The Anthony Bourdain thread

Crapulence.

Something about it really struck me, it exactly described the pleasure I get out of spending a Sunday making stock, or braising a beef dish, or, like last week, spending the day making pork tamales. Just a little paragraph summed up everything I love about cooking.

And his Food Network rant sums it up pretty well. Hooray for PBS.

I love the bit where he rants about how if you can't roast a chicken, you have to just pack it in. Cooking is not for you.

I only just now got around to reading The Nasty Bits and his essay how raw food adherents who fear "toxins" and "impurities" are interchangeable with xenophobic tourists who fear anything served outside the hotel restaurant because it might be "dirty" or "ooky" was so OTM that I blurted out "OTM!" when I read it.

I felt the same about the "Bottoming Out" essay abt junkies & downward spirals, but that could be because a friend of a friend had attempted suicide like two days before. Gah.

I just went and bought this, didn't even know it existed.

There was some giveaway that Tep found out about last year -- I got my copy for free!

The Portland/Seattle No Reservations is great, my favorite of the series so far.

cleveland with mawky ramone and harv pekar on this monday

it's a repeat, it was pretty fun.

I like the Portland/Seattle one lots, but he doesn't quite capture the spirit of the latter the way I see it. The geoduck-digging location is great, but the only really Seattle-proper-feeling part of it for me is when he's walking along those Capitol Hill-looking houses en route to the private dinner.

Sorta the same with the Cleveland one - I think it's great, but I dunno how I'd feel if I were from there.

heck, I was dissapointed with the NY one. It needed more queens/brooklyn love, not to mention bronx/staten island. Glad the went to the Red Hook Ballfields and Kebab Cafe, but a NY episode and no Difaras Pizza? I don't like the need to be a "travel" show and do stuff like spend 10 minutes of him doing circus acrobatics. More food please.

I don't like the need to be a "travel" show and do stuff like spend 10 minutes of him doing circus acrobatics. More food please.

I suspect that since the show is on the Travel Channel, that there's some impetus to keep it away from being all 100% food. The LA show was the same... 15 minutes of him hanging around roller girls and the cops, blah blah blah

Anyone see the ep where he almost broke his neck on the ATV?

i don't have a problem with the skip-the-sights-and-look-for-the-soul approach, but I think the result is usually better when he lets locals do the looking for him

I think there were a fair number of complaints in A Cook's Tour about the bs he has had to put up with while filming the show. That and details about all the off-air stuff they couldn't show.

this guy is corny as hell, but i think his overall attitude to food and life and other parts of the world is pretty good. and my older brother is way into him.

as a food/travel show guy i'd put him ahead of andrew zimmern and even with mark bittman

That Bizarre Foods show (the Andrew Zimmern one) is horrible, though! For all of Bourdain's faux-spiritual dialog and going on about respecting local culture, Zimmern has this annoying-as-hell thing where you're supposed to think "OMG HE'S CRAZY TO EAT THAT" every episode! It's like taking the sideshow from Bourdain's show, that some foods are going to be kind of weird to western eyes, and making a whole half hour out of showboating it.

zimmerman sucks.

actually i think zimmern isn't all that googly-eyed zany about all the wierd shit he eats. he's pretty respectful, actually! considering yeah it's basically an engrish gross-out show. but as a host i don't like him much, a little too dorky.

He's respectful, but that doesn't mean that he escapes the show's premise!

china episodes are the best. hong kong is perfect and the beijing/chengdu and shanghai/yunnan. and japan episodes, back to a cook's tour and the weird rural cambodia/tokyo half-half one. singapore's cool. a cook's tour is always tight, no lameshit immunity challenge filler shit with roller derby and skeet shooting, fuck that shit, but sometimes too tight, none of the 10 minutes in a beijing sheep guts restaurant segments that i like. and the dude on a cook's tour is less tanned and weathered and professional and more naive and genuinely excited about shit, "oh fuck i'm eating a bento box on a bullet train."

i really liked those gaucho dudes in argentinia

i hate zimmerwhatever. i've only seen a couple of episodes, but i found it pretty meanspirited not to mention tame. so you tried a bite of guinea pig - big whoop.

see that's the thing, the SHOW is like that by design, but i get the feeling that ZIMM doesn't feel or act that way. i think he really is goofily excited and interested in grub worms and snake pancreas or whatever -- but still, i don't like him much, for other reasons

zimm = kid on the playground who would eat worms

also chaki otm re: gauchos, I want to go to Argentina even more now

he went to Patagonia right? I need to see that one.

the bit where bourdain got a real-deal tribal tattoo and had this amazing looking chicken way up in the hills in malaysia (i think?) elicited a complicated you are a douchebag/wow that's beautiful reaction from me.

The Tuscany episode was pretty awe inspiring too.

lauren Zimmern eats much crazier shit than guinnea pig. The fried bat was pretty nasty, for starters.

I like him, I think he's goof and fun, but after seeing a few episodes, it's just not that interesting. Once you've seen him eat every kind of bug there's not much left.

tonight's Bourdain repeat in Uzbekistan was ok, had some fun stuff in it, I'm guessing the food isn't all that great because they spent about 5 minutes eating!

Roffles -- the actual post is here but is being swamped, so:

Just got back from seeing Anthony Bourdain in in the city, and it was an absolute treat. He is every bit as much fun as you would imagine him to be. Lots of good and useful stuff in the talk, but two stick in my mind:

1. Truffle oil is the ketchup of the newly affluent.
2. To find good places to eat, provoke the nerds.

#2 showed a remarkably precise understanding of the internet. The question at hand was how to find good restaurants, and his answer was to take the city you want to go to and just google up some restaurant names that serve the dish you’re after. Then got to chowhound or another foodie site, and rather than asking about restaurants, you put up an enthusiastic post talking about how you just had the best whatever you’re looking for at one of these restaurants.

At that point, what drivingblind likes to call the nerdfury will begin. Posters will show up from nowhere to shower you with disdain, tell you how that place used to be good but has now totally sold out and – most important to your quest – will tell you where you would have gone if you were not some sort of mouth breathing water buffalo.

(Actual post's title: "Hunting Vegetarians with Ted Nugent")

Bourdain is a troll! I knew it!

Confirms everything I love about AB, and more.

Christmas special had some rough spots - too much forced humor, QOTSA cameo, yawn. And I could have done without the foie gras apologism - instead of justifying what is clearly unnatural and bizarre, just say "yeah, it's unnatural and bizarre, but a million times better than your average chicken farm..."

Food looked really good, tho.

the show has gotten a little old for me - I've seen the movie a few times now - but it's still capable of doing something rare - that NoLA episode is maybe the best thing about the post-hurricane city I've seen

The show in Iceland is still one of the greatest food shows I've ever seen.

New one tonight: Saudi Arabia.
Haven't watched all the Colombian one yet, but liked what I saw.

crew blog: http://no-reservations-crew-blog.travelchannel.com/2008/07/under-the-abbaya-female-produc.html

this is a great show to tivo up and just have some eps kicking around for like hangover sunday watching.

wow, he really outdid himself on this Tokyo ep

Bourdain bank

Mexico ep was good.

I am super-psyched: apparently he's going (or has gone?) to Ethiopia for an upcoming episode.

I like his persona on this show, if only because I think he's one of very few presenter types on TV who is recognizable as an actual human. There's a palpable personality there, and on balance I think it's a charming one: he seems smart, he can be serious-minded at times, he's endearingly grumpy, he does/says things that are lame and embarrassing enough to seem like an actual person, etc. (Is this just because he writes his own narration? Is that why actual personality seems to be there?) Unlike some people upthread, I don't get a huge macho or tough-guy vibe out of him, though I can see something that could be mistaken for that.

Seriously, really psyched for any forthcoming Ethiopia episode.