Tony Shalhoub explores global cultures through bread in new CNN series 'Breaking Bread'

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NEW YORK (AP) — To make bread, you need flour, water, salt and, usually, a rising agent, like yeast. To break bread, CNN has enlisted someone special — Tony Shalhoub.

The Broadway and “Monk” star enters the crowded field of celebrity travel hosts this fall with “Breaking Bread,” which follows the actor across the globe as he explores cultures and food through the lens of bread.

“It is about bread, but bread really as a kind of a vehicle, a vessel, to illustrate and billboard history and culture and people and find out what they do and why they do what they do,” he says.

The series, which debuts on Sunday night, follows Shalhoub as he samples baguettes and bouillabaisse in Marseille, France, and scarfs down fluffy milk bread and red bean paste buns in Tokyo.

The first episode is set in Shalhoub's current hometown of New York City and he eats old-fashioned pumpernickel and rye breads, as well as Irish soda bread scones. He goes to Chinatown for fried dough and the Little Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn for black cake and currant rolls.

“I don’t know how you convinced people to make this a show. We just get to eat delicious bread,” guest Lin-Manuel Miranda tells Shalhoub as he munches on an everything bagel with cream cheese and jam.

Shalhoub finds himself in Brazil in the second episode, reveling in the influences Lebanese immigrants like him have given to São Paulo’s food scene: Flatbreads, za’atar, pistachios and kibbeh. He visits a cassava farm, learns about fermentation and Afro-Brazilian heritage in things like a deep fried bread ball made from black eye pea flour.

It may be a show about different breads, but Shalhoub and his team are happy to try various local foods and drinks. “This used to be a show about bread,” he jokes onscreen after pounding a caipirinha, the Brazilian cocktail. (“Because of the schedule, there’s no shortage of day drinking,” he notes in the interview.)

Shalhoub is part of a crowded field of celeb travel hosts, which includes Rainn Wilson, Eugene Levy, Stanley Tucci,Orlando Bloom, Zac Efron, José Andrés, Chris Hemsworth, Will Smith, Eva Longoria and Ewan McGregor.

They are all following in the wake of the late Anthony Bourdain, whose “Parts Unknown” series on CNN was part travelogue, part history lesson and part love letter to food.

Amy Entelis, executive vice president for talent, CNN Originals and creative development for CNN Worldwide, worked on Bourdain's show and greenlit Shalhoub's.

“No one we work with tries to be Tony Bourdain and nobody thinks they’re going to be,” she says. “We try to work with people to go on that mission, but to make it theirs.”

Shalhoub collected three Emmy Awards for his work as obsessive-compulsive private detective Adrian Monk over eight seasons. After the show ended in 2009, Shalhoub went on to earn three Tony Award nominations, winning in 2018 for “The Band’s Visit” and starred in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” winning another Emmy.

“I don’t want the show to be about me. I feel like I’m acting more as a tour guide, so to speak. I want it to be more about the other people — the people that I meet, the people I interview, the new places that I get to visit,” Shalhoub says.

“I don’t know that TV audiences need to see that much more of me after all these years. I certainly don’t want to see that much of me.”

“Breaking Bread” is a travel and food show, but it's also a family affair, with Shalhoub's oldest child, Josie, joining him in Marseille as they trace his father's 1920 journey through the city. His wife, Brooke Adams, and daughter Sophie join him in Iceland, while his siblings and nephews feature in a Wisconsin-based episode.

“Bread to me is tied to memory, tied to our childhood, tied to our parents and our grandparents and all their contemporaries,” he says. “We’re drawing from the past, but it’s also something that we want to pass down to my grandchildren and forward and onward.”

Entelis says Shalhoub's show is endearing in large part because he's never done something like this, coming off as a fish-out-of-water who reveals an open heart wherever he goes.

“You get somebody who’s really fresh and new to this kind of work but comes at it with a sort of deep love and passion for food and people and travel,” she says. “This is the Tony behind the actor and I feel we’re really getting a good understanding of that person.”

But there is one moment that may rankle some natives of his current hometown. During the New York episode, Shalhoub is lured across the river to Jersey City, where he is introduced to the “finest pizza in New York.”

The best New York pizza is in New Jersey? “I’m going to be going incognito now for probably the rest of my life,” he jokes.