Dine On, Bobbi
It’s been a sad year for fans of some local food legends. Writer and raconteur Larry “Fats” Goldberg, who covered the “junk food beat” on KMBZ 980 radio, died January 27. More recently Bobbi Marks, the stylish host of KCMO 710’s Dining with Bobbi, died of cancer on July 24.
Bobbi’s death was a shock. Only 66 years old, she’d always been vital and energetic. Her husband, John Saper, told me that until the day before her 65th birthday, she truly “had never been sick a day in her life.” Bobbi had been so passionate about food during her life that she was one of the first twenty people (Julia Child was among the others) to be certified by the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Like Goldberg, though, she had been unable to eat during the last months of her illness.
“But she stayed positive and smiling to the end,” Saper says, noting that even when her radio show was canceled, she started a new career leading international culinary tours.
Long before I met Bobbi, I would listen to her Saturday afternoon show with a mixture of admiration and cynicism; I always thought she was far too nice about certain restaurants. Still, she had a dulcet voice and was one of the first on-air personalities to suggest that diners stop whining and take some responsibility for their experience: “You mean you didn’t complain to the manager when the meat was still raw?” she gently chided one listener.
She wasn’t a critic, but on the air she was brilliant at being herself: a witty, smart lady with a passion for dining out. “And she was beautiful to look at, too,” says Walt Bodine, who often invited Bobbi — along with the Squire‘s Johanna Hall, the Star‘s John Martellero and me — to his “Food Critics Panel” radio shows in the 1990s. And where are Hall and Martellero now?
Martellero is now a consultant with the Corporate Communications Group, having left restaurant reviewing in 1997 after seven years. “It was a hoot while I did it, but I like going out to enjoy a meal and not having it be work,” he says. Hall hasn’t written a restaurant review in a decade. “Sometimes I miss it,” she says. “But I don’t miss having to come up with a new synonym for delicious or a tactful way of saying that something tasted really awful.”
But tactful was Bobbi’s middle name. We’ll miss her.
