Bourdain in Russia

“With the [sic] possible Russian invasion of Ukraine all over the news,” locations photographer David Scott Holloway posted on Reddit two years ago, “I’ve found myself thinking a lot about when we travelled there for Parts Unknown.” Today, ten years after that episode first aired, Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Russia’ is as trenchant — and poignant — as if it had aired yesterday.

Where to begin?

As with so many things to do with Anthony Bourdain’s restless, eyes-open wanderings and soulful ruminations in his Parts Unknown verite docuseries for CNN, you can’t go too far wrong by beginning with Bourdain himself. In truth, Bourdain sowed the creative, philosophical and geographical ground for Russia years earlier, in 2002, during his nascent A Cook’s Tour program for the Food Network. That is when Bourdain first broke bread — or rather downed a vodka or two (or three or four) — with his soon-to-be friend, sidekick and semi-frequent travel companion Iazamir “Zamir” Gotta.

As an older, more self-reflective Bill and Ted of the travel-TV set, Bourdain and the Moscow-born Gotta, just a year apart in age at the time (Bourdain was born in 1956, Zamir in 1957), were philosophical peas in a pod, so to speak. Where Bourdain was caustic and observant and not a little cynical — ideal attributes for a life as a chef in a restaurant kitchen — Gotta was, and remains, somewhat of an innocent abroad, cheerful, ebullient and soulful by turns.

It was their shared sense of humour, one acerbic and always looking to burst the proverbial balloon with a sharp, well-timed verbal barb and the other making it up as he goes, zany and full of life, coupled with their shared humanity and deep-rooted respect for the hopes and dreams of decent, ordinary, everyday working people — that made Bourdain and Gotta such an agreeable pair in Parts Unknown.

Zamir first appeared in a pair of A Cook’s Tour episodes, aptly titled The Cook Who Came in from the Cold and So Much Vodka, So Little Time, but it was in No Reservations, years later on Travel Channel, that they truly made their mark with the TV-viewing audience, with seven episodes over an eight-year period, in visits to Uzbekistan, Russia (specifically, St. Petersburg, aka Petrograd, or to Soviet enthusiasts, Leningrad), Romania — arguably one of the zaniest, most outrageous hours of TV that Bourdain and his long-suffering cameraman/producer/director Tom Vitale ever made together — Ukraine (yes, that Ukraine) and, interestingly, the U.S. heartland: the Rust Belt, Kansas City and Brooklyn, NY, unofficially the heart of Bourdain’s native NYC.

Russia, for Parts Unknown, would prove to be fortuitously timed, happening as it did just weeks before the Sochi Olympics and not long before Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Vladimir Putin’s bid to rewrite the history of the Crimean War — 1853-1856, updated for the 21st century.

Russia opens in a field of snow amid a stand of birch trees — “Beautiful, right?” Zamir says off-camera, “We can already indulge ourselves into something special. Such a beautiful day! … Ah, what a place.”

He’s being both literal and ironic, of course, irony being one of the hallmarks of Russian literature — and as a writer myself, I can honestly say that Russian literature is just about at the very top of the field, up there with Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare.

Bourdain famously hated the cold, and the making of Russia coincided with one of the most bitter winters in Russian memory at the time. Bourdain famously said that an ill-advised shoot in Lapland in mid-winter just about killed him; it’s not hard to imagine that, years later, sunning himself in Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s retreat in Jamaica, Bourdain took one long look at the beach and thought to himself, I could get used to this.

It isn’t long before Bourdain tells viewers what he really thinks of Russia’s fearless leader — still is today, ten years later — “All hail the Maximum Leader. Now, let’s dance!” — but it doesn’t bear repeating here. Bourdain had an inimitable way of describing his irritation at certain people in the public eye, and he is unsparing in his assessment of Maximum Leader. It’s the kind of descriptive way with words that made Bourdain famous, and really should be seen for oneself (Parts Unknown episodes are available for streaming on the (HBO) MAX streaming site, co-owned by CNN owners Warner Bros. Discovery, and are available for purchase on Apple’s Apple TV (formerly iTunes) site).

“It's February 2014, and the Sochi Olympics are just coming up when I arrive in Moscow,” Bourdain says in the opening. “It's a different Moscow every time I come here. The '80s style, go-go capitalist conspicuous consumption see-who-can-spend-the-most-money disco-techno thing that I encountered when I first came here back in 2001 — it's still going strong.

“In fact, these days, Moscow has one of the highest concentrations of billionaires in the world. But as never before, it's imperial Russia now, a one-man rule.

All power emanates, every decision must consider, this guy.”

Russia is full of characters with murky pasts and shadowy connections, Bourdain continues. “But one of them I've called a friend for more than a decade.”

“Tony, wow,” Gotta replies, humbled and awed. And genuine.

And that’s what really works throughout Parts Unknown, not just in Russia but in all the episodes. This is genuine.

“I guess I’m switching to vodka, Zamir.” Bourdain tells him. Switching? When travelling in Russia in the dead of winter, when was he ever off vodka?

“Listen, as a born Muscovite, I'm trying to be a good patron,” Gotta tells him. “So I really want you to tell me, frankly, a week from now, ‘Zamir, now I understand why stereotypes sometimes send a bad message about Russia.’

Bourdain: “I have an open mind. Everything's great. Russians have everything they want.”

Zamir: “Listen, why don't we just taste the vodka.”

Discussions of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Viktor Yushchenko and a sit-down dinner over pelmeni,   a modern riff on borscht, at Moscow’s Yornik restaurant (now closed), with former deputy prime minister (under Boris Yeltsin) Boris Nemstov, a prominent dissident and vocal critic of the Maximum Leader, who would not be long of this world after that dinner with Bourdain. A coincidence? Probably just that — Maximum Leader’s issues with Nemstov ran much deeper than one chance meeting for the TV cameras for US TV. CNN is not a thing in Russia, after all — there, it’s all about Rossiya 1, Channel One, NTV and Russia Today.

A quick scan of Reddit shows that Russia remains one of the five favourite programs for many of Bourdain’s followers

One of the more remarkable things about Bourdain’s body of work in Parts Unknown is just how many episodes count as “five favourite episodes” for someone. There truly was something special in every hour Bourdain, Vitale and Zero Point Zero Production made for CNN, something to appeal to at someone somewhere on a deep, fundamental level. And not just in the US, either. Parts Unknown’s appeal was worldwide.

How to end?

Not with Bourdain this time, though Bourdain does end Russia on a particularly powerful and trenchant note — how could he not?

On the Parts Unknown companion website ExplorePartsUnknown.com, taken offline for several weeks until just the past few days, possibly because it was hacked — that’s what the AI-generated browser blockers said at the time, anyway — there’s a telling, warm reminiscence of behind-the-scenes filming with Russian photographer and film-maker Darya Tarasova. (Also worth a look is the work of veteran set- and locations photographer David Scott Holloway, who has shared links to his Bourdain work, some featured here, on Reddit, and through his website at https://davidscottholloway.com).

The Q&A, conducted and written by Nathan Thornburgh (https://explorepartsunknown.com/russia/behind-the-camera-darya-tarasova/), sheds light on some charming moments that explain, as well as anything in the actual episode, Bourdain's unique relationship with Zamir.

“There was a funny moment in Moscow,” Tarasova recalled. “Tony and Zamir had a kind of skiing competition, because we were filming the episode ahead of the Olympic Games in Sochi. They decided to have fun with the Olympic theme. Anthony was wearing a big jacket that had ‘USA’ on it, and Zamir had his own jacket that said ‘Russia.’ So we had Russia versus the USA. Zamir kept shouting, ‘I will break you!’ He was there to win.

“Zamir knows how to ski, but he wasn’t very proficient when he was trying to go down this hill. And Tony wasn’t in great shape either, but he won the race.

“Zamir just fell down in the middle of the hill and then rolled to Tony’s feet.”

Then there’s the moment with the 122-mm D-30 Howitzer cannon, fired to commemorate the occasion of the October 1917 revolution that ushered in decades of rule — or misrule, depending on your point of view — of Soviet Communism.

Bourdain is invited to load a shell into the Howitzer, and — stand back, everybody… — Bang! It goes off.

Bourdain is happily handed the empty shell, all 21kg of it, once it’s ejected from the Howitzer.

“Enemy is destructed!” Zamir tells him. “Congratulations, you are the hero of Russia now.”

Bourdain: “Sweet.”

Zamir: “You can't take it on the plane, though. They won't understand.”

Bourdain: ”Not even carry on?”

CNN

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Bourdain in Mexico

Eerie and prescient: Anthony Bourdain’s parting words in Parts Unknown’s Mexico City episode. “As I have come to know in my own life, drugs, even drug addiction, can be a survivable event. Death is not. Death is final.”

“I had begun my trip to Mexico in a mood of dejection and self-pity, feeling shunned, overlooked, ignored, rejected—easily identifying with migrants and Mexicans … I’d hoped the trip would be salutary, a cure for my sour mood, and so it proved. I was uplifted, smiling when I set off for home, my hand on my heart, promising to return. …

“One of the greatest thrills in travel is to know the satisfaction of arrival, and to find oneself among friends.”

That was not Tony Bourdain but rather the distinguished writer Paul Theroux, who Bourdain would later break bread with in the Hawaii episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown.

Mexico, which first aired in May 2014, marked a return of sorts for Bourdain to the rich, layered world he first traced in No Reservations five years earlier, in 2009, but this would prove a very different experience. In the prescient way Bourdain had of divining and foreshadowing future events, the Mexico he shepherded viewers through in Parts Unknown is eerily reflective of events in Mexico today. No Reservations cast a brighter, more sunny light on a country of more than 750,000 square miles with more than 130 million people — the 10th most populous country in the world and the world’s most populous Spanish-speaking country.

Human presence in pre-Columbian Mexico dates back to 8000 BC; Mexico is one of the world’s six Cradles of Civilization and a familiar and yet inscrutable neighbour to the United States.

That is not the Mexico that is on Bourdain’s mind, though, as he makes plainly clear in his show-opening opening voiceover, even as he resolves to reveal the human story behind the brutal headlines. Then and now.

“Mexico is a country where every day, people fight to live,” he tells viewers. “All too often, they lose that battle.

“(This is) a magnificent, heartbreakingly beautiful country. The music and food, and a uniquely Mexican, darkly funny, deeply-felt worldview. Right down there, cuddled up in ethos, our brother from another mother.

"Holy mother of Santa Muerte, please protect my stash of cocaine. Let it not be interfered with by the cops, or the competition. Let any who would mess with me be killed. My enemies destroyed. Please forgive us our sins, for they are many."

Drugs, cartels, corruption, murders and convoluted, labyrinthine politics — clearly, we’re no longer in the sunny optimism of Lyon, which Bourdain visited on Parts Unknown only a week earlier.

Recent history is much on Bourdain’s mind, and it says a lot that what was recent in 2014 is still recent in 2024.

Bourdain: “More Mexican civilians have been killed since 2006 than all the American military lost in ten years of the Vietnam War and eight years of wars in Iraq. … 80,000 Mexicans have died in the last seven years in narco violence.”

Bourdain is not interested in the vacation resort side of Mexico with its turquoise coastlines and conveniently pristine white sand beaches, but rather in what lies underneath. This is what made Parts Unknown tailormade for CNN and not the Travel Channel.

The closer Bourdain gets to Latin America’s heart of darkness, the more fulfilled he seems — no longer a chef on the frontlines of the restaurant trade but a cultural anthropologist; part ambassador, part interpreter and part sage for those of us curious about and willing enough to look beyond the glossy surface of travel brochures and self-serving spin from politicians jumping from one positive press announcement to the next.

Bourdain’s strongest suit was the humanizing sensibility he brought to complex, uncomfortable subjects, and it doesn’t get much more complex or uncomfortable than the real Mexico.

“Tepito is a city within its city. Its own thing. Either the dark centre or the beating heart of Mexico City, depending on your point of view. It's the home of Santa Muerte, the skeletal St. Death. This is where they come: the impoverished, the oppressed, the marginalized, the criminal. People for whom the traditional church has less relevancy. For the unforgiven and the unforgivable. For those on whom the Catholic saints have turned their backs, there is Santa Muerte.”

There is grace here, too. Among his many, many attributes, Bourdain had a way of finding grace among the ruin.

And, as often as not, that had to do with food. Good food. In fine quantity, and full of sustenance. And drink. Here’s Bourdain sampling the micheladas in the mercados of Tepito, for example, a delectable concoction of beer, lime, Clamato juice, Worcestershire sauce, spices and chilli peppers, served in a chilled, salt-rimmed glass:

“A lot of good smells here, man. A lot of good-looking food. My happy place is somewhere in here. Oh, there it is. … Wherever there's bones and guts simmering in broth, chances are I'll be happy.”

Interestingly, some of Bourdain’s most poetic, stirring words do not appear in the program itself but rather in an accompanying essay he wrote at the time for the social media platform Medium.

“(Mexico) has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic, elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican wine country rivals Tuscany for its gorgeousness. Its archeological sites — the remnants of great empires, unrivalled anywhere. And as much as we think we know and love it, we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is NOT melted cheese over a tortilla chip. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply ‘bro food’ halftime. It is, in fact, old — older even than the great cuisines of Europe and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. …

“The received wisdom is that Mexico will never change. That it is hopelessly corrupt, from top to bottom. That it is useless to resist — to care, to hope for a happier future. But there are heroes out there who refuse to go along. On this episode of Parts Unknown, we (got to) meet a few of them. People who are standing up against overwhelming odds, demanding accountability, demanding change — at great, even horrifying personal cost.

“This show (was) for them.”

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Bourdain in Lyon

“A bouchon is a uniquely Lyonnaise institution. A casual, laid-back kind of a pub-slash-bistro with a limited, usually old-school menu and always, always, an unpretentious vibe.” C’est vrai. Not unlike AB himself.

You know what they say: A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. Even today, nearly 10 years to the day after Lyon aired on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown as the third episode of   Unknown’s third season, more viewers than you might think rate Lyon as one of their favourites, judging from some of the comments in the Bourdain subgroups on Reddit and other social media platforms. Lyon, which premiered on CNN on 27 April 2014, found Bourdain in a cheerful, effusive mood about a country close to his heart, in his opening voiceover, “… the story of one man, one chef, and a city.

“Also, it’s about France and (many) other chefs, and a culinary tradition that grew up to change the world of gastronomy. … It’s about a family tree, about the trunk from which many branches grew.”

The tree of life!

And it was about food, lots of food. Great food. “Some of the greatest food on earth,” in Bourdain’s words

Find France on a map and pick a spot down to the right and somewhat near the middle, and you’ll find the country’s second-largest city — we’ll always have Paris in the top spot — roughly halfway between Burgundy and Rome, midway between the Alps to the east and the Mediterranean to the south.

“Over the past century, the system here, the tradition, whatever it is that took hold here, churned out a tremendous number of the world's most important chefs,” including, Bourdain added, his host, sounding board and culinary consigliere for the hour, “this guy!  Daniel Boulud. Like Prince or Madonna, he needs really only one name. In New York or anywhere in the chef world, Daniel. The name of his three star restaurant in Manhattan, one of many in an empire that stretches from London to Singapore. He came from here, a farm outside the city of Lyon, through the city's great kitchens into New York … Why Lyon? Why here? Look at the fundamentals, the things that Lyonais think of as birthrights. The right to eat delicious cured pork in unimaginably delicious forms … Terrine, pâté, sausages, rillettes. It’s an art that's revered here, and widely enjoyed. Few names garner more respect from aficionados of pig.”

Then the school lunches. Yes, you read that right. Cafeteria food for the kiddies. Ca va bien.

Jamie Oliver, eat your heart out.

The scenes where Bourdain, all six-foot-four of him, stuffs himself into a tiny red Citroen alongside Boulud on a pilgrimage back to Boulud’s old elementary school in the Lyon countryside are, well, Pythonesque. The Citroen, in not terrific shape to begin with and too slow for France’s equivalent of the autobahn, becomes the subject of invective hurled by passing motorists and truck drivers with things to do, places to go, and deadlines to meet.

No matter. They’ll all get there eventually.

“I'm automatically taken back to memories of my own school days,” Bourdain reflects, on camera. “The smell of caustic pine cleaner, chalkboards and fear. The cruel ministrations of tiny-eyed lunch ladies slopping can loads of prison chow into steam tables. The tuna noodle surprise that haunts my sense memories still.

“This is a very sophisticated meal for children. I was a little… “In school, frankly, like a lot of other students, I wanted pizza, pizza, pizza.”

Here, the very thought of pizza seems inappropriate. Inapproprié.

“This is Marie,” Bourdain says, introducing the rural Lyon equivalent of the school lunch lady. “Head chef, cook, host, and server for 320 hungry and very discriminating French schoolchildren, ages 3 to 12.

“On the menu (on this school day): Today, pumpkin soup, homemade couscous and a sauce supreme … (that’s) pumpkin soup with onion, nutmeg,  and chicken stock. Basic good pumpkin soup.

“Dessert is homemade fromage blanc, cheese with chocolate and orange segments.”

But wait, there’s more.

Marie is on a budget.

What, you thought these kids were dining at Les Halles?

Bourdain: “In the USA, the greatest country in the world, no doubt we spend an average of $2.75 per student for public school lunch. Compare and contrast.”

Like, $1.25.

That sound you just heard is Jamie Oliver crying.

Vive l’ecole! Stay in school, kids.

Bourdain:: “The kids attack their food like hungry trenchermen, wiping out three servings in the time it takes me to eat one. I guess they like it … these kids eat fast. Look how fast this kid eats. Turn your head, he'll dish your food right out of your plate. Push up your tray just like in prison, and move it along. Move it along.”

Of course, French kids are not as, erm, grossiére — i.e. rude — as English kids when it comes to trying unfamiliar food in the school canteen. “What is this [grout]?” one boy famously snapped at Oliver on Jamie’s School Dinners, back in the day, after being served veggies rather than his more familiar diet of, dear lord, fish fingers and stale fries.

Make that French fries. Frites, what?

The school cafeteria scene is a thematic anchor of sorts, appearing roughly a third of the way into Lyon. The readers on Reddit are right: Bourdain rarely, if ever, looked so happy as he does in this episode of Parts Unknown.

Boulud, for his part, the eponymous Daniel, learned the niceties of fine dining from his father, a country dweller with country tastes.

Bourdain again: “Meeting Daniel's dad, one seems to understand the roots of his perfectionism. His mom, dad, wife, Katherine and Danielle collaborate, with some debate, on super old-school farmhouse classics.

“The sort of things, good times and bad times, a family could make with (ingredients) readily available on the farm.”

From farm to table, literally.

One example:

“(This) is a hollowed-out pumpkin layered with toasted chunks of kale bread, nutmeg, grated cheese, mushrooms, fresh cream from the cows and the meat of the pumpkin … Daniel's dad can be a bit of a Gallic MacGyver.

“Sitting here with his family in the house he grew up in, you can see where all (this passion) comes from. Their son is now a gigantic international success.”

In the end, it keeps coming back to family. How Bourdainesque.

“His first love [was] French food,” a visitor wrote on Reddit, just a day ago today.

This is April 2024, remember, 10 years after Lyon originally aired.

“He talks about it in one of his books,” the reader continues. Discovering what could be as a kid on a family trip to France.”

And how. Bon appetit.

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Bourdain in the Punjab

“India is one of the few places on Earth where, even for me, that’s not a burden." The one where Anthony Bourdain tapped his inner vegetarian on the India-Pakistan border and found that veggies weren’t so bad after all.

By the time Parts Unknown’s third season opened in April 2014, ten years ago virtually to the day, the tone had been set. So it was somewhat of a surprise that the season-opening episode, The Punjab, marked a subtle but noticeable shift away from the established template to the extent that Bourdain followed anything resembling a template. There is a focus on simmering border tensions between India and Pakistan, a situation that, if anything, is even more pronounced today than it was 10 years ago. There’s a renewed focus on food — the sourcing of food, the making of food, serving food, and the role food can play in alleviating tensions in borderline conflict zones — and in that sense The Punjab reflects some of Bourdain’s earlier work on No Reservations and even, to some extent, his earlier A Cook’s Tour.

The old Bourdain is still there — cranky, irascible, and witty as (heck) — but, strange for an hour about border tensions and an ever-present threat of war — there’s an optimism that wasn’t there in earlier Parts Unknown programs on Libya, Congo and Jerusalem. The colours are brighter, people — Pakistani and Indian alike — smile more, and the food, even to Bourdain’s jaded point-of-view, is, well … divine. It’s almost enough to repudiate his vocal, lifelong stance against vegetarianism. Almost. This is Bourdain we’re talking about, after all.

“To eat around this part of the world, Punjab in particular, get used to eating a lot of vegetarian: chickpeas, dough. India is one of the few places on earth where, even for me, that's not a burden. … In the Punjab, meat or no meat, you are almost guaranteed a free-for-all of intense colours, flavours and spices.

“Unlike some of the joyless vegetarian restaurants in my sad experience, vegetables here are actually spicy, all taste different, have different textures, and are served with extraordinarily good bread. Who knew.”

And, later: “If this was what vegetarianism meant in most of the places that practice it in the West, I would be at least half as much less of a dick about the subject.“

And then, turning to the camera — breaking the third wall — “Look, hippie, if you made bread this good, I might eat in your restaurant. Mmm.”

Along the way, there are visits to the backstreet eatery Kesar de Dhaba Amritsar (“The best food isn’t cooked in people’s homes, you find it on the streets); the kulcha, a type of small bread cooked inside a tandoori-style oven, marinated in butter (“a perfect little flavour-bomb of wheat dough pressed against the side of a very, very hot clay oven, slathered with butter and served with a spicy chickpea curry on the side. Did I mention the butter?”) and the chole, chickpea curry cooked to piping hot and immersed in spices, onions, tomatoes, and herbs, at — and this name is real — the All India Famous Amritsari Kulcha in, wait for it, Amritsar.

What, you thought it might be somewhere else?

The old Bourdain is still there, though, despite his uncharacteristically sunny disposition (“The religion doesn't matter,” one of his local sidekicks tells him, “Food is the religion here”), and it isn’t long before all this vegetarianism starts to wear on him.

“Checking off my list of things to do in the Punjab, I got to score some animal protein. It's time. I've been going all Morrissey for two days now and frankly, that's enough. I need chicken.”

For the record, Morrissey is not just famously “different” — according to a fan interview published in SPIN in 2018, the former Smiths frontman only eats food that is beige.

And don’t call him a vegan, at least to his face, if you value your life.

Back to the chicken, and cue the Beera Chicken House.

And if you think that means beer and chicken, you would only be half wrong: Sikhs, the prevailing religion in the region, abstain from alcohol.

No matter, at least not for now.

Bourdain again: “When we are talking must-haves, tandoori chicken is just that.”

“I have some lemon in it,” he’s told “You will enjoy it.”

And how.

“Sensational. Wow. People (here) do love their food.”

History is everywhere Bourdain goes in The Punjab, but as always with Bourdain, his personal take is, well, Bourdainesque.

“Leaving the fertile plains of the Punjab behind, I'm headed out towards the Himalayas. In getting there, at least the way I'm going, hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years….

“Truth be told, I'm an angry, bitter man when I board. I'm guessing there ain't a Shoney’s or a P.F. Chang on the way.”

Bourdain finds himself on what he can only liken to the tourist train on the Universal Studios backlot in Burbank, Calif. — “You go on the King Kong ride. … while my stomach growls, I become the kind of traveller I warn against -- gripey, self-absorbed, and immune to my surroundings. But as my brightly coloured little train heads up into the hills from Kalka Station, known as the gateway to the Himalayas, my worldview starts to improve.

“The unnaturally bright colours of India start to pleasurably saturate my brain. The views from the window of ridiculously deep valleys, hundred-year-old bridges …  it's, well, breath-taking.”

And how.

Bourdain even takes time to wonder what was involved in building a train track to the roof of the world, as the High Himalayas are often called.

“Already behind schedule and plagued by cost overruns, Colonel Barog” — the British engineer tasked with building the line up to the British hill station town of Shimla, a man so famous nobody seems to know his first name, this, according to the Times of India — “screwed up.

“When he realized the two ends of this tunnel didn't meet in the middle, he shot himself.

“It's the kind of personal accountability I would like to see more of, frankly.

“Or is that just me?

“But all my snarkiness fades as one can't help but reflect on what it took to dig, drag, blast and tunnel one's way up this route back in the day.”

For a man who nurtured an almost cult-like status as a grumpy traveller with disdain for everywhere and everything, Bourdain finds himself, well, enchanted.

“I've been to Mumbai, Kolkata, Rajasthan, Kerala,” he says at the end. “This is a part of India that's different than any of the others. Look, it's fascinating and beautiful.”

Not unlike the show itself.

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Bourdain in Tokyo

After the night before comes the morning after. This was Anthony Bourdain in Tokyo: big city, bright lights and sleepless, seemingly endless nights. And the philosophical hangover that inevitably comes in the morning.

After the night before comes the morning after, right? Work with me here, people.

On Nov. 3. 2013, viewers looked on as intrepid world wanderer and recovering line cook Anthony Bourdain went to Tokyo. This wasn’t your ordinary, run-of-the-mill tourist trek to the land of the rising sun, mind, but a bar crawl through Tokyo after dark, where karate-themed sushi, dancing robots at the eponymous Robot Restaurant, and endless rounds of beer competed with tentacle-porn manga (yes, that’s a thing) for attention.

And the food. Fried snacks in the main. Hot finger food and cold beer — two of the five food groups needed for, well, if not a healthy diet exactly, one that’s livable. Bourdain was there, too, to catch up with former fellow New Yorker and still practicing sushi chef Naomichi Yasuda, who said three years earlier that he’d open his own restaurant in Japan, and then went ahead and did it.

“This is a great country,” Bourdain famously said of Japan, or perhaps not so famously. “Every chef I know wants to die here” (emphasis mine).

No one was about to tell him, mind, ‘You need to get out more, least of all his hard-pressed camera team, but there it is. Watching the Parts Unknown episode Tokyo today, 10 years later, give or take, it’s hard to take everything at face value. What you see is not always what you get. What’s on the screen is not your typical bar crawl. Far from.

Tokyo shows two sides of Bourdain: the curious soul of the restless traveller, ever present in his work for “the bitch goddess that is television,” from A Cook’s Tour for the Food Network in 2002 to breaking on through (to the other side) with Parts Unknown for CNN, not Food Network, and the darker, more introspective side.

“All the best moments are when the cameras are turned off,” Bourdain admitted in one of his later, more introspective confessionals, “and me and the crew … stumble up on top of a sand dune and look out at life's mysteries.”

Tokyo is the ying to the Bourdain yang of his more trenchant foreign correspondence — the genteel term for war reporting — in early Parts Unknown episodes like Myanmar, Libya, Congo, and now, most pointedly, Jerusalem.

Tokyo aired six weeks to the day after Jerusalem, and never that twain shall meet. Least of all today, in March 2024.

Bourdain: “Most people who don't understand sushi will go to a sushi bar and say, ‘Oh! I had the best sushi last night, the fish was so fresh. It was right out of the ocean.’"

Bourdain sampled some 21 late-night eateries and after-hours bars for Tokyo, and every one of them has its own story. Aged sirloin topped with caviar and served alongside moin moin dumplings garnished with plantain is not your average bar fare.

Tokyo also gave Bourdain the opportunity to channel his inner music critic. Japanese pop! Miley Cyrus! Nickelback!

“The pop music scene in Tokyo is not that different than ours — with an accent, though, on pretty boy bands, pop idols, tween stars. Generic, industry-created crap for the most part. Like I said, not so different than us."

Miley. “Picture an army of Miley Cyruses. Or would that be Miley Cyri?"

Nickelback. “"When I see Nickelback I want to kill myself. I want to kill them, and then I want to kill myself. And then I want to kill everybody who listens to them.”

And then, after a quick glance at his camera crew. “What's so funny? It's true.”

Working with Tony Bourdain. It’s not a job. It’s an adventure. Or was, at any rate.

As always, at the very end of the hour, the last word belongs to Bourdain.

“What is weird? What is strange? What do those things even mean, anyway?

“Sure, a lot of what you've seen looks different from maybe the mainstream. It's certainly different from the way we like to portray ourselves, see ourselves, at least our daytime selves. But roughly 50 percent of all movies rented in American hotel rooms are adult films … Maybe there's a line from there to here. So, who's crazy now?”

CNN

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