People believe what they want to believe. You have to run your race and be proud of the person you see in the mirror.
I'm Adam Richman. A food fanatic who's held nearly every job in the restaurant biz. Now I'm on a mouth-watering journey to find America's greatest pig-out spots. And take on the country's most legendary eating challenges. I'm no competitive eater, just a regular guy with a serious appetite. This is my ultimate hunger quest. This is Man v. Food.
Gratitude is the attitude. That's the thing.
Generally speaking, there's a difference. Moose nose is just pure cartilage. It's not just the end of a chicken leg, it really is - imagine the cartilage of game meat.If I ever took the spare tire off of my car and was on a survival show, and Bear Grylls was like, "What you need to do in a survival situation is eat your tire," I'd be like, "That's moose nose!"
You can change your spouse, your friends but never your club.
I'm a big soccer fanatic, and although I support a team called Tottenham Hotspur in London - I love that team, I wear their symbol around my neck on a chain - I've always had a soft spot for this little club.
My mom always says, "Pack your smile," but [the sound guy] articulated it beautifully, because he saw me go from Joe Schmo who had been on food stamps to Adam Richman from Man V. Food. He said, "For you, it may be your 50th or 100th selfie, autograph, or whatever of the day. But for that person, it may be the first or the only time in their life that they've seen someone they enjoy on television. Never lose sight of that."
If I had Sirius FM and fire-breathing in a giant puppy dragon, I'd be golden.
I sponsored every team in the Park Slope Little League for years.I sponsor two soccer teams in England, one of which is called Broadley F.C. A kid wrote to me through Facebook because they started a team in honor of their friend who died of leukemia, and he played in the band of this very obscure team in England.
We were filming in Greenland, and I treated my crew. It's 24 hours of pretty bright daylight there right now, and I always try to do something nice for my crew every trip or in every other city. So I greeted them with a midnight cruise, but it looked like two in the afternoon.
If something is nice about you, usually one or two people will tell you. If something is foul about you, everyone will tell you.
That was another incredible thing: the opportunity to be in Greenland, a place I had read about in NatGeo a decade before. Suddenly I was staying there and hiking there, and we took a mini iceberg out of the water and chipped it up and used it as ice cubes and made cocktails with it. It's surreal.
I'm not a plumber who accidentally blew up or a math professor who accidentally backed into notoriety. I have a master's from Yale drama, and I auditioned for this. So obviously I want to be in the limelight in some capacity, or I want to be in entertainment in some capacity.
In the early '90s I was floating somewhere between the Brat Pack/Andrew McCarthy/James Spader/Pretty In Pink kind of stuff and the alterna-pop look, crossed with a very distinct grunge sensibility.
Shaq is Shaq. I did an episode of The Soup with Shaq, and he shook my hand, and I felt like I was a Ken doll, like I had no hand.
When Lollapalooza started, and I was really into Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction, Soundgarden. I went to that Lollapalooza tour twice, I think.
I've always been a massive Beastie Boys fan, so if you look at their style aesthetic on Check Your Head, that was the headspace I was in for a minute. Whatever that was, that was me.
I was 12 or 13, and I had seen a demo about origami at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. My dad, my step-mom, and I were at the Japan pavilion of Epcot, and my dad was going to get me an origami book. They had these really sick origami books with an overleaf, but those packs can sometimes blow, because they give you, like, eight sheets.
Actually, I am loathe to admit, but I also remember freshman year of Emory - and I'm so sorry to have to admit this - but there was a Domino's Pizza in Emory Village, where I went to college, and I was ordering a pizza.
There are soccer athletes that are known the world over except in the U.S. Thierry Henry, for example.
I think that in terms of who is known the world over, I would wager that it's probably someone like Mark Wahlberg or Dwyane Wade.
I think the most surreal moment for me having been a kid who was on unemployment, was on food stamps - I'm not kidding you, to utter these words aloud is so surreal to me - but to say, "I had to give up my Super Bowl tickets for my all-expense paid research trip to Argentina's wine country," it was like, who's life is this? It was splendid, and the nice thing was that they renewed my contract for another year.
People also respected my culinary acumen and my intelligence, and that was their whole thing. They flew me over, and it was this immersive experience.
I do feel that, generally, people will see me and go, "He knows where the good food is," which is an awesome correlative. It's an awesome simplification.
I produced a play in New York that got nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award for Best American Play.The play is called Stalking The Bogeyman. It was a story on This American Life, and my former roommate is the artistic director of the New York Repertory Theater. He heard the NPR show, contacted them, and essentially - shortest synopsis ever, like I'm the Cablevision guide button - it's the true story of a man stalking and plotting to kill the man who raped him when he was seven. It's by a brilliant reporter named David Holthouse.
