“There were things I never tasted growing up — like food with any flavor,” Phil Rosenthal said recently during an interview outside his favorite coffeehouse, Go Get Em Tiger, in Larchmont Village. “Our oven had a setting for ‘shoe.’ ”
Rosenthal has a long history of jokingly disparaging his mother, not least in his very loosely semi-autobiographical hit sitcom, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” which aired on CBS from 1996 to 2005. But more than that, this is his way of explaining one reason he grew up to become such a foodie, investing in a number of local L.A. restaurants, including Nancy Silverton’s Mozza and Suzanne Tract’s Jar, among others. And now, he’s melding TV and food with his own six-part PBS series, “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having,” which chronicles his culinary adventures around the globe.
In the show, the quirky, hilarious Rosenthal, still boyish at 55, chows down in six cities — Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris, Barcelona, Florence and Los Angeles — appearing like a kid in a candy store the entire time. He’s wide-eyed as he dines at Narisawa, one of the finest restaurants in Tokyo, where the chef prepares Kobe beef by drizzling hot oil over the meat for half an hour. Rosenthal oohs and aahs when he’s presented with a salad that’s prepared to look like a forest floor — the “moss” composed of soy and green tea, the mushrooms tempura-fried, and burdock root fashioned to look like tree bark. There’s even a speaker in the dish that live-streams sounds from four different forests around Japan. “I can die now,” the delighted Rosenthal exclaims.
Not every stop is linen tablecloths and fine dining: In Florence, the gastronome samples fare from Vivoli, his favorite gelato joint; in Barcelona, he scores a comically enormous joint of jamon, Spanish prosciutto; in Paris, he visits the city’s most popular restaurant, L’As du Fallafel, a kosher Middle Eastern place, and helps the Israeli owners prepare the dish behind the counter; and in Los Angeles, he takes his pal Martin Short to munch on kimchi fried rice at Roy Choi’s Koreatown restaurant, Pot.
“I’m exactly like Anthony Bourdain, if he was afraid of everything,” Rosenthal quipped, comparing himself to the adventurous travel/food host of the shows “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown.”
Not that Rosenthal avoids chowing down on more, er, exotic fare on his show. At a family-owned restaurant in Tokyo, he stares in dismay at a bowl of pond loach (rice paddy eels) that’s destined to become his supper; at a stand in Italy, he tastes a sandwich stuffed with lambrodotto, aka cow’s stomach; and at Narisawa he discovers two black ants staring at him from his forest salad.
“At first I thought there had been a cleanliness issue in the kitchen,” he told me. “When I bit down it was like, crunch, it’s a bug.” Rosenthal was relieved when the insect turned out to taste like a burst of lemon.
He was even warier in Hong Kong while eyeing a century egg, a Chinese delicacy concocted by preserving eggs in ash for at least a month. “The yolk was green, and the white was a brownish-orange almost translucent color,” he recalled. “The first thing you taste is very, very rotten egg, which is then surpassed by an overpowering wave of ammonia. And right away you see the seven stages of death play out on my face.”
Rosenthal’s favorite moment on the series came when he prepared egg creams — his New York childhood delicacy — for some of his Japanese hosts. “As they foamed up everybody went ‘ooooh,’ and that to me was the purpose of the show,” he said. “It’s ‘I’m eating your eels; you’re drinking my egg creams; we’re friends.’ ”
Rosenthal has come a long way from his gastronomically deprived childhood. During his 20s in Manhattan, he said, he regularly read The New York Times’ reviews of stellar restaurants such as Lutece and The Quilted Giraffe. “They sounded like Disneyland to me, kingdoms where the most delightful, magical things would happen,” he said. “And so I made a pact with a friend of mine: We would save up so that once a year on our birthdays we could go to one of those magical places.”
“Everybody Loves Raymond” also began over a meal: Rosenthal first met with the show’s star, Ray Romano, over pastrami sandwiches at Art’s Deli, where they compared notes on their respective Jewish and Italian-American families. “We discovered we weren’t so different,” Rosenthal said. “All problems were solved with food, and the mother never leaves you alone.
“Oh, my God, we had so many episodes that centered on food on the show,” he added. The series’ pilot was based on the true story of how Rosenthal once bought his parents a fruit-of-the-month subscription, with disastrous results. “My mother told me on the phone, ‘I can’t talk now, there’s too much fruit in the house,’ ” he recalled. “It was as if I’d gotten her a box of heads from a murderer.”
Rosenthal went on to star in his 2010 documentary, “Exporting Raymond,” which follows his fraught experience launching a Russian version of “Everybody Loves Raymond” in Moscow. His funny, affable persona caught the eye of PBS executives, who wanted him to appear in a travel show of their own. “I told them, ‘I’ve had this fantasy of hosting a series where in every episode I go to another great spot in the world, and I show you where to eat,” Rosenthal said. And so “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” was born.
He insisted that most of the venues he visits on the series are affordable, like the Tokyo ramen place that cooks its vegetable broth in a contraption that looks like a mad scientist’s vials.
In the Los Angeles episode, for example, he takes his pals Norman Lear and Paul Reiser to Langer’s Deli and introduces them to the restaurant’s famed pastrami sandwiches.
In every episode, Rosenthal Skypes with his Jewish parents back home in the States, sometimes to his own chagrin. When he tells his mother he’s eaten an ant, she replies that he could have enjoyed some of the insects in her own backyard.
His goal, in each episode, he said, is to urge viewers to try something gastronomically new. “I hope people will look at me and say, ‘If this putz can do it, maybe I can, too.’ ”
“I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” premieres Sept. 28 at 10 p.m.on PBS SoCal.
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