Chef, drag queen Arnold Myint hopes to be 'Food Network Star'
If local food personality Arnold Myint wins this season of "Food Network Star" and winds up with his own show, he already knows who his co-star will be.
Himself.
That's not an offhand comment on schizophrenia; more, it's a nod to Myint's alter ego, the drag and cocktail queen Suzy Wong, but more on her later.
This is the show's 11th season, having dropped the "next" part of the name, with chefs Bobby Flay and Giada De Laurentiis serving as mentors/judges. The first episode of this season airs 8 p.m. Sunday.
This isn't Myint's first glint in the food television spotlight. In 2010 he appeared on "Top Chef," where his squid ink pasta got him bounced in the fourth episode and taught him a valuable lesson on never forgetting whom you're cooking for.
In some ways, Myint, like his two personas, represents Nashville's past and its debutante side on a larger culinary stage. He is a homegrown Nashvillian who came of age inside the International Market, his mother Patty Myint's legendary Belmont Boulevard restaurant. For Nashvillians of a certain age, it was their first exposure to oddities such as Pad Thai and Tiger Tears.
That is why food and cooking have always been in his blood, and it was the global exposure from his mother's shelves and the travel his parents afforded him that gave Myint an appetite for more.
Growing up, however, it was the lure of performing that stirred within him. At first it came through auditions for anything and everything. Later, he credits the University School of Nashville, where he says people there did a tremendous job nurturing the arts.
The greatest validation, though, came in an unlikely place; it was at the ice rink, with skates laced and the rush of cool air, that captivated him. He was good at it and learned to skate professionally in what he now calls his first career.
At a certain level, though, skating can only take you so far. In his down time, Myint went to cooking school in New York, fueling his other passion. "I got fatter, um, larger," he says, and decided to slim down on one last skating job, in a show on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. That's when the epiphany came and he found himself back in Nashville helping his mother with her new restaurant, PM, across the street from the market.
More restaurants followed, including Cha Chah, which had a three-year run before morphing into blvd, and Suzy Wong's House of Yum on Church Street. All solid enterprises, but none enough to vaunt Myint beyond our borders to craved stardom.
Since his last reality stint, and after a pilot that never gained traction, he continued to work the scene in Los Angeles. "I realized, after that, that I was so not prepared," he says of the difficulty of working on camera.
To help fund his West Coast dreams, Myint began taking on consulting roles, and found some of the success and validation that didn't come in Nashville, notably designing the bar program for a concept called RockSugar Pan Asian Kitchen, developed by The Cheesecake Factory corporation in Century City.
"What I've done there was what I had hoped to do in Nashville," Myint says.
Along the way, through this journey of self-realization and looking at himself as a brand, Myint found his other self. It came on a night at Suzy Wong's, when the eponymous restaurant's diva came to life.
"I got dressed up and did a show for Halloween (what he calls the unofficial birthday of many drag queens), and my business partner Joey Brown thought it was great," says Myint, laughing.
In hindsight, it was a natural culmination. His love of the spotlight began going to "ladyboy" shows while visiting Thailand with his family. Unlike here, it wasn't a sexual thing, but more about pure spectacle and pageantry, of unbridled glamor.
Frankly, Myint says that dressing up as Disney characters and skating with thick makeup, wigs and spray-painted panty hose is pretty much the same as being a drag queen.
"Absolutely, it's my mother," he says when I ask about his inspiration for this Asian doyenne, but like most things, it's more complicated than that.
The "glamor of the third gender" was encouraged by his dear friend, Margaret Ellis, Nashville's most notable jewelry designer, who helped him see this as a side worth celebrating.
"Suzy is my very complicated co-host," he says with a laugh, only because Miss Wong is not "in the room" at this time. "Arnold is the chef. Suzy is the socialite. She's the queen of cocktails and home entertaining. She's flowers and tablescapes."
And while Suzy is built on his mother, it's in a very compartmentalized way. "She's a young gay son's image of her. I think it's how Patty sees herself." Most people, however, see Patty Myint as the roll-up-the-sleeves workaholic and restaurateur, busing tables and directing her staff.
Myint agrees that's still very much her, and it's exactly that side that fuels his chef dreams and passion for food. Away from work, though, he says his mother has a most definite glam side.
When I ask Myint whether Suzy Wong makes any appearances on "Food Network Star," he defers to contractual muzzles, only saying they were very "supportive." Because the show includes elimination rounds and concludes with a live audience voting in the end, he can't say how far he has gone, and frankly doesn't even know who will win when the show ends in early fall.
Unlike other reality shows that edit for humiliation, Myint gushed about the support he has received thus far, which is not surprising because this is ultimately a talent development gauntlet for the network and finalists are vying for a coveted contract to host their own show.
It would be too easy to dismiss Myint and criticize him for being an absentee restaurateur if you didn't know his back story. He's not coy about who he is or what he wants to do. He wears his ambition on chiffon sleeves, and while lights and fame may be the tenterhooks that pull him, his food chops and passion in the kitchen are real, deep-seated and earned.
Myint is listed as a Nashvillian on the Food Network website, but he still splits his time between here and L.A., where he keeps an apartment, if only for logistical simplicity. "I don't have to haul my wigs, knives, heels and chef coats back and forth," he says, uttering a line you probably won't hear repeated.
Still, he's bullish and proud of his hometown, calling the changes in the food scene "fantastic." He also knows the games of celebrity-hood, of opportunistic chefs and the land grab for space and attention.
He, like his mother, is concerned for the old guard, referring to Patty Myint's friend of many decades, Randy Rayburn. "For her to see Randy close (Sunset Grill), it was an eye opener. It's painful. Being fabulous isn't enough now," he says, referring to restaurants with deep pockets and big budgets for PR and marketing.
"We don't need this to validate our coolness," he says of the bittersweet changes to the dining landscape, adding, "I'm all for it. I just hope Nashville remembers that we were always cool."
Reach Jim Myers at 615-259-8367 and on Twitter @ReadJimMyers.
Season 11: "Food Network Star"
Where: The Food Network
When: Premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday
Myant restaurants
International Market
www.internationalnashville.com
2010 Belmont Blvd.
615-297-4453
PM
www.pmnashville.com
2017 Belmont Blvd.
615-297-2070
blvd
blvdnashville.com
2013 Belmont Blvd.
615-385-2422
Suzy Wong's House of Yum
www.suzywongsnashville.com
1517 Church St.
615-329-2913
