thirsty Traveler”, “Iron Chef America”, as well as personal appearances and many wine and beer tastings. Oh wait, he’s also the emcee for Food Network Canada’s Superstar Chef Challenge and is hosting segments on Discovery Network’s Mega World documentary series.

We met outside the Drake where he offered me some beer ice cream. “I was going to bring flowers but didn’t have time, taste this it’s really good.” I tasted, it was good and I followed the charmer (he was going to bring flowers? Ahhhh…cute.) . Away from the Drake we went, headed to a (now defunct) booze-can he knows of just off of Queen West. At 3pm on a Saturday. Kevin wanted to go to this booze-can because he knew they had just got some Coronas in cans and he was excited to try one.

We sat outside in the sun drinking Coronas brought to us by a Sudoko-addicted biker who also happened to be a practicing Wiccan priest. I proceeded to try and interview Kevin Brauch, which turned out to be a fun, but not so easy task.

For someone who has two shows on Food Network and whose “Thirsty Traveler” gig is envied by almost every single person I know, he isn’t too high on himself. Getting him to answer questions about himself is difficult, not that he’s tight-lipped or private, it’s just that he’d rather talk about people he’s met, people he’s worked with, his friends, anything other than about himself. He got more info on me in that first interview than I did on him.

I did learn that he was born in Toronto East General Hospital, grew up near Taylor Creek Park and his first job was as a popcorn vendor at the Ex. He went to high school at East York Collegiate and Leaside. “I’ve always been sort of a social director for my friends. I used to have wicked parties. I made fake ID’s in high school. I was on the student council so I had access to the best photocopier in the school, there was another guy trying to make fake ID’s on the library photo copier and I told him ‘don’t even bother guy’.”

Later he went to Ryerson and planned to work in radio or TV behind the scenes writing or directing. “I hated it: all the teachers had worked in TV when it was still black and white. It wasn’t current, I came out of there and felt like I’d made a big mistake. I was so unimpressed I went back to bartending, which I’d done through school. I was pitching projects all the time but also living that nocturnal, slightly alcoholic life.”

He bartended around Toronto for seven years and he partied a lot. “Eventually you lose all of your old friends because nobody lives like that after a certain point. They’re up while you’re sleeping. I knew I had to get out.”

After losing out on a gig as an MTV VJ, Kevin ended up getting involved with TVOntario children’s programming as a host, actor, producer and writer. Then one day he got a call, a pitch to host a show for the Food Network. “I was called to host what I thought was ‘The Thursday Traveler’. I assumed the premise was about three days weekends, how far, how fun, how much trouble before back to work on Monday. Then, I was told it was The Thirsty Traveler – a better job I thought.”

Thus the Thirsty Traveler was born. He crisscrosses the globe with cameraman Brad Schewega and sound guy Mike Mirden. No posse of massage therapists and acupuncturists, not even a makeup artist. It’s a low budget show, so he does his own makeup, hey Kevin what’s in your makeup case? “MAC Clear Matte foundation, MAC No.1 Light Powder, No.7 from London for facial lines and wrinkles and Milk Thistle for the liver.”

The Thirsty Traveler makes friends everywhere he goes, they feed him, they get him tipsy or totally loaded, it’s all caught on film and after a little editing we get to watch him jump naked into a frozen lake after drinking vodka for hours in a sauna in Lapland, or chat up a toothless, cigar-smoking little old lady in Cuba, or eat a giant white hoo-hoo grub pulled from a rotting log in New Zealand. When he tastes a fine brandy or a scotch he enjoys it as much as when he takes a swig of Guinness and doesn’t bore us with pontifications about the bouquet and the mouthfeel. He’s a guy’s guy in a metrosexual’s world. Give him a drink; he drinks it, appreciates it and asks for another. He doesn’t spit it out in a bucket and tell you it tastes of dew-kissed apricots and rusted lawnmower parts. That’s probably why the show has lasted this long (the show is in its fifth season, 58 episodes and counting). “He’s the only person on the Food Network I can fucking stand.” Says my friend Adam Bishop, a hard core cook, who like me grows weary of the same old pabulum the Food Network keeps feeding us.

With Kevin you get a guy going on adventures that you would love to go on, enjoying food the way a normal person would and getting a little bit plastered every now and then when the locals press too much of their local liquor on him.

While on “Iron Chef America” he reports back to Alton Brown and the revolving roster of judges while Bobby Flay takes on yet another guest chef (meanwhile Kat, Mario, Morimoto and that new guy all sit out yet another episode). “They don’t give me a script for “Iron Chef”, you know what they give me?” he asks. “The secret ingredient, that’s it, the rest is up to me.” He doesn’t push some phony persona on us with any cutesy patter, he’s just a guy reporting on what the cooks are doing while we watch and form our own decisions from our living rooms. He’s just a guy, he’s not a brand. Maybe that’s why he’s so easy to watch on television because he’s not trying to sell us anything.

Our next interview takes place in the fall, a few days before he’s scheduled to shoot a pilot for a new food show in development for the Food Network. We meet at his local, which turns out to be one of those cookie-cutter pubs with Firkin or Fiddle or Fat Fuck in the name that are on almost every corner in the city. This is his local? There’s nothing cool or hip about the place. This is not a joint where everybody knows your name, the staff and fellow patrons don’t seem to have any idea who he is. He likes it here for the big screen to watch the soccer games, especially when Arsenal plays and the proximity to his office (aka “The Clubhouse”). We have a few pints; he talks about the pilot he’s working on with chef Domenic Chiaramonte from Match restaurant. “I want it to be a small, simple show that will just do good stories about food in a different way than what’s on Food Network right now.”

The Arsenal game over, he has to get back to the office. He invites me to join him there for a drink; I accept and am soon ensconced behind a desk with two bottles in front of me. One is wrapped in barbed wire and one contains a few floating cobra dicks. I’m serious (did you know cobra dicks have two prongs on the end?); I also think that last paragraph would make a great opening to a trashy detective novel.

The barbed wire bottle contains pure, distilled Mirula fruit liquor from Africa and has the smell of musty incense. Kevin doesn’t pour from that bottle; instead he turns to the bottle of floating, two-pronged cobra dicks! “I got this from Snake Alley in Taipei, I brought it on the Jay Leno show, he refused to drink it though.” He pours a tiny bit and offers it to me, I shoot it back before I have time to think and stop myself. He takes a shot and yells “Oh fuck! It’s so fucking nasty. You feel like it might be poison or something because the taste is just so….incorrect.” which totally sums up how I feel about this stuff. Then we have some beers from Black Jack Brewery and I ask him about the first time he ever got drunk. “Well, I remember the first drink I got really sick on. It was Cockspur Butter Rum and I was in Scarborough. It was the only thing we could steal from someone’s parents’ liquor cabinet.”

Has he been drunk often while shooting “The Thirsty Traveler”? “The only time I ever got in trouble was in Russia, all that vodka. I’ve puked in five or six countries out of sixty-five countries. Every drink you see on the show is an honest to God real drink. People sometimes accuse me of drinking water in place of vodka. If I was drinking water why bother? Why would anyone even watch the show?”

Finally I ask him what he’s learned from all this traveling. “I find that the media often focuses on how different we all are, but the more I spend abroad the more I realize how similar we all are. Everyone works all week and when they have a few days off they want to do the same things as us. They go for a drive, have a barbecue, go camping, get drunk. We’re not different at all really.”

As I’ve said, Kevin is not a snob when it comes to drinks, which is nice. He doesn’t give me grief for loving Bud Light the way I do, he gets excited by Corona in a can, I’ve even seen him drink Lakeport Light when my husband, Kerry, gave him one last weekend. He drank the whole thing (although he did bitch about it).

“I did a Tutored Tasting at the Gourmet Food and Wine show, the class tasted eight different types of beer and then I offered them a ninth beer to taste as a bonus. As we were finishing up I asked what they had thought of the last beer. Everyone loved it, until I showed them that it was Labatt 50, then they were all disappointed. I said to them ‘50 isn’t a bad beer; I grew up a Labatt’s kid. Don’t you get what I’m saying? Drinks can be made or ruined by the lighting, the atmosphere, the people around you. It is about what’s in the glass but it’s about so much more than that. One of the best bottles of wine I ever drank came out of a box, on a beach in Aruba. I got to watch the sunset and I got laid at the end of the night.”

I get you mister. It’s about the lighting, the atmosphere and the people around you. Preferably wearing string bikinis.

Find out more about Kevin Brauch and the Thirsty Traveler at www.thirstytraveler.tv.

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