“If we don’t talk about someone’s criminal backstory then we’re just a cooking school and who gives a shit?” Mike Curtin doesn’t sugarcoat things. The CEO of DC Central Kitchen sat down with me for breakfast at Unconventional Diner in December 2018, just weeks before the organization marked its 30th anniversary.
Throughout the 114th meal with a stranger, he was equally direct about everything from the politics of holiday charity to why feeding people alone will never end hunger.
Founded on surplus food from a presidential inauguration, Central Kitchen had operated every single day for two decades until Barack Obama’s swearing-in forced its only closure. Mike’s own path to running it wound through Japan, a hotel favored by Bill Clinton, a restaurant where the owners were secretly funding competing drug habits, and a Thanksgiving turkey crisis that changed how the organization thought about itself.