Anthony Bourdain

SOUTHERN COMFORT

I just got back from family vacation, where, for ten days, I violated all my rules and everything I’ve ever preached about how to travel.  I stayed put. I rarely left the hotel grounds.  I ate in the same two restaurants for most of my trip—rarely deviating from pasta, pizza and gelato. Though there was a lake a few hundred yards walk down, I never put so much as a toe in it—spending the bulk of my days instead, splashing around in the shallow end of the pool with a Barbie pail , an inflatable porpoise, and a relentlessly energetic 4 year old girl. It was marvelous.

I missed—or was at least physically absent from—the monstrously overblown “controversy” about the dietary choices of  “regular people” and the larger question of whether I am  a cruel, horrible, snake-eating, Yankee liberal elitist—or just an occasionally obnoxious guy making a point.  Or a bit of both. Without revisiting a week where I found myself in the rare, worrying– and yet strangely  satisfying position of having both FOX News AND the New York Times drop a deuce on my head, I’ll let this Monday’s episode of NO RESERVATIONS make my argument for me.

The show begins in New Orleans, a city I feel very connected to—and continues deep into the heart of Cajun country and culture. The South—particularly (but not exclusively) Louisiana, is where “American” food comes from.  There are certainly other uniquely regional cuisines and specialties in this country—but creole and Cajun constitute uniquely American-born mutations. They could not have occurred anywhere else.  Like the birth of jazz—they were created  at bizarre yet magical intersections of cultures and circumstances—the end products of long journeys, much pain and simple pleasures.

One of the things I’m always looking at as I travel around the world is “where the cooks come from”.  And if there’s a regular feature, a common thread wherever you go in this world, it’s that the best cooks and often the best chefs come from the poorest or most challenging regions.  And it is without doubt that the greatest , most beloved and iconic dishes in the pantheon of gastronomy—in any of the world’s mother cuisines—French, Italian or Chinese–originated with poor, hard-pressed, hard working farmers and laborers with no time, little money and no refrigeration.

Pot au Feu , Coq au Vin, Sup Tulang, Cassoulet, pasta, polenta, confit, —all of them began with the urgent need to make something good and reasonably sustaining out of very little.  So many of the French classics began with the need to throw a bunch of stuff into a single pot over the coals, leave it simmering unattended all day while the family worked the fields, hopefully to return to something tasty and filling that would get them through the next day.  French cooking, we tend to forget now, was rarely (for the majority of Frenchmen) about the best or the priciest or even the freshest ingredients. It was about taking what little you had or could afford and turning it into something delicious without interfering with the grim necessities of work and survival.  The people I’m talking about here didn’t have money—or time to cook.  And yet along with similarly pressed Italians, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Indians and other hungry innovators around the world, they created many of the enduring great dishes of history.

So the notion that hard working, hard pressed families with little time and slim budgetshave to eat crappy, processed food –or that unspeakably, proudly unhealthy “novelty dishes” that come from nowhere but the fevered imaginations of marketing departments are—or should be—the lot of the working poor is nonsense.

The many Cajuns who were good enough to host us on this Monday’s episode make this case, I think, far better than I ever could.  Notice, when you watch the show, howeverybody cooks.  Men, women—even the kids seem to be helping out.  Many aren’t cooks, per se, but everybody we met , everybody, was really, really good at at least one dish.  Cajuns proudly trace their roots to a particularly harsh and brutal diaspora, followed by a steep learning curve as they adapted to an incredibly difficult new environment.  Their culinary traditions reflect that.

At the traditional “boucherie” I  attended, an  entire community swung into action within seconds of me putting two  bullets into the guest of honor.   And one and all– everyone, from musicians, mechanics, to the town mayor—set about demonstrating the real guiding principles of  gastronomy. Slow cooked, “smothered” and “stuffed” turkey wings, a stew made from the backbone of the pig,  delicious, hot boudin made from the blood or less expensive bits, head cheese, cracklins. None of this was expensive. None of the cooks were professionally trained. But what I ate that day—and on other days—in Lafayette, Breaux Bridge and Eunice was some of the most delicious food I’ve had anywhere.

And what about New Orleans? There’s nothing fancy or expensive about the wonderfully kooky Afro-Chinese hybrid street food, Yakkamein, or red beans and rice—or the fried chicken at Willie Mae’s.  A good muffaletta sandwich, an oyster Po’ Boy—these are not expensive luxuries, they’re birthrights—and no one who’s eaten them can ever say they are any less delicious than anything served in a Michelin starred dining room. Made well, by someone who knows what they’re doing, they are unimprovable by man or God.  They are also, one would assume, quite delicious and quite fattening enough without squeezing them between two Cinnabons.

For ****’s sake, the South pretty much taught us all to cook.  They know what good, affordable  food is—having pretty much written the book on the subject. All I’m saying is that Macaroni and cheese is a good and noble dish.  Deep fried macaroni and cheese is no better and certainly no more affordable.

This is the last episode of NO RESERVATIONS of this season.   We begin shooting a new season  in September, but in the interim period, while we’re out there travelling, I hope you’ll find amusement—and maybe even some useful information– in THE LAYOVER, a ten episode, high speed mini-series we just shot in an alternately thrilling and exhausting bounce  around the world, from New York, Singapore,  Hong Kong, Rome, San Francisco, Miami,  Montreal, Amsterdam, London, and Los Angeles.

And for the NOLA/Cajun episode, I want to thank Lolis Eric Elie, Wendell Pierce,  David Simon and everybody from the HBO series “TREME”, upon whose previous works and extensive research and experience we shamelessly piggybacked.

BOTH ENDS BURNING

Eight shows into production for our seventh season of No Reservations with a whole bunch more to come. That’s a lot of years of traveling around the world, stuffing food and liquor into my face. Eight shows shot already and ready to go—or still being tended to carefully in a nerdly warren of editing rooms. In between shoots, I’ve been bouncing around the country doing public speaking gigs, something that over time, becomes more like a stand-up routine than anything resembling a “talk”. Talk for two hours a night, forty or more times a year in front of a large audience, you quickly find yourself learning a skill set you never thought you’d want or need. You repeat yourself, like a comedian, working the same lines, adjusting the timing, changing a word here and there—altering delivery—and hopefully, slowly working out the old and trying out the new.

It’s been tough at times, up at five off to a plane, a car, Easton, Glenside, Coral Springs, Red Bank, Stamford, Hershey, Norfolk, Tallahassee. Started writing this in a delayed plane on the tarmac in Lauderdale, waiting for clearance from Atlanta, wrote some more on another plane, will probably finish it somewhere between Cerritos, Palm Desert and Modesto. Somewhere in the middle there, I had a few hours of date night with my wife and way too much sake . My daughter cried when she saw I was leaving again and I feel guilty and horribly hungover. End of this run of appearances, I’m ditching as much of everything and anything I’ve ever said before and concentrating on a new presentation. . And I’ll be cutting back significantly on the whole live in concert thing in general. Enough is enough. I don’t ever want to hear my daughter crying “Daddy, Daddy!…..” again as I walk down the hall to the elevator. The show is one thing. I go away, I come back, I stay for a while. But touring like this? One concrete suicide dressing room after another, another chain hotel room, trying to maintain the right balance between the Red Bull (for fatigue) and the beer (for stage jitters and nervousness) necessary to not “die” out there in front of 1,500-2000 people. Cause they let you know right away if they’re not enjoying you. And believe me, that’s somewhere you don’t want to be—twisting slowly in the wind, struggling for words, in front of an audience who are beginning to deeply regret having paid the egregious price of their tickets.

On a good day—and there are many, I get to see exactly who is reading my books—and watching my shows, and I hear from them directly. It’s amazing how intimately people are acquainted with the misadventures of Zamir, how they seem to cherish best my most painful and embarrassing moments. It’s inspiring, though, how many distinguished looking ladies and gentlemen of years enjoy a good felching joke. The weird swings of demographics is nice to see: One night, forty percent of the audience will be Filipino-Americans, the next mostly alienated, college age men, next, mostly women, many of whom appear to have dressed for the event. Mondays are usually restaurant people—you can smell the garlic and onions and salmon in the air—and they’re always a rowdy bunch. Next night—inexplicably—it’s golfers or drunks. You never know. An awful lot of people seem to be watching No Reservations—and most of them, it appears, by stumbling across re-runs, DVRing, downloading it legally or otherwise, renting from Netflix or iTunes. Which is all good by me.
The fine folks at Swiffer maybe not so much.

Nicaragua, the Ozarks, Hokkaido, Cambodia, Boston, Vienna, the Brazilian Amazon and Haiti are in the can . Haiti is airing first—as our season premier: Monday, February 28th. 9PM EST. It’s a ballsy choice for the network. As Haiti, having suffered ,only one year ago,a massive earthquake that killed nearly 300,000 people, more recent difficulties with cholera, and the all too regular afflictions of poverty, corruption and political turmoil is not a happy-go-lucky show. Our friends at eater.com will have difficulty finding a good dick joke for their regular “Quotable Bourdain” feature. But like our first Beirut show, it’s an episode I’m very proud of. And I’m grateful to the network for choosing this, above others, to lead off with. On the subject of gratitude, I can hardly give words to how important Sean Penn was to the show or how helpful. Above and beyond showing us around the tent city of 55,000 souls that he helped found and continues to help administer, and explaining to us articulately and with real passion the complex needs and problems of a country in desperate need of a break, he pointed us to the incredible artist’s colony in the middle of densely packed maze of crumbling, cobbled together shacks in an inner city shantytown. Here, in total obscurity—and with barely a hope in the world of ever selling a single work, amazing craftsmen are making art every day. They live in tiny sheds. A bed surrounded by stacks and stacks of their work, most covered in dust.
And for the helicopter shot that closes the show. That was Sean’s idea too—without realizing it. Talking about the situation, he described how he’d felt, the first time he’d seen Port au Prince from above— a suggestion we took— and his remarks resonated later in the editing room. As you’ll see, it ended up making a very powerful end to the show.

In addition to the kick-off to our seventh season, we are approaching another landmark: 1,000,000 Facebook “Likes” . I thought of this while watching David Fincher’s brilliant SOCIAL NETWORK recently; that scene where the offices of Facebook get all excited when they hit a million users. I saw that film and started paying attention to our numbers. And as of this writing, it’s getting mighty close. Feel free to help getting us over the hump. Having fully embraced the interactive world of Facebook, twitter, live streaming, tumblr et al, and hijacking my accounts, I find myself living in a strange and wonderful new world. One in which I talk to my wife, it seems, on twitter nearly as much as in person, bust Ripert’s balls while he’s skiing in Park City, hear from Batali while he’s chowing down on crab in Singapore—and communicate with my audience out front while I finish my last beer before showtime backstage. I have learned already the perils of drunk tweeting.

Any other news? Yes. Season two of the great HBO series TREME starts soon. Be sure to watch. I’m doing some writing and consulting on the show and can assure you, without violating any confidentiality agreement, that it’s going to be a very very foodie season. Hi-test shit.
Also be absolutely sure to pre-order chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s amazing memoir BLOOD, BONES AND BUTTER. A book I think mops up the floor with Kitchen Confidential. Shockingly good.
GET JIRO, the graphic novel I wrote with Joel Rose and illustrated by the incredible Langdon Foss, is looking really, really breathtakingly good. The art is…well…you’ll just have to see it to believe it. That’ll be coming out NEXT year, I’m told, so my dreams of ComiCon this year will have to be deferred till next.

An I’ll be appearing as “Biff” in the Coral Gables Dinner Theater Production of “Death of a Salesman” with Joe Piscopo and Frankie Munoz.
That last thing is NOT true.