S4E60: Having the City for Dinner with Corey Mintz

In Toronto's Kensington Market, Colin Marshall talks to Corey Mintz, author of the Toronto Star column "Fed" and the book How to Host a Dinner Party. They discuss what makes a dinner party a Torontonian dinner party; the city's "uptight" reputation; how he bottomed out in his initial cooking career, winding up working the kitchen at a dinner theater; how he converted to writing and also found a way to take a friend's advice that he "should host dinner parties for a living"; the time he made lunch for Ruth Reichl, and what his editor appreciated more about the blog post he wrote about it than the actual column he did; his dinner party with the disgraced head of the District of Toronto School Board, pre-disgrace; what it means when some like what you do and some dislike it for the same reasons; the art of mixing personalities at the table; why to recognize that "important people can be blowhards," and indeed that blowhardiness often makes them important in the first place; how he keeps the smartphones in peoples' pockets; "Toronto" versus "Toronno"; how he came to regularly invite the city, whatever the pronunciation of its name, into his home for dinner; his food-paradise neighborhood of Kensington Market, which through accidents of history now exists "outside reality, a little bit"; his questioning of his Councillor at dinner about why the neighborhood doesn't have trash cans, and what he learned from the attempt; how Torontonian multiculturalism translates into food; what took him into the secret VIP room of a suburban Nigerian restaurant; and whether he considers his dinner parties the revival of a lost art.