Bourdain in Gaza

Did Anthony Bourdain ever make a more important hour of television? Viewed today, 10 years after ‘Jerusalem’ first aired on CNN’s ‘Parts Unknown,’ it’s hard to think of one.

"They are all nice. But if you scratch, if you push, they'll all say,:’ Throw them in the sea.’”

Ten minutes. That’s about as long as it takes watching Jerusalem, Anthony Bourdain’s eerily moving second-season opener of CNN’s Parts Unknown, for it to sink in: This is going to be an emotionally wrenching gut check, both for what it says and what it doesn’t say about what’s going on today, right now, in that corner of the Middle East.

What Bourdain has to say in the program has relatively little to do with Jerusalem itself, except at the beginning, when the restless wanderer and worldly philosopher in Clark’s Originals desert boots sums up in a few succinct, well-chosen words what the Old City means to three of the world’s established religions. “By the end of this hour,” Bourdain says, perhaps even more prescient than he knew himself to be at the time, “I’ll be seen by many as a terrorist sympathizer, a Zionist tool, a self-hating Jew, an apologist for American imperialism, an Orientalist, socialist, fascist, CIA agent, and worse. So here goes nothing.”

Well, hardly nothing.

It’s what comes next is both poignant and unspeakably sad, given what we know today about what happened on October 7th, four short months ago.

Jerusalem-born, British-Israeli chef, accompanied by chef, restaurateur and food writer Yotam Ottolenghi, who was conscripted into the Israel Defence Forces in his younger days and served three years in IDF’s intelligence headquarters sits quietly in the peaceful, sun-dappled homes of homesteaders who live alongside Israel’s border with Gaza while Bourdain does what he did best as he shares meals with artists, musicians and, yes, peace campaigners: He listens, while others talk.

This section in the program is hard to watch, because these were some of the very homes that were laid waste to last October, taking with them the dreams, aspirations and futures of those who lived there, raised their families there, and were laid to rest there, in more peaceful times. These are not the angry, rage-twisted faces of extremist settlers seen on the nightly news in the months and years leading up to today’s war, but rather the faces of peace campaigners and those who, on October 7th, may well have taken the secrets of a future, lasting peace with them.

Bourdain may have been a born peacemaker without realizing it. Later in the hour, he spends time with families in Palestine’s occupied territories in the West Bank and, in Gaza itself, sharing fatit ’ajir, a dish made of baby watermelon and unleavened bread, and maqluba, a traditional Palestinian dish made of layers of fried eggplant, while sharing ideas about what it will take to forge an enduring peace in the region. He finds himself moved by his visit to the Jewish-Arab-owned restaurant Majda, “You could almost believe for a minute or two that some kind of peace, some kind of reconciliation, meeting of the minds, sanity is possible after you visit Majda,” he says, in improv mode. “It feels like an alternate universe, for a number of reasons.”

For all the keen thoughts and basic beliefs Bourdain shared with his television followers over his years in TV’s spotlight, it was his capacity to listen while others spoke that gave him the insight that allowed him to move so many people with seeming ease.

For all his outsized personality and frequent mood swings — capably captured in field producer and self-confessed Bourdain guinea pig Tom Vitale in his book In the Weeds — Bourdain was at his best when drawing out other people’s internal monologues.

He was always looking for answers to the eternal truths. “I am instinctively hostile to any kind of devotion,” he confesses.

“Certainty is my enemy. I’m all about doubt — questioning oneself and the nature of reality constantly.”

He doesn’t hide his Americanism while a guest in Palestinian homes. “Many, if not most, of these guys are not too sympathetic to my country or my ethnicity, I’m guessing. But there’s that hospitality thing. Anywhere you go in the Muslim world, it seems, no matter what, you feed your guests and do your best to make them feel at home.”

Possibly intending to be ironic, though probably not, the Israeli-born, London-based chef Ottolenghi finds similar parallels in the origins of falafel. “The one thing that is very clear in this part of the world,” Ottolenghi notes, “Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, is that (falafel) has been cooked for many, many generations. There’s actually no answer to it, but the question of food appropriation — who owns the food — you can go on arguing about it forever.”

Bourdain had an unerring ability to size up his surroundings in less time than it takes most people to swipe a smartphone screen. In the Aida refugee camp two km north of Bethlehem — “a graveyard of dreams for Palestinians,” as Spain’s El País described Aida this past December — Bourdain tells his host, theatre director Abed Abusrour: “Six thousand people, (and) of that number 66 percent are under the age of 18. I don’t care where that is in the world; that’s pretty much a recipe for unruly behaviour.”

“Well, yes,” Abusroour replies. “Especially when you don’t have any possibilities to (release) the anger and stress in a creative way … after I finished my studies, I came back here and I started using theatre as one of the most amazing, powerful, civilized, and nonviolent means to express yourself, to tell your story, to be truthful.”

Amazing, powerful, civilized, and nonviolent:

That pretty much sums up Bourdain’s time in Gaza, Israel’s West Bank and in the calm, once quiet garden groves of kibbutzes and family homes that run along Israel’s border with the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

All this in 42 minutes of television, give or take.

Bourdain: “It's easily the most contentious piece of real estate in the world. And there's no hope, none, of ever talking about it without pissing somebody, if not everybody, off.”

Early in the program, while walking alongside Ottolenghi on Jerusalmen’s Via Dolorosa, “the "last trip Jesus did before he was crucified,” Ottolenghi tells him, then adds they may be walking in the very steps made by Jesus Christ.

“As I often do,” Bourdain says, then adding, after a pause:

“Jesus was here. I feel like I should be more … something,

“A little bit more pious?” Ottolenghi prompts helpfully.

“A little bit?” Bourdain says, with a rueful laugh. “It’s a bit too late for me.”

Not that late, though. The big picture was never far from his mind.

“One can be forgiven for thinking, when you see how similar they are, the two peoples, both of whom cook with pride, eat with passion, love their kids, love the land in which they live or the land they dream of returning to, who live so close, who are locked in such an intimate, if deadly, embrace, might somehow, someday, figure out how to live with each other. But that would be very mushy thinking.”

He is missed.

CNN

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Bourdain in Congo

In which intrepid explorer and restless wanderer Anthony Bourdain channelled his inner Joseph Conrad and (nearly) went full-on Kurtz on the Congo River.

The demarcation line between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DMC), or just plain “Congo” to seasoned travellers like the late Tony Bourdain, is easy to spot, if not that easy to navigate, according to more than a few present-day explorers, including writer Thurston Clarke in his compelling travelogue Equator.

The meticulous, painstakingly maintained road comes to a sudden end, and you’re suddenly driving through a pool of mud and brackish, brown floodwaters. Welcome to Congo. Please don’t neglect to notice the border guards in jungle fatigues and sporting AK-47s — they may want a gratuity. It’s just the polite thing to do. You’re in somebody else’s country, after all. Be patient and courteous. Oh, and gratuities are best paid in USD, preferably in mint condition bills. Ben Franklins will do.

Bourdain wanted to go down the river —yes, that river — ever since he first read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Francis Coppola’s landmark film Apocalypse Now — Bourdain was a noted admirer — came later, long before A Cook’s Tour set Bourdain on his true path.

In 2013, following Bourdain’s jump to CNN from the Travel Channel — bugger budgets, more prestige and, most importantly to Bourdain, a more serious geopolitical and philosophical worldview — he finally got his wish.

True, it almost killed him, but, as another noted writer-philosopher put it, what does not kill you makes you stronger.

Fun fact: As serious and bracing as the Parts Unknown episode Congo is — the final episode of Parts Unknown’s debut season — it’s nothing compared to what really happened behind the scenes when Bourdain channelled his inner Col. Kurtz a little too closely and mayhem ensued. Bourdain, feeling the effects of late-night heat, humidity, swirling insects and one shot too many on an empty stomach, suddenly got the urge to whip up an impromptu coq au vin for himself and the crew. He insisted every member of his inner circle, including — especially including — his terrified director/producer Tom Vitale, who did as he was told, to kill their own chicken. Vitale botched the job, as he feared he would, and suffered a near full-on nervous breakdown as a result.

The rumble in the jungle takes up a full chapter in Tom Vitale’s confessional In the Weeds, and the real story, believe it or not, is every bit as harrowing as what we see on the screen today.

You don’t say no to the boss late at night in the middle of the jungle, on an untrustworthy boat where some hapless fool has neglected/forgotten/never intended to put down the anchor and the boat is now drifting aimlessly Christ knows where down a  snake and crocodile infested river noted for the sheer number of people who go down the river and never return, not to mention the fact that the generator, never much good in the first place, keeps kicking out and Bourdain, wielding a huge knife and cursing everyone and everything in the middle of the Congo night — well, let’s just say this isn’t like sipping piña coladas on a tropical beach somewhere, say, La Playuela Cabo Rojo in Puerto Rico.

Coq au vin might not sound that ambitious — it’s simply chicken braised with wine, preferably a red Burgundy, with lardons, mushrooms and garlic.

The Congo poses its own unique set of challenges though, especially late at night, surrounded by venomous snakes, spiders and giant jungle moths with poison for blood and the fixer/head-of-expedition security is shouting at the top of his lungs, telling people not to swat away the giant moths because God only knows what might get under your skin if you do that — and, oh, did we mention, the hapless director/producer is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Welcome to CNN, the most trusted name in news. Travel Channel was never like this.

“Casually attired in a khaki shirt, Clark boots and his trademark Persol sunglasses, Tony made trekking through war-torn Congo look effortless,” Vitale opens the chapter Heart of Darkness with.

By the end, Vitale has changed his tune.

“Like many travellers who find themselves in a moral inferno, we’d begun in search of Tony’s childhood heart of darkness adventure fantasy.

“What we’d found was something different… maybe Tony could still say something that would justify why we’d risked life, limb, and sanity to go to the middle of the freakin’ Congo. I needed to know if it meant something to Tony. That I wasn’t disposable. I wanted to know if it had all been worth it. Or if he thought it hadn’t.”

Bourdain touches on that in his voice-over.

“Nine days of threats of imprisonment, confiscation of footage, and what was the most chaotic, difficult, yet amazing trip of my life,” he begins.

Then, the coq au vin:

“Our chickens are thin, scraggly, and tough. In order to make anything any kind of edible, I'm probably going to have to stew the crap out of ‘em."

“You want to eat?” he tells his crew at one point.  “You gotta kill your own chicken, and pluck it, too.”

And then, the bugs.

“Crush the wrong one of these moths while swatting at your face and you will blow up like a balloon,” Bourdain says. “Seriously.”

On realizing his childhood dreams:

“It is written that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I think I understand what that means now.”

And finally, when it dawns on him that this may have been a very bad idea:

“They'll find us ten years later, naked in the bush with a necklace of Spam cans.”

And finally, in his field notes at the very end, blessed perspective:

“At the time that 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 neighbouring countries, fighting it out across the country.

“One of them, M23 [short for March 23 Movement] were fighting amongst themselves only 10 miles away.

“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 in the business of extortion, murder, mass rape, and robbery, rather than simply amateurs.”

Perspective!

“We were, during our shoot, extremely fortunate. Relative to most, we had a luxuriously unmolested, violence-free time.

“We were extorted, detained, and threatened daily. But such is life in the Congo.”

Bottom line:

“The Congo is a place where everything is fine. Until it isn’t.”

Enjoy the show!

The view, this one anyway, looks so much better from the comfort and safety of the couch.

CNN

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Bourdain in Peru

“Imagine you took a lot of acid, and then you ate that whole bowl of ants …” The one where Tony Bourdain treks into the Peruvian Amazon in search of rare cacao beans— and comes back with an idea for a funky chocolate bar he christens Good & Evil.

During a previous trip to Peru, Anthony Bourdain wrote in his program notes for his return visit to Piruw Ripuwlika — Peru’s quechua name — for CNN’s Parts Unknown (season 1, episode 7, originally aired June, 2013) ), he bounced around Lima, explored the ever-changing food scene — ”from the more cutting-edge fine-dining restaurants to the funkiest but most delicious traditional cevicherías” — huffed his way up pre-Columbian Andes mountains, got dizzy from altitude sickness, stuffed his mouth with coca leaves, ate guinea pig in Cuzco, explored the jungle of Amazonia, drank chicha with yucca farmers, took ayahuasca in the darkness of night with a curandero, puttered upriver in a wobbly boat — the kind TV producers like his long-suffering companion Tom Vitale just love — “with imaginary bats screeching in my brain and lights that probably weren’t there dancing in front of my eyes,” and took in the sights of Machu Picchu at dawn — “one of the most extraordinary experiences one can have in this life” — then watched millions of cutter ants strip a forest floor clean, made friends, and “learned something about the world and about myself.”

There was hardly a reason to return, Bourdain readily admitted in his programs notes, save one: His close friend and partner in kitchen crimes Eric Ripert, the chef of the most excellent Le Bernardin in NYC, told him that he (Ripert) had recently tasted the “best chocolate in the world,” and asked if Bourdain would be so kind as to get involved in a likely disastrous cooperative venture into the high-end gourmet chocolate business. Cacao loco!

The resulting chocolate bar, christened Good & Evil, would kick off the most viral discussion of chocolate in recorded history. (To save you the trouble, don’t bother looking; I tried. The most recent mention of Good & Evil chocolate on Reddit dates from two years ago; the high-end kitchenware and home furnishings retailer Williams-Sonoma had exclusive rights to Bourdain-Riperts’ chocolate confections, but any trace of Good & Evil has long since vanished from Williams-Sonoma’s various websites.

Don’t get me wrong: Williams-Sonoma has plenty of gourmet chocolate, but not Bourdain-Ripert.

If you rewatch Parts Unknown, as I did the other night, it might help to sample some gourmet chocolate of your own, to get in the mood.

LA-based Compartés comes highly recommended by connoisseurs, though in my neighbourhood Green & Black’s is more accessible, and less likely to require you to take out a bank loan to cover the cost — to get into the mood.

Peru is less politically driven than earlier 1st-season episodes of Parts Unknown like Libya and Colombia — Peru may have been more politically stable when Bourdain visited than it is today — but the country is full of surprises, none the least its claim to pride-of-place as the world’s premium supplier of gourmet cacao beans.

To reiterate — after all, what are TV reruns for? — Good & Evil was the culinary love child of Bourdain, Ripert and Éclat chocolatier Christopher Curtin; it was fashioned from personally selected, hand-picked pods of Peruvian Pure Nacional, an exceedingly rare and prized all-white strain of cacao bean thought to have been wiped out nearly 100 years ago.

No wonder the Good & Evil bar sparked a chocolate conversation that went viral.

“I don’t know whether you knew this,” Bourdain says at one point, “but I am an aficionado of early erotica of pre-Columbian and post-Columbian eras — you know, like pottery of people doing it.”

Erm, alrighty then.

The Peruvian rainforest was the incubator, too, for many of the early legends of El Dorado, the so-called “City of Gold.”

“Wow, gold necklaces,” Bourdain says, during a museum prowl of pre-Columbian arts and artifacts.

“You see why the Spanish just freaked out when they came here and turned into maniacal greedheads.”

And then there’s the cuisine.

“Whole different flavour spectrum, right? All new. It’s almost like you need a new section of your tongue when you eat this food, It’s not like, well, this is something like. It’s not ‘kind of like’ anything. It’s really awesome.”

Not to mention the chocolate.

After watching Peru, either for the first time or the umpteenth, it’ll be hard to settle for a Snickers or Twix ever again.

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Bourdain in Libya

Tony Bourdain’s throwback to Libya, post-Colonel: Check out the ‘Uncle Kentucky Fried Chicken’ in a 2013 outing for CNN’s Parts Unknown that still resonates in 2024.

It’s true what they say: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Tangier was always going to be a tough act for Tony Bourdain, but from where I sit, he gave it a genuine shot with Libya, another landmark episode that aired in Parts Unknown’s debut season, on CNN in 2013. Ten years ago today, give or take.

It was one of Parts Uknown’s more tense episodes — one reviewer at the time mentioned that perhaps only Haiti could compare in that department —  Libya is both strangely disorienting and oddly familiar today, especially in light of recent events throughout the Middle East.

It’s strange, for example, to hear Bourdain say, as he does in the program’s opening moments: "It's amazing arriving here after all you see on TV these days that Libya is, in fact, functioning at all. But it is.”

Fast-forward 10 years, give or take, and it’s hard to figure out what, if anything, has really changed.

It’s still not on the tourist map — I bought a ticket to Libya once, not so long ago, on British Airways, but the flight, insanely expensive by Mediterranean standards, double what it would have cost to fly to nearby Morocco, for instance, never got off the ground — and at this rate, Libya won’t appear on any tourist maps for some time to come yet.

Two years ago, the Libya episode was singled out in Vanity Fair’s excerpts from Bourdain’s longtime director/producer and creative colleague Tom Vitale’s book In the Weeds, and it’s not hard to see why. Libya was not the kind of program one might see on the Travel Channel or Food Network, or even Parts Unknown at that point.

There is little to no fine dining to speak of, save the occasional nod to the salving effects of street food — the fish market in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, for example, where Bourdain gleefully notes the day’s menu is presented as the actual fish you will be eating for lunch, as opposed to the lame, declassé option of listing the lunch specials on a printed menu.

Anyone for barracuda, with the heads?

And while you’re there, do check out Uncle Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s like the colonel,  but not actually the Colonel.

Libya is replete with those pithy, uniquely oddball and yet uniquely perceptive observations Bourdain-ophiles have grown fond of over the years, from “Every kid over the age of five seems to have been issued a lighter and a fistful of fireworks,” to, “This is Tripoli after 42 years of nightmare …  How to build a whole society overnight and make it work in one of the most contentious and difficult areas of the world, is what people are trying to figure out.”

They’re still trying.

Libya today is presided over — “governed” would be too strong a word, metaphorically and literally — by a mishmash of local militias, most of whom hate each other with a passion reserved for, oh, say Gaza or the Occupied Territories in Palestine, and a national government that appears to lurch ever closer to the not entirely exalted status of ‘failed state’ with each passing day.

The shadow of Col. Muammar Gaddafi — Gaddafi, Gadhafi, or Qaddafi (قذافي, Qaḏḏāfī), take your pick — still loomed large over Libya at the time Bourdain visited, even though the erstwhile colonel-in-name-only had been rudely shish-kebabed in his hometown of Misrata two years earlier. Bourdain again: “Outside Tripoli's centre, there's this  one-time axis of all power and untold evil, a huge complex of sinister offices, barracks, and residences on top of a rabbit warren of secret tunnels and underground facilities.”

Oh, dear. Secret tunnels and underground facilities — now where have we heard that before?

Everywhere he goes, Bourdain finds himself surrounded by modified weaponry — “You took it off a helicopter, and you put it on a car?" — and homemade firearms — “So, it’s basically a crossbow … that fires Molotov cocktails.”

Bourdain, unshaven and looking at times more shaken than stirred, is constantly being knocked off-balance, it seems, at one point threatened by a local militia that barks at his crew to stop filming, or else, and things get dicey. “I don't know if you noticed but I'm going full-Blitzer on this shoot,” Bourdain says at one point, showing off his scruffy beard for the camera.

The distinct lack of alcohol — it’s a Koranic thing — doesn’t seem to bother him. At first.

"I've been about a week without any alcohol. I'm enjoying my new clean-living lifestyle.”

Well, that wouldn’t last. Either.

As always — and this is what elevates Bourdain’s work above the rote, the usual, then and now — he spared a thought at the very end for those who live there, and he found a grace note on which to close the hour.

“It's Libya,” he says, with weary resignation. “They were supposed to be the bad guys, a bad country filled with bad people, right? I don't think so. … I wish them the very, very best.”

What the hell, it’s all about the end result, right? And Libya makes for fascinating — if occasionally harrowing — viewing, especially today.

And that fried chicken? Not to die for exactly, but I’ll bet it had its compensations. It sure did look that way.

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Bourdain in Maroc

Remembering Tony Bourdain rock the casbah in Tangier Morocco, the “City of Stories,” for CNN’s Parts Unknown.

At a talk a few years back at a book fair near where I live, the respected world traveller Paul Theroux — who broke bread with Anthony Bourdain over Hawaiian rice flavoured with pineapple, coconut and golden raisins in a Parts Unknown outing for CNN two years later — said that anyone else’s experiences of the South Pacific, as Theroux recounted in his first-person testimonial The Happy Isles of Oceania, would not be the same as his, should they decide to go.

That’s the whole point of writing prestige literature, Theroux said.

It’s not about the place; it’s about the person inside.

I was reminded of that the other night while re-watching Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Tangier, Morocco, in which Bourdain waxes poetic about the experiences of several of his literary heroes, among them William S. Burroughs, in “the City of Stories,” as Tangier is often known.

Tangier was founded in the 5th century BC. It’s a crossroad of cultures, ruled at various intervals over time by Phoenicians, Romans, Carthaginians, Spaniards, the English — oh god, the English! — and Arabs, including a several-year spell as an “international city” in the early 1950s (think Rick’s Cafe Americain from Casablanca, if Casablanca had been governed at the time by the UN).

As described by Bourdain, Tangier is a state of mind, full of cultural enclaves and layers, where a waiter may welcome you in Spanish, a member of the local constabulary may address you in inflected French, and where voices cry out in Arabic over streets that have borne witness to decades of literary hangers-on, from William S. Burroughs and Paul Bowles to Alexandre Dumas and Mark Twain, all cast in the luminous sea light of the Mediterranean and  Gibraltar, with Spain and modern Europe just a short ferry ride away.

I’ve been to Tangier myself, years ago, and I can’t still quite wrap my head around the experience, even something as banal as whether I loved it or hated it.

Theroux had a point because my Tangier was most decidedly not Bourdain’s Tangier, or at least the Tangier that Bourdain describes — aptly and well, with the heartfelt conviction that Bourdain brought to virtually every place he experienced throughout Parts Unknown’s 12 seasons. (Looking back on it now, can it really have been 12 seasons?)

I never cared for Burroughs’ writing, for one — Naked Lunch, which Burroughs wrote in 1959, the year I was born, was unreadable. (No, I didn’t try to read it then; that would’ve been some neat trick.

I tackled it years later as a young man).

Bourdain would no doubt dismiss me with one of his signature scoffs and an irritated wave of the hand.

I’m a great admirer of Paul Bowles, though. The Sheltering Sky, for me, is a masterpiece of modern prose. It played a large role — though by no means the only role — in nurturing in me a lifelong fascination with the Sahara.

And therein lies the rub. Tangier is a city of mystery and intangibles, where no two people are likely to experience it the same way.

During his stay for Parts Unknown, Bourdain sampled the British tea at Café Tingis (one teabag per person, and another for the pot, how very English, do they give the teabags pet names?); the tagine (a traditional Moroccan stew of vegetables and meat of fish) at Saveur de Poisson on Escalier Waller; the Moroccan mint tea at Café Baba on Rue Zaitouni and the Moroccan tomato salad at le Restaurant Andalus; and last but not least, the Moroccan goat cheese, or jben, at Grand Socco at Place du 9 Avril 1947, a town square named for the date of a speech given by King Mohamed V.

I, on the other hand, downed a bottle of lukewarm Coke on a hot late afternoon one year in May, while working worked my way through a paper plate of soggy fries.

It did have its compensations, though. I kept the bottle, tiny, made of seemingly inch-thick glass, in the classic old glass style of Coca-Cola bottles, with the Coke logo printed in Arabic. I’ve stored it on a shelf near my workspace all these years. (Fun fact which likely won’t surprise you: Coca-Cola, written in Arabic, is instantly recognizable as saying Coca-Cola, even to someone as unfamiliar with cursive Arabic script as I am.)

Chances are, you will never see Tangier for yourself. If you do, though, remember Theroux’s counsel about all places in all parts of the world: your experience won’t be the same as mine, or anyone else’s. Everyone sees things differently.

I’ll say this, though. What Bourdain had to say, and what he saw and experienced of Tangier in his own words for CNN is an out-of-body experience in its own right. Hadha sahih.

Further reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/morocco/bourdains-field-notes-morocco/

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