Goodbye to No Reservations, but hello to what one can hope is just as great of a show, where Bourdain and his very talented behind-the-scenes crew still retain total creative control.
Hey, Travel Channel, if you’re looking for a replacement show, I have some great ideas - much, much better than your Hidden City or Ghost Adventures nonsense, I assure you. Call my people.
I know you like him (and I used to as well) but he has said some very classist and fatphobic things. It’s very disappointing to see someone as intelligent as Bourdain say things that really offend me.
Above are responses from two of my very favorite bloggers concerned about my affinity for Anthony Bourdain - and so I will answer to their, probably justified, questioning of my admiration.
As for the quotes on my blog, they are almost always directly from something I am reading at the time in which I post it. From my blog’s creation, I have always used it as a way to archive snippets from books, articles, and whatever else I am reading. I checked Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw out from the library a few weeks back, so naturally, that is why there have been an excess of his words on my site lately.
Bourdain himself is in the rare position of having had fame and fortune thrust upon him in his mid-40s and he did so by writing a entertaining as hell book about the “underbelly” of the cooking world, something I enjoyed even more having myself worked in a fine dining restaurant from the ages of 16 to 24 (and I still go back from time to time). I don’t think he is some genius nor do I think he is changing the world with his intellect. Rather, he is someone who is legitimately amazed by his own celebrity, who is well aware of his flaws as a human being (and is unapologetic about some of them, i.e. the drinking), and most importantly, he seems to really get my idea of what it is to live life - travel to new places, get away from the tourist traps and eat, drink, and meet people, my god, just meet people! And he does a great job of expressing in words his fascination with the world.
He’s not without his hypocrisies - though nor am I, far from it - and he has certainly said some offensive things over the past decade - of which I am also guilty - and this is part of his schtick (although he has played it down in recent years and apologized for much of it in Medium Raw). The comments he has made about obesity, while definitely having made me cringe at times, have mostly been related to his call for the food industry in America to revamp itself and make quality, healthy foods available and affordable… and by healthy, he doesn’t mean amp up broccoli production in America, but for our industries to stop exploiting while cutting corners with their products by needlessly processing them (often with ammonia as a cleanser) and filling them with poisonous trans fats and food additives. He wants, like many of us, accessible natural foods for all.
I get why people think the guy is a douche, because he can be - but even to those people, I would recommend his books, which I finished recently. He has his moments, but he’s much more self-aware and self-deprecating and much less self-righteous than one might think. I like the guy. Maybe it’s because he reminds me with a lot of the people I worked with over the years or because he’s the kind of guy I’d find myself hanging out and arguing with at my local dive bar. All I know is that even if I can’t defend him, I like him. And his shows: are there better produced travel shows out there? If so, I’m yet to find one.
In a perfect world, individuals would be free to take all the heroin they wanted – and stuff their faces with trans fats as much as they like – until it becomes a problem for their neighbors. Which it clearly has.
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Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw
I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able – if called upon to do so – to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world.
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Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw
Sweating through your shirt, resisting the urge to double over in pain, you begin to understand. Pain - followed by relief. Burn, followed by a pleasing, anesthetizing numbess. It’s like being spanked and licked at the same time. … At no point in your youthful misadventures would the offer of even playful discomfort have appealed … Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad. Pleasure was good. Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused.
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I have never really been able to explain why it is I subject myself to foods that cause physical pain. I’m talking burn-my-nostrils, make-me-cry pain. Why?
When I was eleven years old, I had my first extra sloppy, extra spicy chicken wing from a local pizza joint - mild by my current standards, but excruciatingly painful to a child who grew up in a salt and pepper only household. A friend of my older brother - Steven was his name, five years older yet never treating me like an inferior or annoyance as so many of my brother’s other friends did as I tried so desperately to butt my way into the teenage world - brought them over on a Friday night after a football game and asked if I was interested in having some. “They’re damn hot,” he warned me, and I did not hesitate to prove my worth, to show him that I was just as much of a hardass as the rest of them, scrawniness be damned. Those wings burnt - and I panted my way through eating a half dozen, sauce dripping from my fingers, my chin - but they burnt so good. I was captivated.
Soon, my teenage love affair with jalapeno, serrano, and habanero peppers took off. Exploring atomic and suicide sauces with mandatory waivers became a priority. Middle school lunch competitions to see who could bring in and eat the spiciest sauce without blinking or taking a drink became a weekly occurrence.
Nowadays, my more subdued adult self still has an addiction to adding ingredients which cause burning sensations and when asked, I have never really been able to explain it to friends and family. Reading Bourdain’s Medium Raw tonight, I think he did a damn fine job of explaining why it is those of us who love spicy foods enjoy it so much.
If there was any justice in this world, I would have been a dead man at least two times over. By this, I mean simply that many times in my life the statistical probabilities of a fatal outcome have been overwhelming – thanks to my sins of excess and poor judgment and my inability to say no to anything that sounded as if it might have been fun.
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Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
But I’m wising up.
If I were a reasonable man, a smart man, I would have retreated to my hotel long ago. But I am a flawed vessel. I carry within me, as so many do, the seeds of my own destruction. A Rumsfeldian delusional belief in my own infallibility.
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Anthony Bourdain, The Layover (Montreal)
Everything was different now. Everything. I’d not only survived - I’d enjoyed. This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents’ shudders, my little brother’s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life - the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation - would all stem from this moment.
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Anthony Bourdain on eating his first oyster as a child - from his memoir Kitchen Confidential.
Bourdain makes a damn good case for why pho is one of my very favorite dishes (food porn, indeed). The carefully prepared broth, the tender mix of meats, the extreme contrast of flavors… if you haven’t tried legitimate Vietnamese pho, you don’t know what you’re missing.
I think it’s a willingness to try anything with a smile, and whoever’s offering, to smile back at them and give it a shot, and also a willingness to make mistakes. Things go wrong. What’s the worst that can happen? That’s okay. I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it’s interesting.
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Anthony Bourdain on keeping an open mind when traveling.
When traveling, one can do it the way of the tourism guide (you know, coming back with those mundane stories that everyone dreads listening to) or the interesting and potentially life-altering way.
Take a wrong turn? Don’t drop the f-bomb. That only serves to make everyone else in the car cranky. So what? Go with it. Keep driving. Switch off that GPS. Go, damn it. The GPS will guide you back later. Pull over at the strangest looking restaurant in the area. Skip the club with the line and check out the dive next door. Talk to people - my god, talk to people. You go places to experience, not to have an exclusive conversation with your travel buddy about how the weather is so much different than back home. Let loose. Don’t worry - none of these people will ever see you again. Just experience it and save the regrets for the morning.
You’d have to make friends [to find that out-of-the-way place the locals go to], and you’d have to get to know somebody in the town. How do you do that? Drink. Drink recklessly. Make mistakes. … This is the distilled wisdom of many wheels gone wrong … But in fact, that little out-of-the-way place, that discovery is often the result of a happy mishap or an accident. You know, car breaks down, you get lost, you end up at some grotty little place that ends up being magical.
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Anthony Bourdain on how to find the right places to eat while traveling rather than the tourist traps.
Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.
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Anthony Bourdain
Here explains my own philosophy of food and travel. If you travel with me, expect to never set foot in a Subway or a Red Lobster. As far as I’m concerned, chain-eating travel is a crime. We will be in the dingy dive on the corner eating a greasy, bloody burger, the family-owned bayside restaurant eating fresh gumbo with their trademark roux, or the dim-lit corner off the main strip eating bizarre sushi creations. Eating is a communal experience - a moment of regional bonding for people who otherwise have little in common. There’s nothing like meeting new people over food you’re first enjoying.
Here’s what you need to know about life in general - any place that refuses to sell you a burger under medium temperature… is basically on the side of the terrorists.
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Anthony Bourdain, The Layover
If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them - wherever you go.
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Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
I'm a writer, teacher, and student in rural Pennsylvania. Sometimes I blog. This is my stream of consciousness - a self-serving archive of musings, music, food, snippets of what I've been reading, and whatever else captures my interest.
