Nick Paine
was born 44 years ago in California, the son of two French Canadian families with an ancestry imbedded in Canada's pioneer history. Paine passionately pursued a life in the L.A. entertainment industry for 25 years, building a rich career in music and television.

But in the mid-1990's, Nick traded the comforts of his profession for adventure into the unknown. Paine undertook several grueling international expeditions, discovering his love for the exotic people and igniting a burning passion to investigate the mysterious culinary traditions that exist beyond the Western world.

In a new field he terms "Culinary Archeology," Nick found that the best way to preserve and document the world's exotic recipes was to film them "live" in the field. Paine has distilled his videotaped adventures into a multi-part series called "Nick Paine's Exotic Kitchen."

Four expeditions on three continents have only deepened Paine's appetite for the world's curious culinary offerings. Paine is a member of the Culinary Historians of Southern California, and his efforts compel us all to appreciate the fascinating variety and universality of culinary innovation.

Through insight, ingenuity, and intense physical training, Nick Paine developed a way of filming himself as a compelling personal presence in exotic circumstances. Paine fixes a video camera to a pole, the pole to his body, and thereby videotapes himself in the center of his untamed surroundings. 

Although he usually makes his journeys completely alone, Paine's camera innovations allow him to feature himself living, working, and eating alongside his tribal hosts, as a participant, not an observer. Paine's careful editing and dramatic descriptions - often delivered in the field - make his images of faraway lands vividly real, full of immediacy, fascination, and danger.

This innovative series allows the viewer to accompany Nick on his impulsive yet very personal explorations to a multitude of exotic locations around the world. For Paine, the adventures have led to dramatic personal discoveries. In 1997, he was stunned to find a remarkable coincidence in some Spanish Amazon documents that were only accidentally discovered: a pioneering Franciscan missionary, Father Leoncio Panneton, who indoctrinated many of the tribes Paine filmed, turned out to be one of Paine's Canadian ancestors.

"To find I am bound by blood is now the unquestionable validation of my allure to this region. My focus is to provide the viewer with a worldwide itinerary of cultural cooking, linking the collectivity of all people to common food shared by all."

Nick Paine's Exotic Kitchen is the thread that documents for future generations all the world's cooking techniques and the genealogy of culinary history...