Anthony Bourdain

“…WHISPERING, COME FIND OUT”

“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”

“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence—but more generally takes the form of apathy.”

-Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”
 

It is the most relentlessly fucked over nation in the world, yet it has long been my dream to see the Congo. And for my sins, I got my wish.

No show I’ve ever made has been more difficult, more frustrating, more uncertain, maddening or dangerous. It is a country, a subject so large, so complicated as to defy explanation—or any summing up in a sentence, a volume, an hour of television—or even ten hours of television.

Occupying an ungovernable mass of land the size of all Western Europe combined, the Democratic Republic of the Congo should be the richest country in Africa. It possesses the equivalent of trillions of dollars in resources: diamonds, gold, coltan (which the whole world requires for cell phones), minerals, timber, probably oil, uranium and hydroelectric power. In short, it has everything that the first world needs and desires. This is its curse.

But from before its beginnings, it has been ravaged by greed. Stripped of its population by Arab and Portuguese slavers, its tribal societies devastated. Handed outright to Belgium’s King Leopold for his personal exploitation, nearly half its population were worked to death, whipped, dismembered, executed outright or sent running into the bush to die of starvation and disease in a pitiless quest for first ivory and then rubber. The Belgians who followed left behind a deliberately uneducated governing class and a few sergeants. The Congolese people then made the very untimely tactical mistake of democratically electing a socialist president in the midst of the nuclear arms race between East and West.

The CIA and MI-6 conspired to assassinate him (whether they succeeded directly is open to debate. What certainly very clear is that he was killed), eventually installing in his place Joseph Mobutu, a man of spectacular rapaciousness, brutality and megalomania. At one point, having looted the country of billions—and having allowed what infrastructure remained to largely rot into the forest, Mobutu’s army complained of not being paid. The President-for Life’s response was to point out that they had guns, and to suggest that they take what they needed from the already desperate population. This is an attitude that prevails today.

War in Rwanda, next door, left the Congo with hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them genocidal Hutus, living within its borders—and a neighboring Tutsi government uninclined towards either sympathy or good behavior (as Mobutu had been a staunch supporter of the Hutu—who had enthusiastically slaughtered up to 800,000 of their Tutsi neighbors in a period of only a few short weeks). Ensuing Civil Wars have cost the country millions of lives.

At the time my crew and I drove across the border into Goma, there were nearly 30 different rebel groups and militias—many of them aligned with the Congo’s neighboring countries—fighting it out across the country. One of them, M-23, were fighting amongst themselves only ten miles away. The federal troops, the official armed forces of the Congo, the FARDC were said to be on their way—an outcome generally considered to be a worst case scenario as they are widely regarded as professionals at the business of extortion, murder, mass rape and robbery—rather than simply amateurs. We were, during our shoot, extremely fortunate. Relative to most, we had a luxuriously unmolested, violence free time of it. We were extorted, detained, threatened daily. But such is life in the Congo. 
The Congo is a place where everything is fine—until it isn’t.

And yet, there they were: the Congolese people themselves. Fighting to get by. To feed themselves. To keep themselves clean—and proud in the middle of circumstances of almost unimaginable difficulty and the constant threat of near psychedelic violence and instability.

Across the river from Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (present day Kisangani), we visited the train station, a transportation hub for a system that once extended all the way to the Southern tip of the continent. At one point, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Katherine Hepburn would have seen it from their windows at the “Pourquoi Pas” Hotel where they stayed during the shooting of “The African Queen”. The hotel is now a shambolic squat, devoid, as most of Kisangani, of plumbing or electricity.The station is now a ruin. The tracks overgrown with grass and weeds. The magnificent engines and passenger cars sit rusting under bullet-pocked roofs.

But a skeleton staff of railroad employees, unpaid for who knows how long, put on their jackets and ties, their coveralls, and show up to work every day. They fill out their paperwork, grease wheels, hammer at metal, do their best to maintain locomotives, which haven’t run in decades and almost certainly will never run again. They are proud of what they do.

At the remote Yangambi Research Center, a hundred kilometers downriver, the chief librarian and his clerks also show up to work every day at the powerless library, the showpiece of a once massive complex of modernist buildings—now without electricity or running water of course—and do their best to fight the ravages of moisture, mold and age on the thousands of volumes of botanical and agricultural knowledge. They too are proud, and living in some kind of hope. Waiting for something.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the Congo is “too black and too sad” and certainly too complicated—to ever attract the attention of the world, much less television audiences.

Yet it is also magnificently beautiful.
It is—gorgeously—like “going back to the earliest beginnings of the world”, and just as gorgeously (if tragically) post-apocalyptic; whole cities, once grand hotels, lovely buildings, a whole society (albeit a cruel, exclusive and oppressive one) receding into nature.

On the way downriver, we stopped all too briefly at a village to visit the chief of a once mighty tribe. He appeared at the riverbank resplendent in a suit, wearing a medal given to him by the Belgians. We said hello, gave him a goat as our best available form of tribute and respect. He gave me a simple, hand hammered bracelet of copper.

It was only later, miles down river that I was told what the bracelet was. It had been given to the chief by his father—sometime in the ‘30’s. Passed down, as bracelets of this kind were, from generation to generation. A tradition going back to the earliest Arab slavers and traders, who had, it is said, taught the tribe how to make, and craft these things.

This thing in my hand went back a long time. Represented something far more significant than I’d realized. It was an old thing. Very old. It dated back a long time. To when the big trees were kings.

THE WAGES OF CACAO

There are a lot of very good reasons to go to Peru.

On a previous trip, I bounced around Lima, exploring the ever-changing, ever more exciting food scene—from the more cutting edge fine dining restaurants, to the funkiest but most delicious traditional cevicherias. I’ve had many Pisco sours, huffed up mountains, light-headed from altitude sickness, my cheeks stuffed with coca leaves. I’ve eaten guinea pig in Cuzco. Explored the jungle of Amazonia. Drank chicha with yucca farmers. I took ayahuasca in the middle of the night with a curandero, putted up river in a wobbly boat with imaginary bats screeching in my brain, lights that probably weren’t there dancing in front of my eyes. I have looked out over Machu Picchu at dawn—one of the most extraordinary experiences one can have in this life, watched millions of cutter ants strip a forest floor clean, made friends, learned something about the world and about myself.

So, I didn’t really need a reason to go back. But this time, I had a good one.

About a year ago, my good friend, Eric Ripert, the chef of the most excellent restaurant Le Bernardin in New York City told me he had recently tasted the “best chocolate in the world” and inquired if I would be interested in getting involved in a probably foolhardy venture into the high-end chocolate business.

There were these beans, he went on to say, high in a valley in a mountain range, somewhere in Peru—cacao beans from wild trees, and recently, when their DNA was tested, they were found to be of a variety long thought to be almost extinct in their pure, non-hybrid form. Even more tantalizing—at an even more remote location, were an even more rare all-white variety. He’d been to see them, and his stories of high jungle adventure coupled with delicious, delicious chocolate were… enticing.

Eric, as I knew well, LIKES chocolate. And as one of the best, most decorated, celebrated chefs in the world, he’s had a lot of it. Guys like Eric? A lot of very fine wines come their way. Expensive ingredients like truffles, caviar, very old Cognacs. It’s not just his business to know what the good stuff is: the good stuff finds him. What I’m saying is: the guy knows his chocolate. So when he tells me that this Pure Nacional shit from some little town in a remote mountain valley in Peru is the best he’s ever had? I’m interested.

We eventually come up with mix of chocolate and nibs in bar form and next thing you know? I’m in the chocolate biz.

Thing is: it’s a very boutique-y, very high end, screamingly expensive end of the biz. One of the only 7000 bars we were able to produce (the whole year’s supply sold off in just a few months) cost the nosebleed price of 18 DOLLARS. Even reflecting the remote location, the rarity of the raw ingredient, the long trip from the mountains to the city to Switzerland and then to the States—the whole artisanal process… that’s still a fuck of a lot of money for a chocolate bar.

So, here’s what I wanted to know:

Was I doing a good thing? Is it OKAY to be in the chocolate business? I don’t have any problem with wealthy people who can afford making impulse buys in expensive gourmet shops spending a lot of money on my chocolate. But where does the money go? In fact… where does this chocolate come from, anyway? Just about everybody loves the stuff. It’s everywhere. A fundamental element of gastronomy. But I knew so little about it. Where does it come from? How is it made? Most importantly: WHO does it come from? And are they getting a good piece of the action? Or, are the producers, as in so many cases, getting screwed over? I very much hoped to find that whoever was growing our cacao was, at the end of the day, happy about the enterprise—that life AFTER Eric and Tony’s Excellent Chocolate Adventure was, on balance, better than life before.

I decided to find out.

So I invited Eric to take me back to Peru, up into the mountains, to follow the cacao trail all the way back to source. There would be, as I was soon to find out, quite a journey ahead of me: many miles of bad road, vigilantes to pay tribute to, swollen rivers to cross, the kind of mud that swallows whole trucks, shamans to get right with, planes, bridges, boats and ferries—long hikes up steep, slippery slopes into the forest before we’d find our trees, hack open a few pods and see what it was all about.

It turned out to be a great adventure.

Were all my questions about the morality of the luxury chocolate business answered to my absolute satisfaction? No. But this episode will show you some things—and raise questions about others; painting if not an entire portrait—at least a fuller picture of one of the world’s favorite things to eat.

LIBYA

I’ve made a lot of hours of television over the years, but I think I’m proudest of Sunday’s Libya episode. I believe it is the best piece of work I’ve ever been part of. Some of that pride comes from recalling how difficult it was. My crew and I are not exactly seasoned veterans when it comes to shooting in “conflict zones”. We had to adapt to a whole new style of shooting—where prior preparation, instead of being a religion—became a security risk. Destinations couldn’t/shouldn’t—to the greatest extent possible, know we were coming. We had to learn to keep moving, spending only a short period at each location before moving on. We changed hotels frequently, spent as little time as possible milling about between vehicle and destination, refrained from social media, rarely went out for dinner off-camera.

Whether any of this was “necessary” is beside the point. Libya is a place where there is every likelyhood that everywhere you go and with everyone you meet, you will be greeted warmly, treated generously, welcomed with a smile or a thumbs up. It is also a place where very bad things happen to nice people—where things can go very, very wrong in a heartbeat.

While we were there, the close associate of one of our interview subjects was kidnapped. In Misrata, a popular elected official was assassinated with a silenced pistol. In Benghazi, the British Embassy was telling its citizens to leave. Generally speaking, highly trained security dudes do not want to even consider their idiotic on-camera “talent” charges anywhere near weapons—much less imagine the possibility of their operating one. During one tense moment, I was blithely reminded that “selector is on the left, clip release on the right. Extra clips in the seat back—and above you.”

It was not uncommon for my crew and I to be roused by our security late at night, told to pack our bags, grab our passports, get ready to head for the airport. These incidents were usually followed by group discussions—borderline arguments, really—where we would debate the issue of “stay or go”. I am very, very grateful to my stressed out crew that we stayed. As you will see the amazing result of their work on the screen.

Again, I’d like to underline that none of the stress, the heightened security measures, the omnipresence of weapons (wielded by the young, militia members from Misrata who looked after us when things started to get..tense) meant that anything bad happened to any of us. There were NO near death experiences. No close calls. (Okay. A bottle rocket ricocheted into my hair. Setting it momentarily on fire. It hurt for a second. Ouch.) Everywhere WE went, people were, more often than not, lovely to us. At one point, we unwittingly rolled up on the front gates of the internal security forces’ HQ, intending to shoot some cool graffiti. Some very sinister looking dudes were extraordinarily and unusually cool to us. Almost anywhere else, we would have been arrested immediately. In Misrata, the overwhelming concern of the various “militias” seemed to be to keep us safe, to keep order, to not let their city—for which they’d fought so hard—slide back into chaos. Even the Tripoli militia who you’ll see shutting us down while trying to shoot in the ruins of Gadaffi’s palace complex—they weren’t overtly hostile per se. It was more an armed version of a bureaucratic squabble over jurisdiction. These things happen when you’re talking about a “new” nation emerging from 40 years of maniacal autocracy. There is not, currently, much of a government. Order, to a great extent, is a DIY affair, maintained on what one might call: a volunteer basis.

What will stick with me about Libya, however, is not the tension—or all the things that might have gone wrong but didn’t. What will stick with me is the faces of the people we met—most of them very young. Young people in their twenties who, only a few weeks before the rebellion, were playing PS2, studying medicine, working abroad, learning to skateboard—who then rushed to fight. Again and again, these young people looked at our cameras and, in answer to a simple question, told us extraordinary things. The mix of hopefulness and pain in their faces is something I will always remember.

At one point, one young man, who had helped storm the Gaddafi compound, sat down with me to eat American style fast food chicken at KFC knock-off, “Uncle Kentacki”. “This is the taste of freedom”, he said, joyously, un-ironically—and with considerable pride. There was something beautiful in that.

The food in Libya is often delicious—with influences from Moorish Spain, Italy, across North Africa. The seafood in particular is excellent. It is a beautiful country—with perhaps the best preserved (and fantastically under-attended) ancient Roman City in the world—the magnificent Leptis Magna.

But what I hope people take away from this episode is a picture, a glimpse, of WHO we are talking about when we talk about Libya—and Libyans. It is a far more nuanced, complicated matter than what we might get from brief news stories.
I met a lot of people I liked. I hope you will like them too.

INTERZONE

“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”
-Hassan-i Sabbah

When I was an angry young man, disillusioned with the world, disenchanted with my generation, disappointed by the “counter-culture” and looking for role models, William S. Burroughs’ paranoia and loathing, his anti-social appetites, his caustic, violently surreal wit, and his taste for controlled substances seemed to perfectly mirror my own aspirations.

I wanted to write. I wanted to be apart from everything I grew up with. In short, I wanted to be elsewhere. And the Tangier—the “Interzone” that Burroughs described—where he’d found himself exiled, strung out, writing the pages that eventually became “Naked Lunch” sounded, to my naïve young mind, like an exotic paradise. 

Tangier, of course, is part of Morocco—and however accepting it was of badly behaved expats, however “international” a city—it was always part of that nation. Traditional Arab/Berber life went on, always, around the dreamers, refugees, libertines and romantics who flocked there. 

This week’s show is not about Morocco. Nor is it about Tangier precisely. It’s about the intersection between the old world and the new, the modern and the ancient, the real world of real Moroccans and the fantasy created by generations of foreigners who came to Tangier to create, to one extent or another, an “Oriental” fantasy.

Unlike Burroughs, the author Paul Bowles genuinely loved Tangier. Unlike Burroughs, he stayed there, plunged deeply into Moroccan art, music and culture. He came as close to seeing the place for what it was as any who’ve visited. Not as a playland, but as an entity all its own—with fascinations far more lasting and important than hashish, majoun and inexpensive flesh for rent.

A culture as deep as Morocco cannot be “explained” in 42 minutes of television—much less 4 hours. And what you’ll see on the show is hardly a comprehensive overview or even, necessarily a helpful guide to the sights.

It will, I hope, give the flavor of a truly remarkable place—and inspire you to look deeper. There is no place like it in the world. It looks, smells, sounds and tastes like no other city. It is all to easy to lose oneself in the romantic ideal—more difficult to assess the place as it is: an increasingly modern port metropolis situated only a short boat ride from Europe.
It’s probably a good idea to do both: Live the dream for a bit.
But keep your eyes open. 
And be careful.
As you’ll see, many visitors came to Tangier for a short vacation and remained for life. It’s that kind of place. 

FOODFUCKED IN QUEBEC

Foodfucked: to be fed more food of a ridiculously high quality and deliciousness than deemed judicious by any reputable health authority whilst in no position to refuse

Chefs Martin Picard, David McMillan and Frederic Morin are masters of foodfuckery. They are loved, respected and feared by chefs from all over the world who’ve visited them at their restaurants in Montreal (Picard’s Au Pied de Cochon and McMillan and Morin’s Joe Beef and Liverpool House). They are justifiably feared for their generosity with fine wines and liqueurs, their profligacy with ingredients like black truffles and foie gras.

They are also, arguably, the most important, most influential chefs in Canada. Even a glancing association with any of their kitchens gives a cook in Brooklyn or Los Angeles an immediate hipster cred. This is, of course, particularly ironic given Mr. McMillan’s frequent threats to beat passing hipsters to death with a shovel.

They are Canadian. They are Quebecois. And what they bring to gastronomy is a particular embrace of French Canadian lumberjack appetites and joie de vivre—coupled with a deep respect for the traditions of dining and hospitality unique to their region.

They do not look like intellectuals, historians or gentlemen farmers. They look more like a motorcycle gang or well-fed fur trappers. But they are.

And in the week I spent with them recently for the making of this episode of PARTS UNKNOWN, they fed me as I have never been fed in my well-travelled life.

You will see food porn in this week’s episode so epic, so enticing, so devastating in its richness, flavors and sheer volume as to endanger the life. If I have ever made an episode of television where even WATCHING food being served can cause livers and other vital organs to explode or malfunction, this is it.

This episode is listed as being about CANADA. But it is clearly not. It is not even, really, about QUEBEC. It is, however about three characters—and the world they move around in—that could not have existed anywhere in the world BUT QUEBEC.

They are the magnificently mutated offspring of an old and glorious culture. They respect and cherish and preserve the best of the old, while creating and inspiring the new. They are dangerous, dangerous men.

I know you will like them.

Colombiana

I’d thought my unconditional love for Colombia was well established there. I’d visited for speaking engagements. I’d made a giddily enthusiastic episode of a previous series in Medellin and Cartagena. I’d waxed poetically and often about how well I’ve always been treated, how thrilling it is to see how far the country has come from its bad old days. I’m a fan of its people, its music, its food and its disarmingly injured pride. But coming out of the remote jungle village of Milaflores, I made a mistake.

I tweeted a photo of myself, standing under a shade tree, surrounded by young Colombian military recruits. My old friend and Top Chef colleague, Tom Colicchio tweeted right back: “ Too soon.” – connecting the appearance of machine guns with the then recent Newtown massacre. I tweeted back that “this what it looks like in FARC country.” Of course, I meant, “territory recently controlled by the FARC”—the very unpleasant Marxist guerilla group who’d been terrorizing Colombia for decades with kidnappings assassinations—and worse. They operate hand in glove with the cartels—essentially shaking them down and providing them with protection—in return for funds. And indeed, not too long before I arrived at the dirt airstrip, merchants in the small town are said to have accepted payment for basic goods and services with coca paste.

Now, Miraflores is swarming with army and police. The FARC, by almost all accounts, have been beaten back significantly. The phrase “FARC country” was not, however, interpreted as intended—as meaning an area, a neighborhood, a territory once under FARC control. Not in Colombia. Colombians were outraged. “I do NOT live in FARC country” and “how come you glorify those bastards?” were common responses. The twittersphere blew up with pissed off, deeply offended Colombians, reading second hand reports of what I was believed to have said. Many misidentified the young soldiers in the photo as being guerillas. Our fixers and drivers were very, very unhappy—in the uncomfortable position of being closely associated with someone (me) who was (for the next couple of days, anyway) widely thought to be a FARC sympathizer. Things bled into the print media and it was a tough couple of days. It was a clumsy, ill worded and foolish thing for me to have done.

Colombia is NOT, for the record, “a FARC country”. Far from it. As I should well have known, the struggle between the FARC, the cartels, and various right wing militias has been deeply felt by nearly every Colombian family. Opinions—even perceived opinions—can have consequences. Just about everybody you talk to—even in a present day Colombia that is much, much safer and secure—has lost someone to violence from one side or the other.

Colombia—more than anyone—has paid a terrible price in lives for the world’s seemingly bottomless appetite for cocaine—and for the greed of a relative few. And if you ever wondered “how come they don’t get a handle on things down there”, all you need do is look at the place. The country is huge. It is about 70% sparsely populated (and gorgeous) jungle, mountains and coastline opening up onto both the Caribbean and the Pacific. It is ideologically divided. And it has neighbor problems. Venezuela next door has been all too happy to provide safe haven and even covert military assistance to the FARC. Panama’s Darien Gap offers some of the world’s most impenetrable jungles. Colombia has been very successful in recent years in its war on cartel and FARC related violence. But the ludicrous futility of any fully successful “war on drugs” is apparent with a single look out of a plane window. In spite of all its painful history, Colombia is emerging as what SHOULD be a vacation wonderland. Have I said yet how beautiful the place is? It’s incredible. It’s fun. And yes—it’s safe. Every day, more so. Cartagena has some of the most beautiful colonial architecture you’re likely to find anywhere in Latin America. A great bar scene. Amazing food and architecture. Medellin is a modern, sophisticated, enormously enjoyable place to spend time—as far from its image as a murder capital as you can imagine. And people are heartbreakingly welcoming and happy to see visitors who have come to their beautiful country for something other than to talk about narcos and violence. Cali is a party town to rival Miami. The beaches along the coasts are as unspoiled as your wildest fantasies. And yet many people still don’t go.

I would urge you to put aside the stereotypes. If you want to find bad people in Colombia, you can surely find them—as you could in New York or Los Angeles. But nowhere have my crew and I been treated better or with more kindness and generosity. I’d bring my family on vacation there in a heartbeat. And hope to soon. As I said before: Colombians are proud. Let them show you what they are proud of.

That said, this week’s Colombia episode of PARTS UNKNOWN marks another great moment in Bourdainian stupidity. Faithful viewers of my previous program on that other, less good network, might remember my previous misadventure on an ATV. You’d think I would have learned from that experience, a long barrel roll down a sand dune, wrapped around a few hundred pounds of metal and machinery. I was very, very lucky to have emerged from that experience with limbs and skull intact. That maybe I’d be smart enough to realize that maybe off road vehicles were just not for me.
No.
In Colombia, I saddled up once again—and as you’ll see—managed to fly off the seat, drive my head straight into the ground (helmet-less, of course), and (my producers insist) somehow succeed in running over my own head. Though I was “out” for a brief micro-second there—I remember bounding to my feet, unwilling to be embarrassed by the glaringly obvious: I should have worn the helmet they offered. I should have driven more carefully. I probably shouldn’t—given my record—been driving the damn thing at all. Comedy Gold.

BURMA FAREWELL

It’s a very special moment when you arrive someplace, look around at a vista that is clearly, awe-inspiringly fantastic and realize: “Holy ****! Almost no one else has SEEN this!”

After many years of looking at some pretty impressive vistas, I have to be honest: It makes it better. Let’s face it, the first French dude to push aside some jungle brush and look upon Angkor Wat was probably a hell of a lot more excited about it than I was. (And I was pretty excited). It’s a greedy, selfish instinct—the notion that this is all for you, that you are singularly fortunate to have seen this—that you—and only you, get ALL the cake.

I don’t know what Hiram Bingham thought when he looked up at Macchu Piccu for the first time. He certainly hadn’t “discovered” the place. He was probably just the first non-Indian to have gazed upon it. But I’ll bet he felt pretty smug about his accomplishment. “Will you look at that! Wow! And it’s been here all along! Dumb bastards been traipsing through these parts for centuries and they missed THIS!”

That’s kind of how I felt looking out at the ancient temple complex of Bagan in Myanmar. An unlovely instinct, I grant you. But like I said; I get to see a lot of beautiful vistas. Way too many of them, after all these miles, take on the importance of moving wallpaper. So it’s something really special to be thrilled by ruins—hair stand-up-on-back-of-neck- excited by a view.

Of course, plenty of visitors have been through Bagan over the years. But for Americans, the country now known as Myanmar has been mostly a place to avoid. I’ve avoided it for years—in spite of a terrific curiosity about the place— because I didn’t want to help a very unpleasant, totalitarian government stay in power.

But things have really started to shift in Myanmar. It’s still a military regime in charge. They are still up to some very nasty business in the parts of the country they do not let Westerners go. But the people are now, for the very first time in over half a century, relatively free to speak their minds. From a society where huge segments of the daily papers were routinely—and without explanation—hacked out by censors, where having an opinion could be a very dangerous thing..and where just about everybody with an opinion has been to jail—it’s pretty remarkable to see what’s happening.

Most remarkable, I think, was how open people were with us—how willing they were to talk –how not shy they were with our cameras, when only a little over a year ago, talking with a Western film crew could land you in prison. The door is opening in Myanmar—and we are very proud to show you some of what’s happening inside.

Parts Unknown

Before I set out to travel this world, 12 years ago, I used to believe that the human race as a whole was basically a few steps above wolves.

That given the slightest change in circumstances, we would all, sooner or later, tear each other to shreds. That we were, at root, self-interested, cowardly, envious and potentially dangerous in groups. I have since come to believe — after many meals with many different people in many, many different places — that though there is no shortage of people who would do us harm, we are essentially good.

That the world is, in fact, filled with mostly good and decent people who are simply doing the best they can. Everybody, it turns out, is proud of their food (when they have it). They enjoy sharing it with others (if they can). They love their children. They like a good joke. Sitting at the table has allowed me a privileged perspective and access that others, looking principally for “the story,” do not, I believe, always get.

People feel free, with a goofy American guy who has expressed interest only in their food and what they do for fun, to tell stories about themselves — to let their guard down, to be and to reveal, on occasion, their truest selves.

I am not a journalist. I am not a foreign correspondent. I am, at best, an essayist and enthusiast. An amateur. I hope to show you what people are like at the table, at home, in their businesses, at play. And when and if, later, you read about or see the places I’ve been on the news, you’ll have a better idea of who, exactly, lives there.

“Parts Unknown” is supposed to be about food, culture and travel — as seen through the prism of food. We will learn along with you. When we look at familiar locations, we hope to look at them from a lesser-known perspective, examine aspects unfamiliar to most.

People, wherever they live, are not statistics. They are not abstractions. Bad things happen to good people all the time. When they do, hopefully, you’ll have a better idea who, and what, on a human scale, is involved.

I’m not saying that sitting down with people and sharing a plate is the answer to world peace. Not by a long shot. But it can’t hurt. 

Anthony Bourdain
Hotel El Minzah, Tangier

Jo Jo, The Dog-Faced Boy’s POV