Food Network TV host Alton Brown’s farewell tour – maybe? – comes to First Interstate Center for the Arts

Since 1999, there has been a pretty good chance of seeing Alton Brown any time you turn on Food Network.

Brown made his television debut with Good Eats, a food science- and history-forward cooking show that brought humor to the kitchen.

In 2004, Brown began working as the expert commentator on “Iron Chef America: Battle of the Masters,” an adaptation of the Japanese cooking show “Iron Chef,” which puts a challenger chef against a resident “Iron Chef” in a competition to create dishes featuring a secret ingredient. Brown also hosted the spin-off series “The Next Iron Chef.”

Brown then led “Feasting on Asphalt,” a series during which he traveled the U.S. via motorcycle to explore the history of road food. “Feasting on Asphalt 2: The River Run” and “Feasting on Waves” followed.

In February 2012, “Good Eats” came to an end after 14 seasons and 249 episodes. The show would eventually return in new formats, “Good Eats: The Return” and “Good Eats: Reloaded.”

In 2013, Brown began hosting the cooking competition show “Cutthroat Kitchen,” and in 2018, he acted as a mentor on season 18 of “Worst Cooks in America.”

Brown returned to the “Iron Chef” kitchen via Netflix’s “Iron Chef: Quest for a Legend” in 2022.

Since 2013, Brown has also been easy to catch in person thanks to his live tours, starting with the “Edible Inevitable” tour. The “Eat Your Science” and “Beyond the Eats” tours followed in 2016 and 2021, respectively.

Promotional posters for Brown’s current tour, “Last Bite,” feature the words “The Farewell Tour. Maybe?” leading many to wonder if this tour would mark the end of Brown’s career in the public eye.

But he’s quick to clarify that the “Last Bite” will only be his final tour of this magnitude. In the future, his live shows will be on a smaller scale and the tours will be shorter in length.

“Living on a bus for 13 weeks isn’t as fun as it sounds,” he said.

The “Last Bite” tour brings Brown to the First Interstate Center for the Arts for a final “night of culinary spectacle and delight” on March 26.

Brown’s illustrious career comes despite having grown up with parents who he said were “fiercely anti-Alton” and having been voted “most likely to fail miserably or end up in jail.”

“I was not bright in the ways that were valued at the time, so nobody really expected very much of me at all,” he said.

Through his own drive and ambition, Brown studied film at the University of Georgia and began working as a commercial director. It was around this time that he realized he wasn’t satisfied with the cooking shows he saw on TV and decided to do something about it.

His first step was attending the New England Culinary Institute, which he graduated from in 1997. He then set to work creating his ideal show, a program that explained various concepts and techniques to viewers.

Brown wasn’t initially set to host “Good Eats” himself; he was merely a stand-in until they had enough money to hire a professional host. When Food Network purchased the series, however, they told Brown he would be the face of the show.

“I was like ‘Oh my God, really?’ ” he said. “So that was a very big switch in the kind of course that I thought that my life would have.”

When he was directing “Good Eats,” Brown would refer to himself in front of the camera as “the meat puppet.” The meat puppet knew how to find his light, he said, and the meat puppet could deliver lines.

Brown said he was far more fearless behind the camera and enjoyed the opportunity to weave elements of education and entertainment into the story he was working to tell each episode. Finding that balance became the driving focus of his work.

“How do you teach somebody? How do you entertain them, first and foremost, and then a few days later, they realize they learned something even though they didn’t know that was going on at the time,” he said. “It’s like infecting somebody with a really deadly disease. A little bit of an infection, just a small viral infection.”

Brown said it’s his job to blur the line between education and entertainment until it doesn’t exist. The “Last Bite” tour, he said, has more science in it than previous tours but audiences can still expect a true culinary variety show, not a lecture.

Along with finding the sweet spot between entertaining and informing, Brown also works to find a balance between tips for those new to the kitchen and those who have been cooking for decades.

For the first 10 years of “Good Eats,” Brown said the running joke was that every show should start with the cutting of an onion. He had to assume that the viewer was watching the show for the first time and had little to no experience in the kitchen, so there wasn’t much difference in how Brown would approach a culinary amateur versus a culinary expert.

More than two decades after “Good Eats” premiered, Brown said his approach does have to differ because of the vastly different influences people have access to. Younger people have been mostly filled with social media and content from the Internet, while older people tend to rely more on the written word and television.

It’s that heavy influence of social media and content creators that Brown said is “unraveling the fabrics” that he and others like him have worked hard to weave over the last 20 years.

That media is also responsible for degrading culinary skills. He sees much of what is created for online content as “food as spectacle” not food as cuisine. Even if you could recreate something perfectly, which you can’t, the food itself doesn’t seem appetizing or appealing on the plate.

“Most of it looks hideous on the table and I think it just alienates us from actual food,” he said. “In 20 years, we’re not probably going to be serving Thanksgiving turkey. We’re going to be serving a red snapper stuffed with pickles and Cheetos suspended under an oven rack by dental floss because that’s what people will have been watching.”

The disconnect that can come with a screen-based experience is part of the reason Brown prefers to perform in front of live audiences. It feels like a public service, he said, because we rarely get into large rooms with people we don’t know. It’s valuable culturally, but it’s also the “last bastion of creative freedom.”

“You don’t get that with content on places like streams and things like that that are very controlled environments now, and you have to dance to algorithms,” he said. “I don’t want to do that. I want to do what I want to do, and live performing lets me do what I want to do.”

After the “Last Bite” tour concludes in May, Brown is going to do more of what he wants to do, which, for the time being, is not a whole lot. A bit of rest and relaxation will give him time to brainstorm his next move.

He reiterated this isn’t the last people will see of him. He’s still excited to connect with the folks – amateurs and experts – who have laughed and learned with him for years.

“I do feel like I helped to raise a generation,” he said. “I’m happy to still be the fun uncle, if not the dad.”