Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the spectator's food and drink podcast.

I'm Laura Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts.

And today we're delighted to be joined by the American actor, comedian and filmmaker Paul Fieg.

Paul has directed comedy films including Bridesmaids and the 2016 Ghostbusters remake,

as well as episodes and shows, including Parks and Recreation and Mad Men.

A keen cocktail connoisseur, having released a book in 2020 called Cocktail Time,

he also makes his own London dry gin.

Paul, welcome to Table Talk.

Thanks so much. It's very fun to be here. I appreciate it. Paul, we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you, what are your earliest memories of food? My earliest members

of food is that I thought I didn't like it. I had a mother who, bless her, was not a great cook

and a grandmother who my father and my uncle always told me was the world's greatest cook,

and her food was absolutely tasteless. It had zero taste whatsoever. She would boil chicken,

everything she made, she wouldn't put any salt in or anything. And so I would taste that. My father,

this is the world's greatest chicken soup. And so I would have this chicken soup and it just tasted like

nothing. And then I grew up in Michigan in the late 60s and early 70s. Restaurants were very

bland, let's just say. Everything was fried. Every vegetable had been cooked, you know, the life cooked

out of it. And so I really kind of thought I didn't like food because I was always hungry and I would

very enthusiastically order some big entree. And then I kind of would get halfway through it and not be able to

eat it because it didn't taste like anything, to which my father nicknamed me Big Eyes, because he said, you have big eyes and you always order too much food,

and then you don't finish it. It's like, well, I would if I liked it. But I didn't know.

I honestly didn't know that food could taste like it. I thought this is just what food tastes like.

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