The Anthony Bourdain Special Episode

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Hello and welcome to the watch.

My name is Chris Rye and I am an editor at theWriter.com and joining me in the studio, he writes,

he eats, and he is hungry for more.

It's Andy Greenwald.

That's nice.

So today Andy in honor of Matt Johnson's Tony, which is being released on August 7th,

sorry, Dominic Cessa as a young Anthony Bourdain, we decided we would do a retrospective

on one of our great shared television passions, which is the work of Anthony Bourdain and extends

beyond TV to his written work, to his public speaking, to his influence on culture.

I was kind of surprised.

I did a search of our archives for the watch.

Yeah.

So that goes back to 2015.

We've talked about him twice on this show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I did that on other podcasts.

Well, I mean, it's just, I think that you and I were both obviously like many, many,

many other people who have shaken by his death.

And I think even at the time or sometime in the years afterwards, I remember saying something

I think on this pod that was like, it's still hard for me to watch his TV.

It's hard for me to go back and watch episodes of Parts Unknown or watch No Reservations

and time does its thing.

And I felt like this would be a good opportunity for us to talk about the work and legacy of

somebody who meant a lot to us and to so many people and has had an outsized influence,

I think, on many things from the bear to journalism, to travel influencing, to things

that he probably would not want to be responsible for.

And you know, you're somebody who had got you got to interview him several times.

You appeared on a post-ermist episode of Parts Unknown to discuss his work.

So I thought we could open it up by just having like kind of a kind of broader discussion

about boarding and then we can get into a couple of things I put together a 10, I'd say

it's a hall of fame, personal hall of fame of Anthony Bourdain television.

We could talk a little bit about some of the episodes, but how are you kind of, and

we haven't seen the movie.

And we haven't seen the movie yet.

And I, it's gotten great reviews.

I know Fennesy loved it.

It's, I can't wait to see it.

Matt Johnson is the director who previously had done the Blackberry and Nirvana, the movie,

the band, the show.

Yeah.

So when you think about Bourdain, did you, had you thought about him in a while when I

brought up the idea of doing this episode?

This sounds weird for someone who I barely knew, but I think about him all the time.

And I think about him all the time, both because of, you know, in, in the kind of rubber necking

way when you have any proximity, even, I mean, I cannot stress this enough super marginal

proximity to someone that they are gone.

But everything that you said in your intro is so relevant just in terms of his voice feels

present as much as it ever did in, in the way we eat the way that we think, the way we

opine, what makes us upset, what makes us angry.

And his legacy, which has been fascinating and remains complicated, is also continually

being reasserted or if you can go into, I mean, there are many restaurants around the

world that you can walk into and there are quotes of his spray painted on the wall.

And does that restaurant live up to his legacy?

Is the quote that is spray painted something he would have said that maybe he said in 2002

that he would have said in 2017, hard to debate.

But, you know, anything, anytime someone falls silent who had spoken so much like there

is a complicated legacy and the debate would rage on for a long time.

I think about him a lot because as a, as a fan, and we're going to get into this, but

as a fan who read the New Yorker article that started his second career as a public figure.

Do you do that like contemporaneously?

Yes.

When it happened?

Yes.

In 99,000.

And you will read a fucking New Yorker issue.

Especially then.

Yeah.

Because I thought there was going to be a test.

Like I did think that someone perhaps a father figure would be like, did you see what,

you know, what John, John Lee Anderson went to another public in crisis.

John Lair reviewed a puckish biography of a 1940s silent film star.

Yeah.

There weren't silent films in the 40s.

See, I'm already, Marty messing up.

Anyway, as someone who has been a fan for a long time, like, but, and we are going to

talk about this, what increasingly I was a fan of was his very public evolution.

So the fact that he is not here to continually evolve and show us the ways in which people

can transform and change and that, and that the project of being open to the world is both

possible, survivable and deeply impactful in that like, especially in this era where,

you know, it seems impossible to forgive, to move on, to evolve, to change publicly in

ways both, you know, big that have global circumstances, but even just like, and even

small within your life or within your opinions and your tastes, that's essential to living.

And he never shot away from that.

I mean, there was a messiness to everything that he did that is sadly missed in, as you

said, in our art and in our life.

I think that his project over the course of decades was a really interesting one to me

because I think it mirrors one that outside of the social moories of the time of like,

you know, how our attitudes about different things changed over his years of productivity.

I think that he mirrored a very recognizable and legible arc of angry young man outsider,

gifted with the gift of gab in the pen, who made his name by saying the food world

was equivalent of the Beatles suck, you know, and was lionized for his kind of edge-already

opinions and his like truth telling ways and then slowly got brought into the establishment

but never lost his voice and also never changed to be what other people wanted him to be.

And I think that that was obviously something that was a major issue for him is like the

public facing persona versus who he was in private.

People wanted from him versus what he wanted to give them in terms of, you know, like this

is a guy who every time he would walk into a bar, that was going to be everybody in the

bar's Anthony Bourdain story.

And I think that, you know, the challenges that he gave himself by constantly traveling

and constantly moving around the world were obviously great stressors to him, but he was

always willing to talk through it and he was always willing to work through it.

And I don't think it was as under the surface is, you know, you can see it in his work when

he's like in an episode of a show is just like, I'm not really feeling this.

Yes.

And famously those episodes could be very good because of that because he was like, I don't

want to do a boat trip or I don't want to do, I don't want to eat out of this clay pot.

Like I'm, I want to go back to New York and have a salad.

Or what was he talked about in like a Sicily episode?

He's like, we went fishing and we didn't fucking catch anything and I'm mortified.

And that made it to air.

Yes.

And we should say that like as we're talking, I think we're going to throw to a couple

clips from the interview, the podcast that I did with him 11 years ago, talkingly.

And you know, I think he he he talks about a lot of these subjects, including the fact

that like the angry young man persona that he put into the world in that New York article

was when nobody was listening.

And once people started listening, he started to evolve and change in front of our very

eyes.

And he had to either publicly or privately or subtly disavow some things as he, as he transformed.

And I before we get into, I just explain the context of that interview too, because I

think it's very interesting for who he is and who he was.

Yeah.

Over the course of the episode, we're going to be sprinkling in little segments from this

interview that Andy did.

But the way the reason why I got that interview is in, I guess, 2014 or 2015.

And we will talk about the different evolutions of him and his like media and the shows that

he did and what he was putting into the world.

But there was a very interesting period in the middle of the last decade when he was

feeling his oats creatively of like, I'm in a right comic books for DC.

And I'm going to have a publishing imprint in that was where he did a couple of seasons

in the writers room of Tremay with David Simon.

And he was in talks to be one of the benefactors, but like the public faces of a food hall.

It was going to bring Singaporean hawker life into Manhattan.

It eventually did open after he died.

And I think just recently closed.

He also was like, maybe I just want to see what it's like to be a celebrity for a while.

And he made a show for ABC called The Taste that was in the era of the voice.

And it was a show in which chefs competed to dazzle judges, including him and Nigel Alasin

and Ludo Lefeb from here in LA with one spoonful, a perfect bite.

And I was definitely in my like, Randier columnist days and intellectually and obviously I had

to break it to you, but you kind of are still.

No, no, I've mellowed.

And I wrote this essay that basically referred to him as an aging, defanged circus lion and

that this show repudiated every single thing he'd ever taught us to believe that like food

cannot be reduced to a single bite, that it is nothing if it is not connected to the larger

cultural trends that created it.

And experience of being whether it's in a restaurant or somebody's house.

And this is something I said to him in the interview eventually was like you show, unlike

every other food show up to that point, you told us we couldn't do this.

You couldn't recreate this at home.

You had to get out of your kitchen, out of your house, out of your country in order to

experience this.

It wasn't like easy weeknight, you know, Korean noodles.

It was no, you have to fucking go to Korea.

And so it was a rough like Kylia idols kind of thing.

And a few days after it went up, I got back channeled.

This was not all the president's men.

But I got a message from someone who worked at 0.0, which was the production company that

he was partnered with that made all of his TV shows saying thank you for saying this because

they obviously had an interest in him not doing that sort of TV.

They wanted to keep making parts unknown.

And they also said we put it in front of him and he read it and he said he got me.

And I was like holy shit.

Do you think he'd ever talk to me about it?

And they were like probably let's check.

And so not too long after that, I arrived, what I thought was you guys know I have a unique

relationship with being on time.

He we used to record when I when you were out here and I was in New York, there was a period

where we were recording in the brutal building.

Yeah.

We're all the great hits were recorded.

And I got there.

And of course, Tony had been there.

He infamously 15 minutes early was on time and he was off and early.

And he was just sitting there waiting.

And he was, you know, to listen back to it now, I am shocked that I didn't realize that

I was a hyperactive nine year old in 2015 and that I spoke in a way that I thought you

could only achieve via like the Elven and the Chipmunks technique.

But I was also clearly very nervous.

But that what was very emotional to listen to and to hear was that like he just showed

up and he showed up and he's just as always just 100% himself.

And I don't know how many people you and I know in our lives who are always 100% themselves.

I think our mutual friend Chuck Closterman is probably the closest we have to it in writing

and in life and just like in front of people and non-freedom about Bill.

I thought about Bill.

Like when people are like, what's Bill like?

I'm like, it's pretty close to what you think he's like, you know, like in a good way.

Yeah.

That is kind of true.

But I asked some bad is how his kids are doing at college and he somehow steered it into

rewatching homeland.

It was like, God.

It's incredible.

You know, it doesn't seem like much when I'm saying it out loud.

But like I took shots at him and he was like, okay, let's talk about it.

Yeah.

And then he showed up and talked about it.

I just think it was just a remarkable measure of his character.

I'll give you guys if anybody needs this.

I think sometimes people's relationships to these figures are different.

I'll just give you the broadest strokes of a, this is a very inadequate biography.

Sure.

Anthony Bourdain was born in Manhattan in 1956 on a childhood trip to France.

Where he took the Queen Mary over to France with his family.

He had a food awakening that involved Vichy Swah, but like essentially like started to

understand the wider world and how food made him feel and how food preparation was this

expression of love and culture.

He dropped out of Vassar in the 70s and moved province down to begin his culinary journey,

which is the period of his life that's documented in Tony.

And is a couple of chapters in kitchen confidential, which is a book he wrote in 2000.

You know, he went to cooking school, eventually became the executive chef at layout in New

York City in 1998.

In 2000, he published kitchen confidential and essentially becomes a literary phenomenon

as well as a food world title.

And kitchen confidential was an extrapolation of the famous infamous article he wrote for

the New Yorker, which was based, I think it was called Don't Order Fish on Mondays.

There's something like that.

And the origins of that story, I mean, he was a, he had written novels.

He had written a couple of mystery novels.

But is it throat?

Yes, and gone bamboo.

And I mean, I think when he, this will probably be in the movie Tony, but like he thought of

himself as more of an artist and writer type and fell into kitchen because it was work

that could support him during like pretty challenging years that involved episodes of addiction

and economic struggling.

And when he wrote this article, it was kind of like a fuck at moment.

I'm just going to put it all out there.

And I think the plan was to run it in the New York press, which us and the people who we

knew in New York 30, 20 years ago will remember of it.

Not many other, it was like these scrappy maybe right wing competitor of the village voice.

I think it swung a bit politically, but it was like, it was like the fourth paper in New

York.

If there was the post in the daily news and the New York Times and the voice.

The fifth press would be the fifth, yeah.

But from what I remember anecdotally, his mother, Gladys, worked at the New York Times,

sent it to David Remnik.

And it got into the New Yorker.

So there was just a little parental nudging in his 40s.

And that article, this is an arrow and an article in the New Yorker could blow up and

there was a bidding word that turned it into a book and suddenly everything changed.

Although maybe representative of someone of his age, like he didn't quit his day job.

Not yet.

About two years after kitchen covenantal comes out, he starts making television.

And he hosts a cook's tour for the Food Network.

In 2005, he premiered no reservations on the travel channel.

And he made that for eight years before moving to CNN, where he made parts unknown.

His travel channel departure was somewhat acrimonious.

I think he was like, they're starting to put me in car ads that I didn't really appear

in and things like that.

So he makes them move to CNN that was as they were trying to branch out to different

kinds of journalism.

And he makes parts unknown for several years.

His television evolved to encompass political and social reportage, cinematic experimentation

and homages to his favorite writers from grain green to hunter S. Thompson to many in between.

Jim Harrison.

And of course, he always focused on food.

He died by suicide in June of 2018, while on location in the French Alps with his good

friend Eric repair, who frequently appeared on his shows.

I was introduced to Tony's work through shows.

I think I was aware of who he was.

And I think I read the like don't order fish on Mondays.

Peace, but and I thought it was cool, but I was really not a foodie in my 20s.

You know, like I don't think I know I think like a lot of people my age, you probably

have a very specific experience eating when you're growing up.

And then you have several years from your late teens to your mid 20s where you're like,

if I have five dollars, it's going towards beer and pizza and not towards, you know,

like a bento box.

We cannot stress this enough.

And I think Fort Dan has a huge hand in this in sort of a larger cultural generational

transformation.

We didn't eat in the late 90s until the 20s.

I was 30.

No, I know.

I'm with you on that brother.

But like I remember like our, we had a similar commute into Manhattan to chase our

nights and like it would come out of the F train at first Avenue and first Avenue and and

and first street, you know, the infamous sign field corner.

And I think about it now how we walked past prune, which is like such an important stalwart

New York City restaurant, the chef Gabrielle Hamilton who Tony like worshiped and thought

was like one of the great food writers in addition to being one of the great cooks.

And like inside of that restaurant, people were like having martinis that were made the

perfect way and like cooking fish the way it's done in France and like and we would just

just storm by there and maybe we would get a slice of pizza at midnight.

Yeah.

And the fact that I do think that young people for the most part in addition to like, you

know, coughing chillable reds also do spend money on food like both in terms of like,

ah, lovely, tinned fish for home, but also just like restaurant culture is pop culture

in a way that it didn't ever used to be.

It's also just fascinating like all the technological evolutions that came out of I know I think

that Anthony Bourdain is responsible for the rise of GPS by the idea of making a comprehensive

map of a city that includes shopping, bookstores, restaurants, pubs, but then also like you

can get an incredible like, ah, like kabob here, you know, it all feels like it kind of

sprang from some of the work he did on his TV shows.

And so I think that when I first encountered his stuff, which was probably on no reservations

and maybe on because you were such a passionate fan of his stuff, I'm not afraid to say it

like it is like kind of like a paradigm shifting like life changing it counter with an artist

or a thinker to be like, no, it can be everything.

Like everything you care about and everything you're passionate about and everything that

makes you get out of bed in the morning, you can find a way to do the jigsaw so that

it fits into the bucket that you're using at any given point.

So whether it's a TV show or a book or whatever it is, and you can bring your love of queens

of the Stone Age and your love of old school stakeholders, but also your love of, you know,

like funky, weird flea markets.

And that can be an hour of TV, you know, and that was mind blowing to me.

Like I don't know what kind of precedent there was for that.

Like I'm sure there are BBC news shows that kind of after round like that, but like Tony

seemed so like he knew that he was the reason people bought a ticket.

And so if he was interested in Fellini, it was going to be as much Fellini as it was

pasta in the Rome episode, you know.

And the fact that what he was so able to do so effortlessly based on his own honesty

and experience was collapse the walls that even as hopefully open-minded people we carried

with us into adulthood because it wasn't just that because I remember like reading the New York

Times at the same era and on Wednesdays, the dining in, dining out section would come out.

And there would be like, you know, William Grimes having a respectful three star review to

Blue Hill. My father would be like, did you read William Grimes's respectful three star review

of this American Brezer or whatever. But then also beneath it, Eric Asimov would be writing 25

and under and he would be reviewing like a pizza place or a noodle place or whatever.

So there was this idea that there was high and there was low and you could both be in the New York

Times, but you would be separate. What Tony did was bulldoze all of that and say that, you know,

there's a time and place for all of these things and the common thread isn't

price point, it's passion and honesty in how it's presented. So the noodles have their value in

a certain place and the charm of sitting on a plastic stool is that's how their best experience

just as if you go to Noma, that experience is worth doing. And also the New York City Dirtywater hotdog,

which he lionized in worship to his whole life also has its time and its place. And you know,

one of the things that he said in the podcast I did with him was that like the reason why they left

food network wasn't just that food network was definitely on it, which is now been a decade

long arc toward dumbing everything down. It's that is that Faran Adria who was at the time considered

the best chef in the world at the best restaurant, El Buoy in Spain was like, I like you come film

what we do. It's that he was like, oh my god, I guess we can do that now. We're going to gain

access to this temple and food networks said no and New York Times media said no.

Faran had out of the blue said to me, I'm willing to give you unprecedented access to my restaurant,

to my workshop, to my life, to my influences. I came back to New York with this incredible

opportunity to document this extraordinary chef in this extraordinary moment in time. And the idea

landed with a dull thud at both the New York Times television and food network and neither of them,

you know, they were absolutely dead set against. So who is he? He does a talk English. She's

it's too smart. We're not interested. Discussions reached the point where I said, look, we'll go do it

ourselves. We're reaching our own pocket. Nobody understood that his punk rock sensibility and way

of filming things and the access, what's the audience for that? Yeah. Where is the where is the

common viewer's interest in something so exclusive, but his ability to connect the dots was so,

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I love the fact that he would do episodes of his show that were maybe of limited reach.

You know, like they would be very specific and they would just be like,

I love the crime novels of George V Higgins and we'll do an episode in Boston that recreates

that feeling.

You know, and you're not going to find 10 places in and around Boston that you want to put on a

on your list of must-tries.

It's going to be me driving around in an old Buick.

Like with cigarette smoke in the air.

You know, it was like he started to iterate on like what the purpose of his show was,

which was not just to introduce you to new cultures and new foodways and restaurants.

It was to introduce you to new writers or old writers or films or music.

And he did an entire episode in the style of and then actually with the work of

legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

Yeah.

Who worked with Wong Kar-Wai among many others.

And he was like, I'm going to make an episode that's essentially an excuse to talk about cinematography.

Yeah.

Because that's what motivated him.

It's everything global has to start personal.

And that was his guiding ethos, especially as he got more and more clout.

So I want to talk about two elements of his television with you.

Because I think you're very familiar with the ZPC side of it.

Mm-hmm.

Can you tell me a little bit about how that place worked and what kind of collaboration they had

with Anthony when it came to making the television?

Yeah. I mean, I think he, this is, and we will talk about some of the books that have come out

about him and, you know, authorized and otherwise that that delved more into that actually how it

played out. But it is kind of simple in the sense that I think, um,

Lidious, Natalie and Christopher Collins were a married couple who were filmmakers reached out

to him at the same time that people were reaching out to him about making television.

And he found Kindred spirits.

And so the way he talks about it, and I imagine they would talk about it as well,

is that they built this thing of bespoke media-making vehicle from the ground up together.

And he talks about like when I spoke to him and I'm sure in many other places,

he flew to Japan for the first episode of a cook's tour being like, I can't believe someone's

going to fly me to Japan. Yeah.

And he gets there and all of a sudden the cameras were pointed at him and it had never occurred

to him that he would be on camera. Right. He thought the camera would be over his shoulder,

looking at the food. And so the, you know, the roughness of those episodes is amazing,

especially as they're trying to cram ambition and in coherence and ignorance into a 22-minute

food network show with commercials. Um, but, you know, look, like, like Bill said,

when he first put you in front of a microphone, like, you can't coach talent.

You know, like the people who have it or, or, or they don't.

And there's an authenticity that came across. And I think what was exciting about that

relationship was that it was so, and also ultimately very frustrating and challenging,

was that they grew completely together. And yet, and so they were willing to push each other

in terms of out of their comfort zone, in terms out of their aesthetic, artistic zone. Like,

what can we actually accomplish here? And then in the evolution of the series, you see,

the multiple series, because I would also include a brief show he did called The Layover.

Which I really like. Which is a lot more of what you were saying. That's more GPS-y.

And it's really influenced the way like we can hit a city. It's like Instagram now. Like,

hit a city. You get a pastry from here. Get a sandwich from here. Get a drink here.

In your days. Yeah, I do a duck boat ride and then you're good. It's like, what if you had 30 hours

to kill in the town? Yeah. And he, but so you could see it as an evolution of craft meeting raw

ambition. So that by the time they got to CNN, it's like graduating to a car, you finally know how

to drive. And so, by the time you get to CNN, all of a sudden, because of their experience in war

zones and the access that the brand had, suddenly he could do shows in the parts of the globe.

It had been absolutely closed off to him to dazzling, if not harrowing effect.

Yeah. I mean, a really great exercise if people are interested in doing it is to watch that early

cook's tour trip to Japan and his lack of comfort on camera. And then watch the one in Tokyo from

parts unknown season two, where it kind of opens with him. Is that the tentacle porn one?

Yes. But it also opens with him dressed like a Yakuza chief in a hotel bar.

Like silently, like regarding a glass of beer. Yeah. And then he, like, looks up and does like a

straight to camera monologue about how Japan was like taking acid. And it changed the way he looked

at the world to be here. And he still doesn't understand it. And then the episode that they do,

while they go and have like the most astonishing sushi and ramen that, you know, anyone in the world

eating is mostly about like martial arts and pornography, which is what he was interested in.

Yes. And fetish stuff. And like all this, like the CD under underbelly of Tokyo.

I'm sure there are other ways we're going to talk about this. But like, it is incredible to watch

his entire film, filmography and not as a travel show, but as a narrative show with one primary

character. And the way that his interests, like a lot of those last seasons, there was a lot of

Jujitsu because during the that the second decade of the century, when he was married to a second

wife, Otavia, and she got super into Jujitsu. And then he got really into it. And his physique changes.

And what he's interested in changes. And then on screen, you're like, man, this guy really likes to

talk to people after grappling on mats. And then you talk to people who worked for for 0.0. And they're

like, you have no idea what a fucking nightmare was because we would only go to places where there

was a Renzo Gracie gym. And we had to be there with him at six in the morning because that's what he

wanted to do. And you know, to put a button on the conversation about that collaboration, like

it's really hard for a equal partnership to succeed when one of the equal partners

becomes the brand and becomes the face of it. And so it became a lot of who's working for who

in ways that were constructive, I think, from talking to them in ways that were frustrating and

challenging and even dangerous. And that came out much later. One of the things that he did that I

always adored was essentially like his version of what we do here, which is like the kind of

network effect of like people go on each other's shows. And there's like a house. Yeah, I mean,

that is sincere. Like many of the people I work with, like I've known for at least a decade.

If not 20 years. But Bourdain would do the same. That'd be 30th anniversary, by the way.

They're our friendship. There you go. I think it may be today. I'm not even sure. My God.

Is it really? It's possible. It was this summer. Bourdain cinematic universe where it would be like

repair Michael Ruleman, of course, Zambier, who is often his fixer breaker in Eastern European

episodes. His brother came a couple times. And Tavi came a couple times. I think Josh Hami appears

several times across the multiple shows. Chang showed up, you know, Warchoy, like he had his

boys and his girls. And he I think the thing I was I always enjoyed about it is like if he

didn't do a Tennessee episode. And he just liked Alison from the kills. Yes. They would just hang

out. Like and it was like she was in his circle. He left her. Yeah. Yeah. So it was like always

really neat to me that he just had people that he was interested in. And if it worked, like they

would pop up over and over again in different cities accompanying him. This is the complicated

side of it, which is how do you engage with the posthumous Bourdain industry? Yeah. I have not

engaged with it personally. Like I haven't read any of the books. You know, I'm going to watch

I'm I'm really excited for Tony. I think it's been the appropriate amount of time to kind of

disassociate with his, you know, the shock that I felt when he died, but also like to start

thinking about him as a fictional character in some ways. Yeah. You know, like I think that sometimes

helps. I think it's also interesting to think about it as the inverse from a conversation we had

a week ago when we were talking about the Spider-Man movie and you you're lack of interest in

origin stories. In many ways for incredibly famous people who have complicated presences and

legacy, the more innocent origin story is the purest thing to fictionalize and share. Sure.

Because it's almost acknowledging the myth making that was necessary for the perpetual myth. Yeah.

This is all that is it's a wordy way of saying like if you're going to make a fictional Tony Bourdain

story, this is the one that I think would make the most sense and this alone. Yeah, I think it would

be tough if it was like Layhaar or something that was a little bit more like more people had seen

him do that and there were more kind of accounts of like, well, it wasn't exactly like that or whatever.

And it sounds like Matt and the screenwriters did a really good job.

Kind of there are certain characters that are malcomations. There are certain ideas that are

broadly put across and kitchen confidential but are not explicitly like play out this way.

I was curious how much you've engaged with his work since he died. I mean, have you

revisited episodes of parts unknown or no reservations? Do you rarely? Not really.

Not rarely. But I think I was also and I you know, I all the caveats like he wasn't the

friend of mine. Like we weren't close. Sure. We I met him four times maybe. But I find it

really painful. I never know. I find it incredibly difficult. I was really scared to listen to

that podcast only because I was like, at least I remembered that I met him but there was no proof

of how it went, you know, or how I used the time which ended up being like the only time.

So I was worried I'd have regret or if I did I misrepresent him or myself or not.

If you think about his time as finite and he gave some to me, it felt like a incredible

gift. Yeah, for sure. What I have done is read most of the books, you know, and

what do you think that compulsion is that's different than revisiting the TV?

I think there's a number of things about it. I think one is it's an incredible

opportunity. I want to exercise in combating my own myth making

proclivities that when I spoke to him 11 years ago, he was in the midst of a reinvention that for

whatever reason, maybe it's just like the conservative storytelling mind that we all

shared to a degree, I really needed to believe in. So he talks a lot in the interview about

I have a wife now. I have a daughter now and that's what grounds me and coming home to New York

is different in having these family holidays and doing Thanksgiving like, you know, like it's

fucking the Ted Offensive is like everything to me and that's changed.

You know, I think like a lot of people who've lived on the margins for a long time,

I've always had this nose pressed against the glass kind of wonder what it might be like

given the opportunity to live a normal life. I mean, for 30 years I was a chef so I never cooked

at home or had any kind of real normal family life. So now that I'm a father and now that I've

just for the last couple of years started doing a vacation and real holidays with family,

write down my menus and I plan as if I'm, you know, taking the beach at Normandy and I,

you know, we're happy family, we're normal, we're going to have a normal, you know, totally awesome

typical Thanksgiving, you know, and you will enjoy all of it. So there's something a little creepy

about it, but but it's something I really, really love. And within two years, you know, he had

left his family and was in what, you know, turns out to be a quite,

competitive, yeah, relationship with, um,

I charge our juncture with Ozzy Argentum. And I think the thing that's really important for me

in this and I'll talk about some of the positive stuff in a second is that there is no

easy narrative page turn in a human life. And the narrative that I too easily bought into and

that everyone did was this former bad boy, this former addict is now perfect has found yeah,

not just yeah, not just peace, but has found a calling and is a leader and inspiration to people

about coming out of addiction and about embracing the world and all these things. And people are

who they are and people are deeply flawed and complicated people who are always every version

of themselves all at once. So to engage in some of this stuff and so when he when he took his life

and and the zero point zero people reached out to me and so I got to talk to people, you know,

when it was incredibly raw and how how much anger there was. Yeah, you know, for their for their

love for him, for their friend, for their own lives and careers and what they had been spending

their time doing. And so in the immediate aftermath, um, Laurie Wilver, who's become a friend who is

his assistant and then co author of his cookbooks and and and other projects put together,

an oral history book called Bourdain that is really exceptional and paints like a really,

I think, honest and intentionally subjective portrait through the eyes of people who

knew him best from throughout his whole life. There is an unauthorized biography by Chris lemon

that I think is not worth engaging with. It is it's very lurid and very like press nose pressed

up against the glass of a of a car crash, which I don't think that it was. And then maybe the most

compelling book to come out of it to complicate the legacy is Tom Vittale's in the weeds and Tom

came on the podcast. This is during COVID-ish when the book came out and to talk about it and,

you know, he was with him every step of the way during parts unknown and before and the picture

that's painted is freely complicated. It's really heartbreaking because what he's describing is

someone who became so paralyzed by fame and expectation that he would travel the world. And the

first thing he would do when you would get to an exotic place would be, you know, check into

a very nice hotel, which you know, fly first glass, check into a hotel good with him so far.

And then send someone out for KFC or anything comforting to create a kind of home bubble before

he ventured out further. And then when he came back to New York, at this point, he was living

alone on the upper east side, the intentionally like least Tony Bourdain neighborhood in New York

and was bordering on a Gorfobick because he knew that going out came with all the expectations.

Sure.

And the ego and the temper and the addictive tendencies were flaring in ways that because the

power dynamic were really, really hard to work out on the fly. And then the relationship completely

upended him. You know, and so to read these things is really challenging. I would also say,

Laurie Williver has a memoir called Karen Feeding that is really worth reading because it is also

not just inside of the Tony, but inside into her own experience around him. And generally,

the psychology of food people, people who are drawn to this like pirate ship of a career.

Yeah. And I think you know, Bourdain's career covers a period of time. You know, he dies right when

the great reckoning is kind of happening in terms of he was getting off some really strong

me two tweets. You know, and I know, but like in turning on batali. And I think also the disassembling

the idea that cruelty is sort of the pathway to excellence for in terms of coaching and management

structure and mentorship and that like, you know, I certainly don't really subscribe to that in

my life, but I also don't work under the pressure cooker environment. Yeah. You know, like I think

I've worked in environments where like people can be quite, quite angry with each other, but not

necessarily like nothing on the level of what you what you hear about in restaurants, you know,

and that sort of tension between like the restaurant is the one place or used to be the one

place that almost anyone could get a job, you know, yes. And almost anyone could maybe make a

career out of being in a restaurant, but it also then has like a very combustible mix of

personalities because it's not like all you guys went to culinary school and you know exactly

what you're doing. It's like, well, there might be a guy who was like five years ago. I was in jail,

but now I'm like the world's best line cook, you know, I mean, we've all seen heat, you know, and

well, and you know, else seen the heat that people have made the bear, which is also, you know,

for its successes and its failures, I think as a TV show over five years,

wrestles with this exact concept. Yes. Is it worth it to be this way? And what are we chasing?

And one of the things he said to me, you know, right off the bat in our conversation was of all the

people in the world, chefs are probably the least qualified or prepared to be communicators,

to be storytellers, to be on TV, to be self-reflective in any way.

I think it's one of the central priorities of celebrity chefdom that that of all the people in

the world that we now require communication skills of, we've somehow chosen the least qualified,

the people who probably chose their profession or instinctively moved towards the profession of

cooking because they sensed in themselves bad communication skills and awkwardness with with the

world a difficulty communicating through conventional means. And yet he is more than almost

anyone responsible for that transition of like the thing that we hate in restaurants of like,

let me tell you about our food. That's on him too. Yeah. In ways both good and bad. I think the

thing that I find, and I imagine I'll find heartbreaking in the movie Tony too, was just how

how vulnerable he always was and was always showing us. And when you do watch, when I have

rewatched episodes, the image and the memory and the pure worship is about a kind of fearless swagger.

But when you watch the episodes, you don't see that very often. You see the, you see the joking

and you know, in the kind of the bluster, but that's a defense mechanism. And you see his eyes

when he walks into some rooms where things aren't the way he thought they were going to be. And it's

awkward. And that's very, very endearing. But what's wild to me about, especially about this

the posthumous stuff is that that becomes the through line. And you kind of wish that in the midst

of everything else in the hero worship that I did too, that that he had people or more people or

that he could have listened to the people more who were just like, hey, we just, we just love you,

man. I prefer obviously no reservations in parts unknown as I'm sure Anthony Bourdain didn't

people or see if he did. So I was kind of going through seasons of those and I very quickly made up

a 10, 10 favorite episodes list. The thing that was painful for me this time around wasn't watching

him. It was watching what the world used to be like in no way am I trying to like rob anybody else

of like the experience of getting to go places or like the experience of however they want to enjoy

those places. But the stark lack of people walking around with phones taking pictures. Yeah.

Shit. Being him being in Barcelona, obviously he gets preferential treatment wherever he goes.

But like just even the cityscapes of some of the towns he's going to in Spain and you know,

all over the world, it just seems like there's just less bullshit going on. It seems still seems

foreign and far the right. And frankly, it does sound like a big big old snowflake like him and Obama

and Hanoi having beers and being like, man, we're fucking turnin the big boat around and we're

like steering towards the big beach of justice and like resolution and and we can walk into the

world on a fray and explore things and be open and then we can reckon with our past but still kind

of move towards the future. And I was like, holy shit, this is pretty melancholy to watch these two

dudes do this. And the time elapsed between that happening, which I think was like roughly 2015

and then 2025 when pictures from it went viral with saying Barack Obama ate noodles with Jeffrey

Epstein. Like that's that's a 10 year gap in the degradation of the world.

But you know, you were just talking about like this very specific portrait that gets painted in

these posthumous biographies and oral histories. The other thing that kind of shook me a little

bit watching it is that in my favorite episodes for the most part, there's a moment where he expresses

to a group of people or a person how in another life he wishes he could just live here.

A lot. Yeah, he says that I talked about that specifically about Sansabashian and just being part

of the Arzac family and like how he just was like I would just live here. I would eat ten seafood

and drink sparkling beer and like be a stash for these people if I could. And there's my you know,

I can start with my my list in my number one episode. He's walking around to all these people who

doing a bushery they're they're doing a whole hog cook basically. And he just keeps being like

this is incredible like all you people know how to cook like all you people know how like all

these specialties and stuff and this is insane and he's like telling everybody he's complimenting

everybody but you can feel that he's like how is this real life? You know what I mean? Like and like

I'm just I'm visiting I'm passing through but this is Wednesday night for these people. Yeah.

And I think you know in his because he's dead I think you look at that some of those moments

more poignantly and those are uncomfortable moments to encounter. There's also so many great

incredible singular moments to be captured on these shows so it's I can still revisit them

but sometimes it'll just jump out of nowhere. But I think that spirit is really important to capture

and any something that he talked about with me about how like the more he does and the more he sees

the less he knows. Yes. Which is a beautiful and challenging sentiment and one almost

known in the world as comfortable admitting. The world is a whole lot bigger than I thought it was

a lot stranger and more interesting and no matter how long I live or how much time I spend here

I'll never even approach understanding it that's both intimidating and exciting. Look I like that

feeling I know nothing. I'll go through my episodes. Do it. My number one and these are this is not

in any particular order although I would say this number one is kind of a special one to me.

Number one is Cajun Country which comes from No Reservations season seven.

For some reason it's just one of my favorite episodes of television I've ever seen no matter what.

This is Tony in New Orleans after Katrina. He hangs out with Wendell Pierce who he knows through

Trume. They have Yakimaan which is a kind of soul food Chinese food hybrid Chow Man noodle dish.

Immigrant. That a woman makes like out of the back of a pickup truck. Yeah. Then he goes off into Cajun

Country in a drop top Cadillac where he starts to discover like a full on new culinary world outside

of New Orleans but pulling from Cajun food traditions and he basically hangs out with a group of

people who live up in Cajun Country who do two nights of like collective communal dining that

sends him into like food Nirvana including it's just great. He's the kind of guy who would eat

crawfish bisque in Louisiana and he just eats the bisque and he's like that's the single best

dish I've had since Elbouille. Yeah. That's fucking awesome. Yeah.

Like that he can he can read the entire landscape like that. So David Simon's in this one too.

Love Cajun Country. Andy references but Spain from No Reservations season four is just the

the assembly of goats. It's Fernand Adria working in his test kitchen. It's the grill grilling master

from X Tabari. I'm sorry if I'm getting some of these names wrong and the RZAC family who take

him around to Topus places. You can just feel how desperately he wants to live there and just like

you know soak himself in red wine and and and Topus. And it's interesting too because of a lot of

the international travel we think of it about him opening the doors to these places for us. And yet

recently I was reading some things about the evolution of British food in this century for example.

And Tony Lootm's really large in that too because Tony traveled the world and he said Fergus Henderson's

restaurant St. John is the best restaurant for him. Yes. And what Fergus Henderson was doing in

London at the beginning of the century was radical and that he was like this is English food.

Is this seasoning his food? Well, hey now this is the thing. He was like I will make I will take a white

plate and put a cooked cow's tongue on there with some parsley and be like that's a meal. Yeah.

And or you know he was obsessed with the bone marrow dish. And people who were contemporaries of

Fergus Henderson like talk about how more Danes saying that made it okay within London to be like this

guy is not a crank on the margins. He's our future. And that there was like a weird process of

internal legitimization that came from him exporting his own opinions and tastes. Yeah. There's

a couple episodes that I wanted to shout out just because of it's ordain being a homie. Like it's

just really fun to watch him with some people that he loves hanging out. And these are not places.

I mean, these are all great food destinations in their own way. But Quebec with the guys from

Joe beef legendary. I mean Quebec episode is like this is parts unknown season one. This is an

episode where I'm like I felt the same way about that episode that I did about watching the dark

wizard where I'm like that's awesome that people do that. But I do not want to take a can of

Fwagra and put it on top of my Poutine covered french fries. Yes. And he goes to a restaurant in

basically in the woods. That is a iteration on like Canadian sugar shack dining essentially.

And it's this guy who's making all this stuff with like serups. And you know, they're having this

like extraordinary like I think he's his blog post that he wrote about this episode was food

fucked in Montreal or something like that. So that's a great one Charleston from parts unknown

season six with Sean Brock famous waffle house visit. And it's just like his his kinship with

Brock is so evident. One of my few memories of being with him is that because of that interview,

I then got on the 0.0 holiday party invite list. Oh wow. So for a couple years, I got invited to

these parties and or any kind of party they were doing like whether it was to promote the release

of a show or something. And like, you know, I definitely went to the first one, which is at a very,

very not cool, but very, very fun and iconic Chinese restaurant in your Wall Street like not cool

at all. They would always have it there because Tony loved that restaurant. And I definitely showed up

to the first one having visions of like we're finally going to like hang out, you know, and like

and the truth is very similar to that. But the truth is that I should have known, but I didn't

know that I only knew the legend is that like he got there 15 minutes before the party started.

He had one heineken with his wife and daughter with him with the crew. And then as soon as the party

was really kicking off, he was gone. I wish I could because he knew that like the party wasn't for him

because everything else was about him. But the Sean Brock thing was there was a party they had once at the

God, what's the name of that hotel? It's the it was like the hotel that like was it called the nomad?

Probably. Yeah, when they were there. Yeah, and there was a party in the basement there. And

Tony was hanging out with Eric repair and Sean Brock. And I had my like 30 seconds of being like

hello chefs, you know, everybody loved it. And I met Sean Brock and Sean Brock then produced a

bottle of a happy van Winkle Sean Brock by who we should say his own journey sober now. Very happy

in life and successful. But at that time, he was a bit of a whiskey enthusiast. And he brought

at a bottle of this like super culty whiskey that only became cultier by being associated with the

Bourdain diaspora. And it was like impossible to get and there was waiting lists for years. And he

was just free pouring shots of it to Eric and to Tony. And I waited probably like 30 seconds. Then

I said, thanks for inviting me. And I never tasted that. But I definitely hung out a little too long.

I've had it once. I don't think I had the good stuff. Yeah, pretty good. I've got it a couple

of times actually. It's pretty good. That was like, what was the thing that I was getting called out for?

For years later watching the last dance. Watching the last dance two and a half years later and

getting on mic to say, it was pretty good. Along with Charleston, I also really loved the US desert

one, which is from no reservation season seven. This is one that's basically Tony banging around

Joshua tree with Queens of the Stone Age. And going to like weird desert freak flea markets,

but also like old man's daycows and it culminates with Queens of the Stone Age making music for

the episode that we're watching. And then them doing a potluck dinner together with Anthony Bourdain

makes them spaghetti. But they're doing like a cabbage slaw and a cornbread and like whatever specialties.

All the guys in Queens of the Stone Age can cook except for Joshua's making the music. And

it's just this picture of like this. There are some places that he goes that you're like, I can't

wait to go there. Yeah. There are some places he goes where like they're never going to invite me to

ranch a little Dola Luna where there's like a tree full of empty patron bottles. I know the

rewatchables reaches in a lot of surprising places. But this was a really rad one and obviously

music is a huge part of this show in Port-Ain's life. Leon, which is his kind of return to the original

Pruss Madeleine of French cooking. He goes to France with Balloude and they kind of do this

French French classics pilgrimage. I think Bill Buford takes them around to some restaurants for a while.

I've never been to Liam but I would love to and it's an incredible episode. I thought you were

going to mention it. I don't know if repairs in that one but we should shut out like the way that

the friendship with repair which was like incredibly odd couple because Eric repair is this like

beautiful Buddhist monkish like high priest of like the most refined three Michelin star French

seafood dining but they just absolutely loved each other and got along and Eric repair is such a good

sport. Yeah. So that there's the episode where he brings repair to Sichuan province just to basically

just blow him out and it's it's very good television. You got to you can't really talk about

Port-Ain's TV without mentioning the Bay Rude episode from No Reservations season two which is

takes place as a conflict is breaking out and is kind of a turning point for his willingness to be

in uncomfortable places and also to be uncompromising in what he's depicting. This is you know

a conflict breaks out between Lebanon and Israel at the time like when they're shooting this and

they basically have to abandon their show but they do still stay you know they they air what would

have been 99% of food travel shows would have been like well scrap that I mean 99% of shows just

wouldn't have gone to Bay Rude but such an important piece of television. As a counterweight to that one

I would recommend the parts unknown episode of Adiron. It's incredibly thoughtful and incredibly

beautiful and nuanced portrait of a country that was in the news then and is very much in the news now

and specifically noteworthy because in it he's host Tony's hosted by Jason Rezane and who's

a Washington Post journalist based there and his wife and shortly after the episode was filmed in 2014

they were imprisoned by the regime and in that posthumous episode Port-Ain's legacy you mentioned

that where they interview me they also and I can't believe this because we are not equal in this

they interview Jason and his wife talking about what that visit meant for the country for them

personally and then what happened after and how like there was a humanity at work behind the scenes

and between the episodes that it was really meaningful. A couple more episodes we Vietnam was a huge

place for him the Hanoi episode that we talked about with Obama and parts unknown season 8 but

also the Saigon episode from No Reservation season 5 and that one indulges in more of his like

Graham Green fascination and being an outsider in a in a world that he finds intoxicating.

He his great undone project that he talked about on the record for a long time was that he planned

to move to Vietnam for a year and not be making television and just live there and maybe a book would

come out of it or maybe some spiritual something yeah he never found the time to do it which I think

was a great regret and in the interview with me he talked about how he read those Graham Green before

having a child he read them as romantic and heroic and then he started to read them as lonely and

sad which is in a way like maybe more revealing than he intended sure I didn't have this in the original

list but I wanted to throw in a personal favorite which is season 5 of No Reservations is when he

takes Carlos who replaced him at layout I love this one quay blad episode back to Mexico hell yeah

and there is a scene where he and Carlos and their guide get up at like four in the morning

to go get breakfast at that place and it looks like the greatest meal I've ever seen and I have to be

honest with you I have tried over multiple visits Mexico City to go there yeah but I love being in

Mexico City so much that my behaviors the night before I conclude for Clude going to visit for the

best breakfast place of all time also can I say of all the like the truisms the like he just

flowing out of him thing is there like we blow your mind and tell you things you don't expect like

truth you know the truth teller the radical that he was at the beginning of his career some no longer

hold water like I think you even he said you can order fish on Mondays from good restaurants where

you might want to order fish on other days too they're not going to serve it but he was right about

two things always one brunch sucks and two all the best French cooks in America come from

poeblah Mexico or that generally all our food is cooked by immigrants from other places who do

unsung heroic brilliant delicious work and he was a champion of that absolutely and one of the one

of the my favorite parts unknown episodes is actually Houston which this is one of our

share of his ability to take a place like frankly like I've been to Houston a couple of times for

all star weekend or whatever and I never I to my own great detriment never explored you know I

went to the Rothko museum but that was about it and his portrait of Houston where it's like no

they're the best fun America is in this strip mall yep and then also I'm going to hang out with slim

thug yeah is like what it's really what I mean when I'm like it can be everything and everything

that you like can be part of your work you know it is this was made I believe what year was season eight

I mean that was near the end it was a later episode we talked about a still tipping on the podcast for

sure it gives me more hope for this country than almost anything made since yeah it is such a beautiful

episode of television I think about it constantly about you know we haven't even we didn't even really

talk about this just like the ways that he told stories in nonfiction that are applicable to what

we want in scripted television but to take a city and show it to us and use it as a microcosm for

not sugarcoding the problems of the country but as a test case for what can go right and what can

and should be celebrated if only we look like Houston does not I mean it has transformed itself and

and people's opinions of it have changed but you're right like people are like oh you mean that

that giant freeway with eight million people in it where I can't find anything that our museum is here

human is fucking has got for free no this is an entire universe yeah and it's the best of America

in a place that most people as casually and like callously assume the worst so those are my 10

we could put up a little list in the show notes maybe or I can I can I can put it up on Instagram

but it was pretty cool to go back through I also missed like there's no Japan episodes

there are no like I often loved his trips to various parts of New York City or to Los Angeles or

Chicago and like really hitting the big ones but yeah that's a personal personal faith list when

he was like defending making the the taste by being like look what can I say I get to live in the

chateau for two months and every morning a driver picks me up and takes me to a studio where

in a jell-a-lossin makes me an English muffin and like you're talking me into it sometimes we do

that was a one for him yeah I mean I was really struck by listening back and hearing at the very

end of our talk him talking about how the period of time that has now been fictionalized in Tony

is still present for him and that it it actually God knows what he would have thought of this

of this movie the complicated picture of him suggests that the ego would have been pleased

but the the more insecure parts would have been furious about the emissions or the sanitization or

whatever but I think the one thing he probably would have felt was that they were right to choose

this moment because I think that was the spark yeah and and and it probably better let him talk

about it than us but what a fun exercise yeah thanks for listening we'll be back uh next Monday let's

let's go out by hearing from Anthony Bourdain there's not distant memories uh shown up to it

you know a cold griddle and and that stench of unchange steam table water the past informs the

present and uh makes it more absurd and delicious the school bake sale because after work pick-up logistics

car seat meltdowns and a surprise science project every mom thinks you know what would really

relax me right now baking six dozen cookies for strangers and they got to be vegan gluten-free

nut-free sugar-free my secret to moist chewy freshly baked cookies pulling up to the nearest

bakery and storing everything in a Ziploc bag secure bake sale treats and your sanity for the

love of food Ziploc