Alton Brown’s New Variety Show Will Be His Last — and Then He Plans to ‘Disappear for a Little While’

Alton Brown is getting ready to hang up his spatula.

The Good Eats star will launch his tour Alton Brown Live: Last Bite on Feb. 13, PEOPLE can reveal exclusively. The 60-city variety show will be his fourth and final one.

“This will be my last big road show,” says Brown, 62, who has been combining educational culinary content with science on stage and screen since 1999. “It’s too long away from home. It’s too hard on my family.”

Brown lives in Atlanta with his wife, interior designer Elizabeth Ingram, and their three dogs. (He also shares an adult daughter Zoey, 24, with his ex wife, DeAnna Brown.)

Ingram toured with him last time as part of his band but her busy career means she will only be joining the occasional stop while he travels the country. “Being away from my family for 10 weeks is, ah. I don’t really want to do that,” says Brown.

He keeps most of the details of his show under-wraps so it remains a surprise to the audience, but Last Bite will share “the same format” as past shows, he says. There will be live music, a multifaceted monologue, and a “very large, very unusual culinary demonstration.” His usual campy costumes, history lessons and pop-culture puns will all be there, too.

Alton Brown Announces His Last Variety Show Tour — Alton Brown.Shayan Asgharnia

“I will tempt [readers] with a tidbit that the entire second act of the show concerns the great hero of the Industrial Revolution, steam, and a food that in America would not have existed were it not for the Industrial Revolution and the aforementioned source of power steam, which is of course can be used both for cooking and also for moving large things,” he teases.

Brown will also release his tenth book Food for Thought,, a collection of essays, in February. And following that launch — and his final performance for Last Bite in May — Brown says he will likely step back from the spotlight.

“I’m 62 and I’ve always said that the secret to being a good guest at a cocktail party is knowing when to leave — and it may be time for me to leave,” he says. “After the tour, I’ll take a break maybe and disappear for a little while and see if the world misses me. If it doesn’t, oh, well, I had a good run.”

Just don’t call it a retirement.

“I’m a worker bee. I am going to make honey until I drop dead outside the hive one day,” he says. “But I do think that especially for people in media, that there’s a time to shut up and be still for a minute and reassess. I’m not so desperate to be in the public eye that I feel that I’ve just got to keep doing something. I could just go off someplace and make small batch brandy or something.”

“I don’t know. I’m not done, but I’m not a hundred percent sure that I’m not semi-done.”

Alton Brown with his wife Elizabeth Ingram. Paul Costello

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For now, Brown will give Last Bite his all. He’s started four months of strength training and dieting to prepare for the “physical rigors of travel.”

“If something happens to me, that’s the show. There’s no fill-in. There’s no, ‘the role of Alton tonight will be played by Brad Pitt,’” he quips.

His viewers, who first took notice during his run of hosting Good Eats and Iron Chef America on Food Network, continue to grow as he takes on new projects. His interactive performances, he says, have attracted a new, younger generation of fans who were turned on to his shows by their parents.

“You’ll look out and you’ll see a family of maybe six where there might be grandparents and the parents and the kids, and they can all enjoy it together at the same time. I’m proud of that,” says Brown. “Being able to get a bunch of people together in a big room and make them happy for a couple of hours is an absolute privilege. It’s the thrill of a lifetime for me.”

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