I first became acquainted with Anthony Bourdain while flying Jet Blue between New York and Washington, DC. I was in college at the time and the recession had meant that the direct flight from Dublin to Washington had been cancelled, so now I had to travel via JFK. Jet Blue had (and presumably still has, not that I’ve checked) screens for every seat that played network TV broadcasts in flight. Usually there wasn’t much on, but while flicking through channels I would usually settle on the Travel Channel to watch this rude New Yorker get wildly inebriated in a series of gorgeous locales. The scene from this era that sticks with me the most is Bourdain getting tipsy in the early morning at a stall that sold a fortified beverage in Lisbon, Portugal. It was not the sort of travel programme I was used to seeing from my childhood.
When some of his shows, most notably his collaboration with CNN, Parts Unknown, were added to Netflix in Ireland I decided to become more acquainted with his work. I haven’t regretted that decision, I’ve had a lot of fun watching Bourdain over the years. I’m not a foody, not even slightly, so you would think that watching an elite chef talking about and eating all sorts of wild food wouldn’t appeal very much to me. We would both be wrong about that. Part of what I like about Bourdain is how he was great at linking the types of food you find in a country or region with the history of that place. While I may not care much about food, I do really like history. The other factor is that while I don’t have very adventurous tastes myself, I do think food is interesting and watching someone who knew what they were doing break down something I would never really understand was always fascinating. Plus, there’s some great shots of gorgeous buildings and countryside, and who doesn’t like that?
Despite watching quite a lot of his shows, I had never read one of Bourdain’s books until recently. My wife gave me a copy of A Cook’s Tour and after spending a little time on my to-read shelf I decided to pick it up to coincide with me finally watching the final episodes of Parts Unknown before it leaves Netflix here. I’ve never seen the series, also called A Cook’s Tour, that was made alongside the research Bourdain did for this book, which made the experience of reading it a little strange. It was a lot like reading a book where you know there’s a very famous film adaptation about it, except that periodically the book takes a break to complain about how miserable making that film was. It was a little surreal.
The premise of A Cook’s Tour, if we want to call it that, is the search for “the perfect meal”, but it is fairly explicitly an excuse for Bourdain to visit several countries and eat unusual food (sometimes willingly, sometimes less than willingly). It is filled with interesting meditations on nostalgia for our youth, the cuisine of various parts of the world, exhilaration at discovering entirely new flavours, disappointment at adventures not being all they were hoped for, and probably too much discussion of how much Bourdain liked smoking. In some ways reading it was like watching one of his shows but with the filter removed, but in other ways it was far more personal and intense, more than just a version of his show with more swearing and complaints about how annoying making television was.
Watching Anthony Bourdain isn’t the same as it once was. His tragic death reframes a lot of his work and makes it a much heavier experience than it used to be. The first time this really sunk in for me was in watching an episode of Parts Unknown when he visited Argentina and they have him visit a therapist, therapy being quite popular and normal in that country in ways it is not in America. This seemed like it was meant to be kind of funny, but in light of later events it was mostly harrowing and a sign of how much more Bourdain really needed help that he clearly wasn’t getting. The final season of Parts Unknown is not particularly long, but it is taking me a while to get through it as it can be quite a difficult watch. Most of the episodes are missing Bourdain’s tell-tale voiceover for obvious reasons, and it is jarring. That narration was so essential to what made his shows appealing and its absence is immediately obvious and a constant reminder of how that series ended and why it’s not there.
I used to watch Bourdain for light-hearted entertainment that could manage to be informative and empathetic as well as amusing. He was clearly an individual of great empathy, particularly for the downtrodden or those who have suffered at the hands of our mutual homeland. His visits to southeast Asia in particular do a great job of highlighting the horrors that America inflicted on numerous countries, including but not limited to Vietnam, for a wider American audience who may not have been aware of it. This is not to say that he was perfect, his flaws are readily apparent in A Cook’s Tour, but he was clearly trying to do his best and in many cases he succeeded. His perspective on the world was refreshing, welcoming, and valuable.
I don’t normally get invested in celebrity deaths. I don’t mean this as a humble brag, nor as a criticism of you if you do. I think it’s sad when I hear about it, but it doesn’t linger with me. That hasn’t been the case for Bourdain, for some reason I’m acutely aware of his passing and it still bothers me to a degree that I don’t entirely understand. Reading A Cook’s Tour was in some ways refreshing, it didn’t have the same grim spectre hanging over it like Parts Unknown does. This was a younger (but not young) Bourdain with years ahead of him. At the same time, some of the mental health troubles he clearly had are also present in A Cook’s Tour, and the knowledge that this would not improve in future years can be a bit bleak in its own right.
I enjoyed reading A Cook’s Tour. It’s very much a product of the late ‘90s (the book was originally published in 2001) and if you’re not familiar with the culture of the time parts of it may seem weird. There was at least one celebrity reference I didn’t catch, and I was alive and aware during that era. That said, as a glimpse into that time and at parts of the world as they existed then it’s really very interesting. Bourdain is also an excellent writer, something that I think most people knew even if we haven’t all actually seen it for ourselves. He first became famous for his writing after all. It’s not too flashy, but narratively gripping and often quite funny.
As I’m writing this, two excerpts from this book have been going viral on Twitter simultaneously – both takedowns of other famous figures. The first is his disparaging comments about British chef Jamie Oliver but the second, and far more famous example, is Bourdain’s scathing hatred for Henry Kissinger and what he did to Southeast Asia. That passage in particular reads just as intensely and hits just as hard now as it must have done when he first wrote it. It’s for passages like that, which combine his seething hatred with a deep empathy for the suffering of his fellow humans, that Bourdain is at his best and it’s passages like this that make it clear why he is so sorely missed.