Alton Brown’s serious about playing with his food

The idea of a live culinary show evokes an image of a booth at county fair exhibit hall, staffed by a microphone-wearing pitchman selling knives or blenders or the latest fad diet.

Alton Brown’s live culinary show, which stops by the INB Performing Arts Center on Sunday, won’t be like that.

OK, there will be a microphone. And possibly some nifty knife tricks.

“This show is really a culinary variety show,” Brown said by phone from a tour stop in Fort Myers, Florida. “It’s got a little bit of everything.”

There will be puppets, music, comedy and “two very large, very unusual culinary demonstrations that you’ll never have seen anything like, unless you’ve already been to the show once.”

He’s been touring this show for two years, although it has evolved. The music has changed, and he’s added a Twitter-based audience Q-and-A in the second act.

“But it’s built on the same bones,” he said. “This is the last leg of this tour, then we’re going to do a run on Broadway, probably around Thanksgiving, and then I’ll put this show to bed and do a new one.”

Brown was one of the early stars of the Food Network, where over 249 episodes his show “Good Eats” mixed comedy, cooking and science. Since then, he’s become one of the Food Network’s go-to hosts, working on “Iron Chef America,” “Feasting on Asphalt” and “Cutthroat Kitchen.”

Stepping away from the cameras and in front of a live audience isn’t a difficult transition for Brown.

“Although I spent most of my career in television, in very large dark rooms shooting things, my background was actually theater,” he said. “My college degree was in theater. And so to return to being in front of live audiences is such a welcomed relief after 15 years of being in front of cameras.”

Brown’s journey to culinary television was a little backward. Brown is not a chef, or at least he wasn’t. While he always cooked, he spent a decade working as a commercial director and cinematographer (he even shot the video for R.E.M.’s “The One I Love.”). As the story goes, he would watch cooking shows only to be turned off by how dull and unhelpful they were. Thinking he could do better, he enrolled in the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont. He then used both backgrounds to create “Good Eats,” which won a Peabody Award in 2007.

“Good Eats” ended its 12-year run in 2011. Fans who have missed Brown’s quirky show have reason to rejoice.

“I’m going to be launching a new project that will be very ‘Good Eats’-like, but it will be on the Internet. It will not be on television,” Brown said. He won’t say when, because, “if I have to delay it for any reason, I don’t want people to be mad at me.”

That Brown has embraced the Internet is no secret. He’s got nearly a million followers on Twitter and 821,000 Facebook friends. During the live shows, he encourages audience members to get out their smartphones and tweet questions from their seats. And as he travels the country, he asks his followers to suggest local restaurants for him to try. (Use the hashtag #ABRoadEatsSpokane on Twitter and Facebook to suggest local places for Brown to visit.) Typically he’ll hit four restaurants, unannounced, and post his reactions on social media.

“I have found my favorite restaurants in America doing this tour,” Brown said. “Not from places that have a lot of buzz online, or have great publicists, or that you read about in magazines. They’re these undiscovered gems that are out there, and they’re all over the place.

“I mean, the best cup of coffee I ever had was in Wichita, Kansas. Who would have thought that?”

Aside from affording him the opportunity to travel the country in search of good eats, the “Edible Inevitable Tour” lets Brown to do something else he loves as a performer, and it’s his favorite part of the show.

“It’s working with audience volunteers,” he said. “It’s that unknown factor of looking out in the audience and picking that person to share your life with for a certain amount of time up on stage. That’s a big rush.”