From Hollywood to the Kitchen: Mitchell Anderson

Before opening the popular MetroFresh restaurants in Atlanta, Georgia, Mitchell Anderson was known for his Hollywood career playing in TV shows and films like Party of Five, Doogie Howser, M.D., and Jaws: The Revenge. Most recently, he was nominated for an Emmy Award for his role in the Amazon Prime series After Forever.

When not in front of the camera, Anderson has found great success in the kitchen. He founded MetroFresh with the notion that fresh, healthy, and creative food should not be out of reach for the casual diner, and he hoped to create a friendly oasis where guests can take a break from their hectic lives. With a daily menu of soups, salads, and sandwiches, MetroFresh uses the freshest ingredients to build unexpected flavor combinations one won’t often find at a fast-casual café.

Yes, Anderson has lived an extraordinary life, and during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was doing what many of us were—reflecting. As a sort of therapy, he began writing, and soon had the concept and content for a one-man show. Titled You Better Call Your Mother. The production will have a limited run at Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre, and audiences are invited to witness this collection of monologues and songs that examines Anderson’s journey and how, in the end, he discovered the only way to a full, happy, and productive life, was to claim and celebrate all of who he is.

OFM caught up with Anderson to talk more about the production, how he began his acting career in a homophobic and closeted Hollywood, his passion for cooking, and the evolution of MetroFresh.

What inspired you to write You Better Call Your Mother?
I just crossed over into my sixth decade. My 60th birthday was in August, and going into my 60th year, I really thought about it in December of last year that I wanted to have a New Year’s resolution and challenge myself in a way that I hadn’t in a long time. It would also give me something to do that wasn’t restaurant related. The last 16 years have been incredibly filled with what I do for my career now, but I had a chance to go back and sort of dabble in my prior career.

I do have After Forever and I will do a play or performance here and there, I have that going as well, but I wanted to challenge myself and write a show. I thought it was going to be a cabaret, but it has turned out to be a little show about how I went through Hollywood coming to terms with my own sexuality in the middle of the AIDS crisis and trying to create and establish a career as an actor in a very homophobic and closeted world. At the same time, politically, we had an imperative to come out, and it was only after I came out in public that I felt like I was able to begin living my life. That’s what the show is about.

The title refers to when I came out at the GLAAD Awards in 1996, I did it sort of as a spontaneous act because somebody had asked me, “What’s it like to play gay character when you’re straight?’ My character on Party of Five was gay. This man tapped me on the shoulder after I walked off stage and said, ‘you better call your mother.” An actor coming out at a big award show at that time was sort of big news. I had already come out to my parents, many, many years earlier, but it was a different level of coming out at that point.

The show has a very limited run. What are your plans for it afterwards?
I own a business, and I own two restaurants, so I can’t really think of it as, there will be a life for You Better Call Your Mother afterwards. If it happens somewhere down the line where somebody wants to mount it as a production and I had time to do it, that would be great. My goal for this new year’s resolution was to get it up on its feet and have people see it, but I can’t imagine what will happen afterwards. Who knows?

How challenging was it for you to start your professional career as an actor while the AIDS crisis was raging in a very homophobic and closeted Hollywood?
It wasn’t possible. In the play, I talk about my partner at the time, who I was with for 12 years and was 12 years older than me. We got together in 1985, and he did not have a lot of patience with me being in the closet, even as an actor. He pushed and pushed and pushed, but on the other hand, I was watching my friends die. I knew that to save ourselves, we really did have to come out. I say in the show, “Silence really did equal death in those days, but I was also trying to establish myself as a viable actor in the difficult, closeted, and homophobic world of show business.”

At that time, you could sort of live your life, but you do press. If you are in a certain situation that you want to be in, you want to be asked to be on a talk show, you want to be asked to be in a magazine, you want your picture taken, and you want them to ask you questions, but part of what they want to ask you is about your life and who you are. If you have to hide that part of yourself, it is very complicated. At that time, they pretty much said, we don’t mind if you’re gay. We’ll still hire you, but don’t tell anybody about it, and certainly don’t celebrate it because we won’t be able to fit you into the mold that we need you to be in.

Out of all your acting credits, is your role in Jaws: The Revenge the one you get asked about the most?
[Laughs] I’ll tell you, it’s certainly the one that pays the most. When I get fan mail, there are still a lot of people asking me to sign production stills of Jaws: The Revenge.

In spring 2022, you are slated to film the third season of After Forever. What can audiences expect?
It’s the third and final season, and there’s a lot of resolution happening. My character has been hanging around his husband, even though I’m dead, kind of haunting him in a way and making him not be himself. In the third season, you will find out more about how they lived as a couple and how it was a real relationship. It wasn’t a romanticized relationship. The first season was very raw. After the death of your husband, all memory is romanticized. Then as time goes on, those memories become more and more real, and they go, oh, life is life. I have been with my real-life partner Richie for 24 years. Overall, it has been an amazing time, but if you look back, there are ups and downs. So, you will see more of that real conflict and resolution in the third season.

You are also an accomplished chef and the owner of Atlanta’s MetroFresh restaurants. Have you always had a passion for cooking as well?
I have. I come from a family that loves to cook. We have a big family, and when we were grown up, home from college, and after college, for entertainment, we cooked. At breakfast, we would talk about what we were going to have for lunch, and at lunch, we were talking about what we were going to have for dinner. My examples of cooking came from that. My mom was a very serviceable, good cook, but she loved fresh vegetables. When corn was in season, we had it every night. When we could get fresh beets out of the ground, we washed them and put them in the pot. Those are my tastes and my childhood.

When I found an incredible mentor, a woman in Atlanta named Jennifer Levison, who has an incredible restaurant called Souper Jenny, she taught me an approach to food that I responded to. It is very improvisational and of the moment. Soups and salads are incredible that you can just pull in anything. For instance, Thanksgiving is coming up, I created this salad that has chicken, butternut squash, some Italian sausage, a little bit of rosemary, celery, a little bit of onion, and a great maple orange vinaigrette. I call it the Thanksgiving preview salad. It’s those kinds of things that I love and get super inspired by.

So, you have always been about the fresh and farm-to-table concept?
One hundred percent, yes. I believe you can eat pretty much anything if it’s not processed [laughs]. If it’s whole and real, and you pull things together that are ingredients, it’s better than just dumping soup from a bag into a pot.

What are some top selling dishes MetroFresh offers?
We do soups and salads, that’s what we are known for. Our top seller, by far, is a turkey chili that I created when I first opened. We call it Mitchili, after my name, and in 2020, it was a Weight Watchers favorite by Oprah’s 2020 Vision Tour, which was super fun. That was a neat thing. On the breakfast side, we do some incredibly healthy stuff, but we also have smoked gouda grits, which people come from miles and miles to have. Now that we are getting into wintertime, we will have stews and chowders, and we do really good creative stuff.

Stay up-to-date with Anderson and MetroFresh by visiting the restaurant’s official website. You Better Call Your Mother will run November 4 through 7, and tickets can be purchased through the Synchronicity Theatre’s website.

Photos Courtesy of Richie Arpino