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| This is a table setting for one of Robert Meyers-Lussier’s dinners. (Photos courtesy of Robert Meyers-Lussier) |
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‘This is Delicious! What is it? An Eclectic
Collection of International Comfort Foods’
By Robert Meyers-Lussier
2004
www.bobmeyers.com
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HOME > ENTERTAINMENT > HOME
By: George Olive COMMENTS
 
continued...
studied pre-law and waited tables at Pannekoeken Huis, a local
Dutch restaurant chain. From his restaurant waiting experience he met many people
with whom he could talk about his burgeoning passion of food and cooking. One
regular customer asked him one day if he would like to cook a dinner for him
and some friends.
From this invitation grew a catering business, “The World on a Platter,”
which lasted four years, until 1996, and helped Bob add many new dishes to his
repertoire. Many of the desserts and finger food for his cookbook come out of
this period: lemon bars, cheesecake, prosciutto and pear rollups.
Cooking and politics have also been connected in his life. After a sour experience
with the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 during his college days, he decided on
a whim to run for Democratic state representative from Minnesota against a 16-year
Republican veteran, Kathleen Blatz (now a chief justice in Minnesota). He lost,
but got a third of the vote.
After his political loss, he worked part-time at Williams-Sonoma in Bloomington,
the gourmet kitchen supplies store. Through his previous contact with the station
manager of Bloomington Public Television, he came up with the idea of a cooking
show called “Talking with Your Mouth Full,” a combination cooking
show–talk show.
Ironically, his first chat guest was Blatz, his previous political opponent.
For reasons even he doesn’t know, he fixed a vegetarian torta as his dish,
an odd choice one would think for a Republican politician in Minnesota.
Some of his political connections also asked him to do dinners or spreads for
their political events. One significant one was Dean Barkley, who had run for
the House in 1992 with the Reform Party and was eventually appointed to replace
U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, after the Democratic senator’s death in a plane
crash in October 2002.
Barkley’s wife wanted Meyers-Lussier to cook for a Reform Party gathering,
where they were going to try to convince Jesse Ventura to run as a candidate
for governor. Bob can’t swear that it was his dinner that had the right
effect on Ventura, but the evening was a smashing success on all fronts, so
he’d like to imagine that it did.
There’s a pattern here. The author believes food is “the best way
of getting people together of different views” to move them in some direction.
FOOD BECAME A critical player in another stage of Robert’s life. He had
started conducting online chats in the winter of 1995 with gay men, his first
contact with the gay world. He was losing a lot of weight and was beginning
to feel better about himself physically.
During one online chat, he was invited to a party in Kansas City, and agreed
to help with the party. The host was a barbecue beef kind of guy, but he loved
pesto, so Bob spent a month experimenting with pesto recipes.
The weekend of July 4, 1996, was when Meyers-Lussier met real live gay people
for the fir
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