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SPOTLIGHT


48


RAGE monthly | NOVEMBER 2010


AN EVERYMAN APPROACH TO COOKING by tim parks


Viewers of Sam The Cooking Guy are well-versed in all things culinary, with nary an air of pretension in his presentation, or a need to send his audience off on a wild scavenger hunt when it comes to items he uses in his recipes. Zien will be showing people the easy way around the kitchen with his appear- ance at the San Diego Bay Wine & Food Festival, which is happening from November 17-21 and he shares his favorite aspect of the event. “I love the fact of being able to walk around and try a whole bunch of different things all in one spot,” he replied. “My favorite way to eat when I go to a restaurant; I would rather have three appetizers than a giant pork chop and a bucket of mashed potatoes, but the point is you can get little bites from a whole lot of places. Plus, there’s all kinds of great wines to try.”


Zien didn’t intend to become The Cooking Guy. In fact, he was happy to keep work- ing his job at a drug development company and firing up his grill for the occasional family barbeque. However, he did end up quitting his job after a trip to Tokyo saw him return with an


idea for television, as he explained to The Rage Monthly. “It wasn’t supposed to be a cooking show in the beginning,” he said. “It was sup-


posed to be a travel show; it was sadly derailed by the events of 9/11. I had a crew lined up and we were going to shoot some demos and come back and try to turn it into something. Then 9/11 happened and it changed a lot of things for a lot of people.” “For me, it just changed the fact that there was a very good chance that no one


was going to buy a travel show September 12 of that year; especially from some- body that had very little travel experience, and absolutely no TV experience,” Zien recounted. “The concept for the travel show was regular guy shows you how to go someplace that you normally wouldn’t think you could go.” Then Zien posed a question to himself of “What if it wasn’t travel, but something else I could be encouraging with?” And, out of that internal query came the answer.


“Cooking came out of it, not because I was a chef or a cook; I wasn’t,” he said. “I did


very little cooking around the house, my wife really did most of it. I did the grilling because I felt like that was my responsibility. I know I f**ked up more food on the grill than I actually turned out right.” Undeterred by his relative inexperience and armed with an attitude of “If I can make it with my limited skills, anybody could make it,” Zien made a demo tape, which he admits was “pretty bad,” and sent it out without having any showbiz connections. “It was me doing it by myself; pushing to have someone get a sense of what my


stuff was and what it could be,” he said. “And that’s where it’s got to come from; it’s got to come from you.” Unfortunately, some industry experts who received his demo weren’t getting the sense of what he was trying to accomplish, and he was told he “didn’t stand a f**ing chance” from one. Now armed with 12 Emmys under his belt, Zien does have something to say to his early detractors. “I just say what makes them think that they know everything? I don’t know ev-


erything, they can’t know everything—Oprah’s the closest we’ve got to someone knowing everything.”


Sam Zien


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