How Did Tony Shalhoub Learn To Play A Chef On Screen?

The Sporkful

SiriusXM Podcasts

Arts

4.6 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

Tony Shalhoub is an actor whose roles skew towards the quirky and neurotic — and his characters’ quirks often come out through food. In the classic 1996 film Big Night, Tony plays an uncompromising Italian chef whose Jersey Shore restaurant is on the brink of failure. In the TV show Monk, he plays a detective with OCD who has many strong opinions about how he wants his food.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Serious XM Podcasts.
0:10.0	Are you kind of a control freak in that way?
0:13.6	Oh, I'm a total control freak.
0:15.3	Absolutely.
0:16.0	With your food and eating?
0:17.5	Like, what's an example of that?
0:18.9	Well, I mean, I like things, you know, a certain
0:21.8	way. I like a certain amount of butter to go on a potato or whatever at a certain time in a
0:28.5	certain way. Yeah, I like things my way. I don't like too much of something or not enough of
0:35.0	something. What's the exactly right time to put the butter on the potato?
0:39.1	Well, you don't want to do it right away when it's super, super hot.
0:44.9	I don't.
0:45.9	Why not?
0:46.5	You know?
0:47.0	Well, because then it just sort of, it sort of liquefies and separates.
0:51.0	I want to sort of like slow melt and still be able to see soft butter on there. Is that, am I, is that just me? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, right? You don't want to just infuse the potato with butter flavoring. No. You really want butter on top. Yeah, and I want potato-flavored butter sometimes. Exactly. You have potato-flavored butter, not just butter-flavored potato. Thank you.
1:11.7	Call me old-fashioned.
1:18.0	This is the Sporkful.
1:19.6	It's not for foodies.
1:20.7	It's for eaters.
1:21.7	I'm Dan Pashman.
1:23.0	Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
	...

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