From a SoHo Squat to Bizarre Foods

Andrew Zimmern wanted to work with food from childhood. He spent New York summers roasting chickens with his grandmother and clamming and crabbing with his father on Long Island. While in college he cooked in restaurants across Europe, sometimes for little or no pay, and by 25 he was opening restaurants with an established New York restaurateur.

He began drinking and smoking marijuana at 13, and around 1989, at 28, his substance use escalated to cocaine, quaaludes and heroin. He lost his job and his apartment and became homeless in New York, at one point sleeping in an abandoned building in SoHo.

The turning point came on January 20, 1992. He woke up on the floor of the San Pedro Hotel in Manhattan, having planned to drink enough vodka over three nights to end his life. Instead he felt a sense of surrender and called an old friend, and an intervention followed. He recalled thinking that he could not even kill himself.

The intervention sent him to treatment in Minnesota, and he later completed a programme at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. While living in a halfway house he offered to cover for a missing line cook at a restaurant, started out washing dishes, and impressed the staff with his cooking. He became executive chef at Un Deux Trois in Minneapolis and stayed until 1998. In 1997 he launched a media company, Food Works, and worked for free at local television, radio and a magazine before moving into paid roles.

In 2003 he sold the Travel Channel on Bizarre Foods, which has grown into four shows. He is also a restaurateur, author, podcaster and investor, and he continues to support addiction and homelessness nonprofits. Looking back, he told the Star Tribune that miracles are real and that he has seen them.