About: Michael Procopio
Website: http://michaelprocopio.wordpress.com/
Profile: I write a weekly food column for Bay Area Bites at KQED.org. This is simply a place for me to let my hair down, slip off that girdle and let it all hang out, so to speak. I’ve involved myself with food– in one way or another– since moving to San Francisco in 1995 to attend the California Culinary Academy, where I learned not so much how to cook, but how to argue with administrators and drink an impressive amount of martinis. After school, I worked as a kitchen slave on the PBS cooking shows of Martin Yan, Molly Katzen, and Jacques Pepin. Needing a more stable income, I turned into a pastry guy at a cute little Kiwi restaurant in the Mission, but couldn’t pay my rent, so I moved to the front of the house. From there, I went to a charming little Italian restaurant which has since lost its littleness and most of its charmingness. Today, I ply my trade for the Greeks, where I get to exhort skinny people to eat, because it looks like their mothers didn’t feed them enough. When not waiting tables, I’ve had the pleasure of doing things like making instant oatmeal for hours on end in a high school gymnasium while a six year old boy tried to get just the right color on two words for a Quaker Oats commercial, nearly going blind under flourescent lighting making two pounds of miniature palmiers by hand for another cereal company at the Center for Culinary Development, and making myself sick on chow fun while assisting a review on Asian noodles for the San Francisco Chronicle, where I interned many years ago and did nothing breakfast cereal-related. And now I get to write about whatever the hell I want, which suits me just fine.