He came to share some practical wisdom about tasty, healthy eating. They came to see a reality TV star, to sample some tacos — and, in some cases, to flirt.

Sage Health, a healthcare provider focusing on seniors, brought Mississippi chef Nick Wallace to its midtown Mobile clinic Wednesday for a “Cooking with Sage” demonstration offering to teach seniors “how to cook with fresh, healthy ingredients, health-conscious shopping tips, and healthy eating habits.” And if that seems a little dry, Wallace brought not just the energy he’s shown on “Chopped,” “Top Chef” and other shows, but a very practical approach to cooking flavorful meals from healthy ingredients.

Wallace said his mission was “really just to let you know how approachable food is.”

“Just because you have to eat healthy, honestly, it doesn’t have to be bland,” he said. “It should be full of flavor, it should be very exciting. It should give you everything that you remember from your childhood and everything. It should be almost like a rooted lifestyle, is kind of how I see it. I was fortunate enough to grow up on a farm and I was raised by Ms. Lennel Donald, and Ms. Lennel Donald showed me how to respect nature.”

Wallace talked a lot about relatives, including Donald and his other grandmother, Queen Morris. He also used them in questions in an informal trivia contest he ran off-and-on during the session, which is where the flirting came in: When he interrogated one silver-haired attendee, she said she’d missed the name because she’d been captivated by Wallace’s eyes.

Amid the playfulness, Wallace delivered a full pantry of information: He demonstrated how to make a tortilla from scratch and his preferred way of slicing a bell pepper without making a mess. He talked about being thrifty with unused fruit and vegetable scraps, pickling them for later use or using them to flavor vinegars. He talked about portion control and about putting vegetables first. He told people to “go to the farmers market,” and that local Alabama honey was a good as any from other regions.

“We made a little bit of everything in house and it was all about slow food,” he said of his upbringing. “But you should think about all those other things that you see at the farmers market, and always use your vegetation to be that front focus of how you eat. Let the protein and all be last. Focus on your sides and your sides should be about vegetables.”

While he cooked one or two tacos, his backstage staff was cooking and serving scores of them to the crowd of more than 125 people filling a tent set up in Sage’s parking lot at Catherine and Government streets. The street-style tacos included some things you’d expect (onion, tomato) and some you wouldn’t (beets, crushed tortilla chips). They were bursting with color and flavor and probably would have been delicious even without the brisket, but they had that too.

As they ate, Wallace made plenty of time to circulate through the audience and take questions. Dr. Vicki Baldwin, Sage’s Gulf Coast Market Medical Director, said organizers were thrilled by the level of interaction.

“He actually embraces our philosophy of the whole person and the wellness [aspect] of how to take care of the patient,” she said. “Not only us as physicians, but we take care of them in their home, their cooking, they come here for yoga, they come here for, you know, Bingo is probably one of the most popular things that they do here. But we like to take care of the person. The one thing that I’ve learned is if we can get them connected to their community, they do better.”

Baldwin estimated that about half the audience were clients of Sage Health, and the rest had heard about the event from word of mouth or other means.