Why Alton Brown Has Never Owned A Restaurant (2024)

FAQs

Why Alton Brown Has Never Owned A Restaurant? ›

In an interview with Cleveland.com, Brown pointed out that he's never owned a restaurant for a pretty straightforward reason: "I've never wanted to work that hard."

I've never owned one. I've never wanted to work that hard. But I am married to someone who designs restaurants. And so I'm very connected to the world through Elizabeth.

Before Alton transitioned to the culinary world and later became a Food Network superstar, he studied drama in college and worked in the film industry. In fact, he looked to a few film-minded friends to help him tape the pilot of Good Eats in the mid-1990s.

Brown earned a bachelor's degree in drama from UGA in 2004, after learning that the curriculum standards had changed several years before. The one foreign-language credit he lacked in 1985 was no longer a requirement, and consequently he was deemed eligible to graduate.

Although Alton Brown spent plenty of time in his mom's kitchen growing up, his real interest in food sparked in college when he discovered that girls who said “no” to dates sometimes said “yes” if he offered to cook for them.

In an interview with Eater, celebrity chef Alton Brown was asked how his faith and religion play into his professional life. Brown is a “born-again Christian,” though he finds the term overly redundant.

Chuck: Where'd you go to culinary school? Alton: I went to New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vermont, which at the time was kind of considered to be a medical school, in a way, because all the restaurants were open to the public and you cooked six, seven days a week.

Personal life. Brown lives in Marietta, Georgia. He and his former wife DeAnna, an executive producer on Good Eats, divorced in 2015. They have one daughter born in 1999.

Just like “Iron Chef,” Alton Brown is synonymous with Food Network. But now, both the beloved show and the celebrity chef have moved to Netflix for a new version of the competition series that will be co-hosted by Brown.

Is Alton Brown a pilot? ›

Although Brown is a pilot, scuba diver and motorcycle enthusiast his current hobby time is focused on brewing coffee, rejecting smartphone updates, and attempting to housebreak a rescued Boston Terrier named Scabigail.

Combining humor, science and history, Good Eats relied on Brown's nerdy personality and his passion for cooking. He said the show was inspired by the unlikely duo of Julia Child and Monty Python. The pilot for Brown's cooking show aired on Chicago's WTTW in 1998 before being picked up by the Food Network in 1999.

Alton Brown Quotes

We are fat and sick and dying because we have handed a basic, fundamental and intimate function of life over to corporations. We choose to value our nourishment so little that we entrust it to strangers. This is insanity. Feed yourselves.

His most well-known recipe is perhaps his baby-back ribs, although he has also imparted advice for making scrambled eggs, brownies, and much more. So when Brown decided to go on his own weight loss journey, he had plenty of food knowledge to draw from.

Brown's older sister. Marsha is a constant source of annoyance to Brown (and, as revealed in some episodes, to members of the Good Eats production staff). She often tricks or cajoles Brown into cooking for her, which usually initiates the topic of that episode.

Browns was the first hospitality venture established by Jeremy Mogford, who in 1973 invested £10,000 (of which £2,500 was borrowed from his father) in the first Browns Restaurant and Bar in Brighton, East Sussex.

James Brown, a stocky man with a big personality, operated his namesake restaurant for 22 years. His mother was from New Orleans, which gave his breakfast menu a Cajun influence. He sold the diner when he wasn't physically up to running the business, but still visited the diner to catch up with his former customers.

Hailing from Tallaght in Dublin, Executive Head Chef and owner Anna Haugh has been cooking professionally for almost 20 years. Having started cooking at l'Ecrivain with Derry Clarke, Anna has spent the last 14 years in London working for celebrated chefs Philip Howard, Shane Osborne and Gordon Ramsay.

The cook and caterer was born and raised on the sea islands of Charleston, the heart of all Southern cooking, and learned to cook in her grandmother's kitchen. These days, she takes generations of family recipes and makes them her own as she cooks for family and friends at her Sea Island home.