TV show finds food's place in family life
| • | Tasty Chinese recipes fit busy lifestyle |
| • | Chins blend culture, family with cooking |
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor
Melanie Kosaka has produced two cooking series for public television — "Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter," which won a 2000 James Beard Award for best cooking series, and the long-running "Hawai'i Cooks with Roy Yamaguchi," which has aired in more than 80 U.S. markets and 60 countries.
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But Kosaka, whose company is named First Daughter Mediaworks in honor of her 7-year-old Akiko, isn't much interested in cooking shows.
Melanie Kosaka has produced three cooking shows — with Charlie Trotter, Roy Yamaguchi and now Katie and Leeann Chin.
She's interested in people and culture and the role that food plays in expressing people's personalities, their family relationships and their cultural backgrounds.
Which may explain why Katie Chin and her mother, Leeann Chin, chose Kosaka's company to produce their new series on family-style Chinese cooking, "Double Happiness," which debuts on Mother's Day weekend (no airtime yet).
"Finding Melanie was really serendipitous," said Katie Chin by phone from her Los Angeles home. "I had been doing some research on the Internet. When I saw the name First Daughter and realized she had made 'Kitchen Sessions,' which I thought was really impressive, I had to call her. It just happened that I was going to Hawai'i on vacation two weeks later."
Kosaka had already heard of Katie's mother, the 70-year-old founder of a Minneapolis-based chain of restaurants and take-out spots and author with Katie, one of her five children, of a recipe collection called "Everyday Chinese Cooking" (Clarkson Potter, 2000).
Katie Chin and Kosaka met in Honolulu and found themselves in sync. "She really understood the importance of the bond that exists between mother and daughter and of the important role that food plays in Asian families and Asian culture. I felt as though she understood our story and would treat it with respect," said Chin.
Photo courtesy of First Daughter Mediaworks
"We wanted more than just a slice-and-dice show. It's a cultural show. There are so many great memories that my mother shares from growing up in China, as well as my memories of growing up Chinese American," she said. "Our idea was to share some of those memories and then create bridges that lead into the recipes."
"Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter" on public television won producer Melanie Kosaka a James Beard cooking-show award.
One episode begins with Leeann Chin's memories of her tomboy childhood. Her father owned a grocery store in Guangzhou (Canton); she recalls delivering 50-pound sacks of rice on a bicycle, drawing crowds because they couldn't believe a girl was doing that kind of physical labor. These anecdotes segue into a discussion of cooking with rice.
Kosaka, for her part, had been ready to say no to another cooking show unless the Chins were interested in exploring different territory, so she was delighted.
Her philosophy is influenced by her upbringing in Hawai'i, where, she says, "it's always about food." But it also owes much to her first TV job, as a culture and arts producer for Honolulu public television station KHET, working on such programs as the arts and culture magazine "Spectrum Hawai'i."
"That was a great job," recalled Kosaka. "We got to go all over the islands and get to know so many people."
It was at KHET 13 years ago that she created "Hawai'i Cooks" — at a time when the celebrity chef was still news, East-West fusion was hot on the culinary scene, and some of the approaches they took, such as shooting on farms and with food producers, were considered innovative. "I was really so lucky that Roy took a leap of faith with me," said Kosaka.
Even then, she knew that she didn't want to do "a cookie-cutter type of cooking show. We wanted to open up the borders and look at food from different angles, taking the field-to-table approach."
With cameras chasing Mario Batali around Italy and peeking backstage into Rocco DiSpirito's "The Restaurant" kitchen, that's been-there, done-that now. Leading the way back into the kitchen is Charlie Trotter, whose third "Kitchen Sessions" series began airing April 3 and is seen at 6 p.m. Saturdays on KHET. "He's making the food the center again, getting back to beauty of food, back to the basics of dealing with food, handling food. There are so many shows these days where the food is almost secondary."
"Double Happiness" falls somewhere in between Trotter's refined and sensual "food as sacred object" approach and the frenetic pace of location shooting. The heart of the program is a contemporary Asian kitchen set, but they also take field trips to Los Angeles' Chinatown, a tea shop in Beverly Hills and so on. (Kosaka's office is her home, and she and First Daughter director Robert Bates — her ex-husband — take the work wherever the show is based.)
Kosaka says the key to a successful cooking show is the host: This is "beyond just being very credible and knowledgeable. They have to know what they're doing, of course, but they have to know how to convey it. That is the biggest challenge — to find that."
Next is to find a new approach. "You're dealing with an audience that's pretty jaded, so how do you bring the show to life? You need a thematic element," said Kosaka.
The third challenge is practical: Entertain, yes, but get the cookin' done, too.
Finally, there's finding the money to do the show the way you want — through grants or underwriting ("Double Happiness" has Kikkoman).
In "Double Happiness," it's the "Joy Luck Club"-style interaction between mother and daughter that creates interest and dramatic tension. Katie more or less takes the role of the viewer, Kosaka said, asking the questions, prompting the anecdotes. Leeann Chin is the businesslike expert, skilled at explaining how things are done.
Katie Chin says she and her mother work together in her catering business now, so they've developed a friendly professional relationship. But, she said, "she's still my mom. That being said, there's definitely a mother-daughter dynamic in which she bosses me around and is quite passive-aggressive with me. I'm the American and I'm trying to offer shortcuts and she doesn't believe in that, so there's some eyeball-rolling." Katie is an actress and admits to being a bit dramatic. Her mother has a dry sense of humor that her daughter finds very funny.
The show uses documentary and magazine-style approaches, including archival photos, voice-overs, and breakaway stories within the story.
There were some cultural gaps between Hawai'i-born Kosaka and the Chins — when they were shooting the show on rice, Katie recalls, Kosaka stopped the shooting when the Chins went into detail about washing rice. "Doesn't everybody know that?," she asked, hoping to trim a few minutes from the program. "Growing up in Hawai'i, you just forget that the rest of America has no idea."
