The food TV globetrotter says yes to celeriac shawarma, no to ‘putrefied shark’
Illustration by Lyndon Hayes
My first look at Phil Rosenthal’s signature expression comes before we’ve even been properly introduced. Folding my bike outside the vast glazed front of Rovi restaurant in Fitzrovia, I spot the comedy writer turned culinary adventurer sitting alongside his publicist, aiming his trademark wide-eyed, beaming smile out at no one in particular. That look of inquisitive delight will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Somebody Feed Phil – his popular astronomic travelogue, now on its eighth season. It is, alongside shots of the host all but unhinging his jaw to cram in some gargantuan local delicacy in Lisbon or New Orleans or Seoul, a recurring visual motif. I have an early sense that this eternally ravenous 65-year-old’s sunny enthusiasm isn’t solely for the cameras.
“Mark Twain said ‘make your vacation your vocation’,” explains Rosenthal, once we’ve shaken hands, found a sunlit corner table and been left alone to consider our menus. “This is what I’ve done. So there’s no acting on the show.” This is evident in the many scenes that depict Rosenthal descending on, say, Glaswegian shawarma or Texan barbecue. It’s an approach that also fills concert venues – he is in London for a live show at the Palladium, one of eight UK performances on his European tour – and is still potent enough to power a new batch of episodes (more on which in a moment).
Happy gluttony wasn’t always Ronsenthal’s default setting. His earliest culinary memories – from his childhood in New York with his parents and younger brother in a rambunctious Jewish-American household – are of miserably flavourless family meals (“Whatever was cheap and fast”). These were supplemented by after-school junk-food binges that were an act of “self-preservation”. “I remember really tough meat that felt like a punishment,” he says. “My jaws ached. And that’s one of my first memories of food. I was not allowed to get up from the table until I’d finished. So I learned the trick of storing [the meat] in the back of my cheeks like a chipmunk, opening my mouth to show that I was done, and then running off to spit it out in the bathroom.”
Rosenthal filmed in Rovi, the de-facto flagship of Yotam Ottolenghi’s restaurant empire, for season three’s London episode, falling for its celeriac shawarma. “I went crazy over it,” he says, looking up at me over the menu. “It’s like a burger, but better than many burgers I’ve had. So [I’m] definitely getting that.” I decide that I basically have no choice but to join him and we settle on a selection of faintly Levantine sides to share. Ottolenghi’s global, culturally promiscuous philosophy seems to suit the well travelled borderlessness that is central to Somebody Feed Phil. “He’s open-minded,” says Rosenthal. “And in the chef’s world, that means flavours.”
Open-mindedness, and the joy of travel, found Rosenthal in his early 20s. As a child in a house of big emotions and fond, occasionally needling humour (“When we weren’t yelling, we were laughing”), he was an aspiring actor, star of high-school plays, and a TV-obsessed homebody. “I watched to excess,” he admits. “My parents would say, ‘Go outside! Be like the other kids!’ But while they were all out on dates, I was watching television.”
You use a bit of humour, you use positive energy, and you get people to literally take in the culture by eating it
Absorbing all that televisual grammar helped him through college and into a period living in New York as “a starving actor”. It wasn’t until his first trip to Europe, when he was 23 – his ticket paid for by a parcel delivery service who couriered packages as excess baggage – that he became obsessed with the possibilities of food and travel. In Parisian parks he gorged on inexpensive baguettes with cheese and “felt like King Louis”; he Interrailed to Florence and had an entire village come out to ply him with pasta, salumi and oven-warm pastries. “It was not like anything I’d had in New York, and it changed my life,” he says.
He carried this passion through to the days when, having graduated from the “veal pen” of LA’s 1980s and 1990s sitcom writers’ rooms, he was showrunner on Everybody Loves Raymond, the Ray Romano-fronted ratings behemoth that ran on CBS for nine seasons. Early in the show’s life, Rosenthal convinced his travel-averse star to film an episode in Italy. Romano was transformed from someone “who vacationed on the Jersey Shore” into an air mile-hoarding global adventurer. “That was when it hit me,” Rosenthal says, flashing another smile. “What if I could do this for other people? You use a bit of humour, you use positive energy, and you get people to literally take in the culture by eating it.”
Right on cue, our dishes arrive and swamp the table. Fat, glinting sardines buried beneath grapefruit and shaved fennel; white soy and hazelnut dukkah-spiked wilted greens; succulent chicken kofta, primed with an unexpected but effective hit of coffee. The celeriac shawarma, all fresh ancient-grain pitta and juicy, marinated root vegetable, lives up to its billing. “It’s so rich and satisfying, isn’t it?” says Rosenthal, dabbing a napkin at the juices running down his chin.
Surely, over the years, there have been dishes he hasn’t loved? His first thought is the piure he tried in Santiago, Chile; an iodine-rich, “diseased-looking coral” that he unthinkingly put in his mouth after a chef presented him with a huge mound of it. He also refused to eat hákarl, the notorious Icelandic shark meat, having seen the vomitous effect it had on the late Anthony Bourdain. “Between creating the genre we work in and saving me from putrefied shark, I have a lot to thank him for,” he notes drily.
The food that features in the new episodes – which include an exploration of Amsterdam and a first trip to Australia – is less hazardous. Although an episode filmed in Tbilisi, Georgia, later gained a fresh resonance when the far-right former footballer Mikheil Kavelashvili was voted in as president. “Tbilisi was fascinating,” he says. “Unfortunately, they swung to the right as well, and it’s even more scary for them.” As we speak, Donald Trump has not long begun his second term, with its focus on deporting migrants. For all Somebody Feed Phil’s folksiness and determined lack of edge, Rosenthal has noted that “if there’s a theme to the series, it’s immigrants and how they make everything better, not worse, despite what some assholes say”.
Phil and Jimi both ate celeriac shawarma, £17.50. They shared whole grilled sardines, £20, chicken kofta, £25, mixed greens, £7.50, choc chip cookie with mint ice-cream, £10.50. Phil drank an americano, £3.60. Jimi drank an americano with steamed oat milk, £4
In a time of entrenched polarisation, is he conscious of enshrining this message in his work? “Suddenly, being a human is political,” he says. “The fact that I literally embrace people from other cultures is somehow now a political statement. The fact that I extol the virtues of immigration is a political statement.” He mentions how his own perspective has been shaped by the show; the Palestinian woman in Dubai whose food “touched [his] heart” and brought him to tears; the realisation in Saigon that the conflict he knew as the ‘“Vietnam war’” was locally known as ‘“the American war’”. In his mind, the show, despite its gentleness, makes a meaningful contribution to an attention economy that can default to negativity and division.
“I get worried, frustrated and angry when I watch the news,” he explains, as we both jab our spoons at a shared pudding of warm, chocolate chip cookie shards and quenelles of mint ice-cream. “But I have to remind myself that 90% of the world is not that. People want to be happy and healthy; they want to have a nice meal and have laughs. That’s the lesson for me in the show and now in life. I don’t have time for the negative. I don’t want it. Yes, I [occasionally] have to look at it. But I’m not giving it more attention than it deserves.”
The grin is still there, along with a previously unglimpsed seriousness. I’m reminded that, following the end of Everybody Loves Raymond in 2005, it took Rosenthal a decade to convince TV executives that his food travelogue idea had legs (initially at PBS before a 2018 move to Netflix). “If you make something a priority in your life,” he notes, “you will not stop until it happens.”
Deep into this successful second act, he’s as eager as ever to maximise opportunities. Phil’s Favourites, a recipe-based follow-up to his bestselling series companion book, will be published later this year. Plans are underway for the long-delayed opening of Max and Helen’s: an LA diner, jointly conceived with chef Nancy Silverton, and named for his late parents (who, before passing away in 2021 and 2019 respectively, were regulars on the show). Although he’s conscious that Somebody Feed Phil could “get stale”, he’s not ready to stop collecting passport stamps just yet. “I haven’t been to Greece, I haven’t been to Turkey or Shanghai – there’s a lot of places,” he says, as we call for the bill. It’s a big world, I suggest. “Right,” he agrees, the beam widening. “And, well, somebody’s got to eat it.”
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Rovi, 59 Wells Street, London W1
The new season of Somebody Feed Phil is on Netflix
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