My first week home from the book tour has been nutty. On Thursday, late night, I was invited on the Joey Reynolds Show, WOR 710 AM in New York City. Joey, the legendary talk radio DJ, pushed the book, which was great, but wanted to talk about Skyline Chili (the chain in Ohio) instead for some reason. I don't think he had even seen the book until we were on the air. Listen to the wacky interview here where he says he's not sure if he can vote for Obama because it sounds too much like 'Osama'. I'd expect nothing less from classic late-night talk radio! If you scroll past the 20mins of diatribe you'll find a short interview with the hamburger expert. He was a tough guy to keep up with.
The next day I was scheduled to be on the Gayle King Show on Oprah's XM Radio Channel. I trudged through the pouring rain to Columbus Circle only to discover that programming 'forgot' that I was coming in and that 'uh, Gayle is in Chicago...'. I was not happy. According to my publicist I had the right date but the station expected me in June. I arrived home to find flowers and an apology, so all is well. Oprah Radio has offered other dates (in June) but nothing has been decided yet. I'm looking forward to talking to Gayle about burgers.
On Sunday morning, early, I went on the national Fox & Friends Sunday Morning show. Huge publicity and a quick, high-profile segment at the end of the program (close to 10am). The segment was shot on the street outside of their studio on 6th Ave and 48th St. Good friend, chef, and co-conspirator of the NYC Food Film Festival Harry Hawk came along to make the burgers for the camera on Fox's lame electric grill (barely got above 300 degrees). The beef came from Pat LaFrieda and I brought toppings for the burgers. Click here to see the clip. The anchor was Ainsley Earhardt and she was a great, very snappy, interviewer. She surprised me by taking bites out of the guberburger and the nutburger, a pretty brave on-air stunt (the shot above is proof that Ainsley took a bite of the nutburger, as you can probably tell from the red lipstick). I completely forgot to take a bite of one myself. There were lots of great graphics and shots of the book cover which made my publicist happy I'm sure. Sales of the book were clearly up as the amazon.com rank hit 1,200 about an hour after the program. I also set a personal single-day website record Sunday with 36,000 hits.
More to come this week as I become the emcee of the Burger Battle of the Boroughs tomorrow night. I'll also be signing books and eating burgers.
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