The Back Story
Lick the Plate can be heard on 101KGB in San Diego, 93.9 The River in Detroit and WQON in Northern, Michigan. It is also a weekly feature in The Coast News. It features engaging conversations with folks from the Culinary, Culture and Music worlds including but not limited to chefs, restaurant owners, growers, brewers, winemakers and other culinary, culture, and music personalities. The interviews give the listening audience an opportunity to really get to know each guest beyond their work in the kitchen or their particular field. LTP gives you a behind-the-scenes look at how our guest's careers began, their love for food, what music moves them, along with where they eat and drink around town.
Ok, enough about plate licking. Let me start by detailing how I developed my passion for all things culinary. Growing up in suburban Detroit, there was a great variety of ethnic food, from the Polish restaurants to the Jewish Delis and of course the ever-present Coney Islands. Add a smattering of world-class eateries in the ritzier suburbs and my lowbrow and highbrow exposure to food was taking shape, more so on the lowbrow end of things. That is until I scored the ultimate summer job as First Mate on a corporate yacht in the Grosse Point Yacht Club. Guest chefs imported from exotic locations every summer catered our day trips with the best gourmet food available. This was combined with a month long trip around the Great Lakes with a yacht full of Detroit socialite foodies whose mantra was to pack light to save room for the Dom Perignon and Stags Leap. I could have easily become quite the food snob after 3 summers of this culinary hedonism, but all that gourmet food on a daily basis actually made me crave White Castles and stacked corned beef sandwiches even more. My evolving food passion was fueled by a stint as a personal assistant/chef in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, years of business travel that took me around the country and world, good friends immersed in the culinary world as chefs and educators, and working as the restaurant writer for the Surf City Times and now Coast News former contributor to Edible San Diego. This all lead to the formation of my marketing firm 10 years ago which I named Artichoke Creative that always counts culinary clients among our favorites and my weekly writing gig with the Coast News. My passion for food is a reflection of my eclectic tastes in everything and my job as a marketer and storyteller. Lick the Plate will tell the stories of area chefs, owners, and those from other areas of our burgeoning culinary, culture and music movements. Since I am just at home in a dive bar serving killer burgers as I am in the latest hotspot dishing up some hot new culinary trend, expect variety. And remember, it’s ok to Lick the Plate!
