Secrets of the Tsil Café

by Thomas Fox Averill

Caught between traditional old World Italian cuisine and New World American foods, Thomas Fox Averill shows us that food is the reflection of life’s shifting flavors. And food is the deepest express of love. Join me and my guest Marshall King as we discuss Secrets of the Tsil Café as we make preparations for a reconciliation meal.

Weston Hingler’s crib was in the kitchen of BuenAppeTito, his mother’s catering service. There, he learned to read while tasting the pleasing flavors of his mother’s culinary alphabet. But before he was allowed to center the Tsil Café, he would have to pass his father’s taste tests. Anchovies. Habanero chiles. Chipotle peppers. Food to purge body and soul. Food his loving but sometimes volatile father uses as a measure of family, friends, and enemies. Caught between kitchens, one traditional and the other New World. Weston quickly learns that he’s also trapped by his wayward parents’ secret and complicated histories, as well as by the café customers and employees who are all to privy to his growing up. Although Weston chooses his escapes intuitively, he discovers that it isn't easy to get away.

This story is a man’s perspective on food. Here food is the reflection of life’s shifting flavors—the way this singular, multicultural family communicates their deepest needs and their greatest expressions of love. Let’s toast the reconciliation. And can Wes escape the conflict?

Original Air-Date: 9.26.2009