Sashya K.

Dinner with Daniel: Aziz Ansari

“I always loved Tom Snyder’s chain-smoking, rambling, hour-long conversations with celebrities on his after-hours NBC Tomorrow show. Or when Larry King would show up and just talk and talk — sometimes clearly having no idea who he was even interviewing that night. The spirit of those shows may not succeed in today’s short-attention span, Internet-clip-friendly world, but that doesn’t mean they have to disappear into the cobwebs of YouTube, either. The idea behind “Dinner With Daniel” was simple: Daniel (that’s me) has a rambling, rollicking, no-road-map conversation with a celebrity. We drink as much good wine as we can, talk about food and life, and see where the conversation takes us. My first (and hopefully not last) guest: Parks and Recreation star Aziz Ansari, who just released a well-received comedy special on the interwebs. Here’s how our dinner played out.

“DUDE, WHY THE FUCK ARE THESE PLACES CLOSED SUNDAY!!!!???”

If you go to Aziz Ansari’s Twitter feed, you will see picture after picture of food: platters of cookies, meatballs, rigatoni, doughnut holes, ribs and sausage, together, in gravy. Aziz really likes food. A lot. So I probably could’ve guessed his e-mailed response after I told him his two choices for dinner (Michael Voltaggio’s Ink and Wolfgang Puck’s steakhouse, Cut) are both closed.”

This is going down as one of my favourite interviews ever. Everything about it is so great: Daniel Kellison talking about missing long rambling interviews of the past, Aziz being a total foodie without sounding even remotely pretentious, the comedic tone and the jokes, the awesome anecdotes from both interviewer and interviewee and really the whole feel that this is just a published conversation between two people becoming friends.

My take on celebrity interviews is that by the end of it, the reader should know just how human the interviewee is. The conclusion I came to about Aziz is that he really is just a normal guy who lives in a celebrity world, is in awe of it and seriously taking the time to enjoy it without being self-conscious. I got the feeling he hasn’t truly accepted his stardom and celebrity or maybe just not yet.

I love the style and feel of looooong interviews like this and it’s a shame we don’t see more. I blame the majority of people with short attention spans. I really do. You all ruin it for the rest of us. -_- 

ANYWAY, read this interview!!! It’s really awesome and for the foodies, you won’t be disappointed. :)