Bourdain in Budapest

“My Dinner with Vilmos:” The one in which Anthony Bourdain sups at the table of Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the greats of film cinematography, in a city Bourdain describes as one of the most beautiful on Earth, and the two share memories and anecdotes from the Hungarian Revolution.

Anthony Bourdain was captivated by the power of the image from a young age, and that’s possibly no more apparent in CNN’s Parts Unknown than it is in the fifth-season episode Budapest, which first aired in June 2015.

Spending much of the hour with Vilmos Zsigmond, the Hungarian-American cinematographer who informed Bourdain’s own cinematic eye from the time Bourdain first became interested in cinema. Zsigmond came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and his camera helped shape the look of American movies in the 1970s. Zsigmond would go on to become one of the leading figures of the American New Wave movement in movies at the time.

He worked with Robert Altman, Brian DePalma, Woody Allen, Michael Cimino and Steven Spielberg. Yes, that Steven Spielberg. Zsigmond “lensed” Close Encounters of the Third Kind., as they say in behind-the-scenes movie parlance, and won the Academy Award for The Deer Hunter, which he made for Michael Cimino.

Zsigmond also shot Heaven’s Gate for Cimino, which, regardless of its merits or lack thereof — I quite liked it, despite its being savaged by critics at the time (Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both rated it one of the worst films they saw that year) and a major fail at the box office, profoundly so — is gorgeous to look at, like turning the pages through an elegant coffee-table book, sumptuous and yet oddly moving.

Yes, you may be thinking, but if  Zsigmond was such a Hungarian patriot, how did he end up in America? Well, therein lies a tale.

And it’s that tale Bourdain chooses to tell in Budapest — to Bourdain’s eye, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, cities in the world.

Yes, Bourdain takes time to eat out — Parts Unknown was sold to CNN at least partly as a food show, if not exactly a cooking show: at the somewhat eccentrically named New York Café — which turns out to be a distinctly Hungarian-flavoured homage to New York City’s intellectual art scene, where saying what you think comes with the menu choices and free-speech rules — and at the working-class eaterie Pléhcsárda, where he samples venison stew, pancakes with chicken liver sauteed in marrow and paprika sauce (better than it sounds), and a pork schnitzel the size, Bourdain says only half-jokingly, of a small surfboard.

Budapest is, first and foremost, a show about revolutionary politics, though, not food per se.

In 1956, Hungary bore witness to one of Eastern Europe’s bloodiest revolts against Soviet oppression and occupation. It would not be the first.

Zsigmond, a film student at the time, used a 35-millimetre movie camera purloined (i.e., without permission) from the arts academy where he was studying to record the fighting — and Russian atrocities — in Budapest at the time.

You could be shot for simply carrying a camera, Bourdain says, and Zsigmond did a lot more than just carry his camera.

Zsigmond, together with his friend and fellow student László Kovács — who would go on to have an influential career as a respected cinematographer in his own right; Easy Rider and Paper Moon were among his list of credits — hid their movie camera in a shopping bag and filmed through a hole they cut in the bag’s side.

It’s a good thing they did.

Their footage survives to this day as virtually the only footage to have survived that time, and a testament to the human will to survive, even in the face of terrible odds.

Most photographers and cameramen, student and professional alike, were cowed into silence by the carnage. Many people died.

Hard as it may be to believe today — insert sarcasm emoji here — the Russian invaders were brutal.

Bourdain was always a rebel at heart, and there’s little question, based on his off-the-cuff remarks in Budapest, that had he been fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he would have sided with the left-leaning Popular Front of Spain’s Second Spanish Republic, basically artists, teachers and writers, you know, the bad guys, and not the military junta of patriots, monarchists, conservatives and “traditionalists” led by Gen. Francisco Franco — the eventual winner in what US ambassador Claude Bowers called at the time a dress rehearsal for the Second World War.

Just as Franco quashed dissent in Spain, Russia quashed dissent in Hungary, and Zsigmond and Kovács were among those who decided that perhaps it might be better to leave — for America — rather than end up being lined up against a wall and shot.

Bourdain, a Hungarian partisan in mind if not body, could relate.

The irony, of course, is that some of Zsigmond’s best work — and the work he remains best known for — is in the childlike wonder depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film Bourdain felt a special affinity with. The images from Close Encounters shown in Budapest are a reminder of just how stunning visually — and emotionally uplifting — that film really was. Bourdain saw it at a time in his life when it left an indelible impression.

“Our style in photography was not realist; it's called poetic realist,” Zsigmond tells Bourdain toward the program’s end. “That's what we always thought about that certain photography. Emphasizing the beauty of things, basically. But, also, I make it more beautiful.”

“This is no kind of an answer to me,” Bourdain tells him. “You've made some of the most iconically beautiful images we've known in the modern world. And you keep telling me, ‘Well, I was smart in school, I was good at math—‘“

“So tell me,” Zsigmond interrupts. “What would you like to hear?”

“‘I don’t know,’” Bourdain replies. “‘I was touched by God.’ If you're regularly creating the sublime, I'm looking for a metaphysical answer, I don’t know.”

“You learn this,” Zsigmond says simply. “You learn to be an artist.”

What a great meal,  Bourdain tells his hosts at the end. “Thank you.”

And then, in his closing voiceover:

“Do we emerge fully formed with a God-given eye for pictures, images that can move people?

“Or, are we the end result of all the things we've seen, all the things we've done, the places we've been, the places, the people we've had to leave behind, all that's happened in your life. Is it those things that bring the light or the darkness to the blank screen?

“And what about the faces of those we capture in our magic lenses for a minute, or second, or hour? Afterwards, should we think about them, and where they might be now?”

Remembering Anthony Bourdain, 1956-2018.

And remembering Vilmos Zsigmond, for that matter. 1930-2016.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/budapest/remembering-vilmos-zsigmond-1930-2016/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/budapest/bourdain-off-the-cuff-budapest/

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

CNN

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Bourdain in Scotland

“They say Glaswegians have more fun at a funeral than people in Edinburgh have at a wedding.” Awe’ n bile yer heid. This was Anthony Bourdain on a bonnie day in Scotland, in May 2015.

A vegetarian boarding school?

“That’s unthinkable to me,” Anthony Bourdain says, barely able to conceal his shock, just past the halfway mark of the 5th-season Parts Unknown episode Scotland.

Americans abroad. Scots have suffered their share of American incursions, from a characteristically gauche Trump golf course and country club on environmentally sensitive land, a development project that naturally raised the ire of many of the local clans — still does — to the steady parade of American visitors with surnames like McDonald, MacDonald and Macdonald eager to get to the bottom of their ancestral roots.

There’s no such danger there with Bourdain — his surname bears more of a French feel, you know, the other, l’autre, one of them, and the funny thing about the French is that, traditionally and historically, they found more succour in Scotland than in hostile England, from France’s Catholic connections to France’s support of the ill-fated Mary Stuart, aka Mary, Queen of Scots — eventually done in, wouldn’t you know, by the English Queen Elizabeth I, beheaded in fact, an act so egregious it provoked a long line of noisy protest films from Mel Gibson (Braveheart!), Sean Connery, and others.

And therein lies a tale that continues to this day — a Scottish yearning, in some quarters anyway, for independence from Westminster and an embrace of Scottish cuisine over the English kind, all for one and one for all, once and for all, and all that

Bourdain samples the brew at a Glasgow pub (EST 1510) before heading to a country estate in the Scottish Highlands to shoot a stag and experience first-hand where venison comes from, all the while ruminating about an independence vote that was turned down by 55% of Scottish voters. At the time.

Now, after decades of misrule from a Tory government in London — think Republicans, but better spoken and with a keener grasp of the English language, not to mention better manners — there’s talk of another vote, and this time it isn’t just the 16-year-olds who’ll bite (yes, the age of eligibility to vote was dropped in Scotland, in part to encourage more young people to be involved in politics, and in part because if you ask virtually any 16-year-old on the planet, ‘Do you want more freedom,’ you don’t need a poll by Angus Reid to tell you the result.

What has all this got to do with food, you might ask, and the answer is that this is CNN, the self-styled “most trusted name in news,” and not the Food Network, a difference that Bourdain embraced when he originally signed on to do a show that allowed him to trek across the globe on somebody else’s dime.

And while Scotland won't top too many foodies’ lists of their favourite Parts Unknown episodes, good eating is never too far away from Bourdain’s mind.

"Last night, in Glasgow, I had enough with the deeper issues," Bourdain says at the 19-minute mark.

“Now, I want to go no deeper than the bottom of a bubbling cauldron of hot grease. It's out there. It's calling to me. I want it now. A happy place from my past where once I frolicked young and carefree in the field of related arts. The University Cafe, where I learned at the foot of the masters the Tao of hot fat and crispy batter.

“Yes, they do a deep-fried Mars bar here and deep-fried pizza. Been there, done that. But Carlo here and his twin brother have been keeping the Verragio family tradition alive since 1918, and it ain't about no Mars bar.

"I order the fish and chips and some haggis. Haddock battered and floating, a drift in a sea of mysterious life-giving oil. The accumulated flavours of many magical things as it bobs like Noah's Ark, bringing life in all its infinite variety. Deep-fried haggis, my personal favourite. Sinister sheep parts in tube form, in this case. And if you don't like chopped-up liver and lungs and all that good stuff, believe me, the curry sauce sets you right. The combination of French fries, or “chips” in the local dialect, with curry sauce and cheese is perhaps a bro too far, Guy Fieri in a kilt, but, what the hey.

“I'm pretty sure God is against this.”

But back to the vegetarian boarding school.

“Heading north out of Glasgow, Scotland quickly becomes something else. A savagely beautiful, harsh, but absolutely mesmerizing landscape that seems to have changed not at all for thousands, even millions of years. And across Loch Maree, and only accessible by boat, one of the great isolated estates: Letterewe. It's the favourite retreat of my friend, Adrian Gill, more widely known as A.A. Gill. He's the much feared and widely followed restaurant critic for the London Sunday Times, a regular columnist for a spectrum of magazines, author, traveller, and one of the finest essayists of our time.”

Gill, it turns out, went to said boarding school, despite now living within a stone’s throw of a country estate where venison rules the roost.

“My parents sent me to a vegetarian boarding school, and for nine years, the year after I left, I was a vegetarian,” he tells Bourdain.

“Nine years,” Bourdain says ruefully. “That's unthinkable to me.”

“Then I decided not to be,” Gill responds. “I made the decision that if I was going to eat meat again. Then I had to be prepared to do the whole business.”

Bourdain: “Right. You’ve got to be accountable.”

Accountability. That was Bourdain’s stock-in-trade.

The last word, as seems only fitting, hails from the visiting American with the French name.

“I came to Scotland this time to shoot an animal in the heart, to take part, to be fully culpable in a practice nearly as old as these hills. You walk this country stalking an animal across the rocks and wet heather. You feel little has changed from how your distant ancestors must have searched for their food, with a rifle, with a spear, with a club. I drag my knuckles up a hill and, like my ape-like predecessors, return tired, happy, and covered in blood.

“Everything changes. Nothing changes at all.”

Strange as it seems, it makes perfect sense.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/writerontherun/retracing-anthony-bourdain-in-scotland-3b9031c978f0

     https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-scotland/

CNN

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Bourdain in Korea

“Han, my favourite Korean word, has many implied and specific meanings, but generally speaking, it's a mixture of endurance, yearning, sorrow, regret, bitterness, spite, hatred, and a grim determination to bide your time until revenge can at last be enacted.” This was Anthony Bourdain in Korea, in a story told backwards, Memento-like, from end to beginning.

Not every idea turns out as planned, just as not every well-laid plan goes astray. Every so often, there’s something to be said for going in cold, for not planning at all, especially when coming off a ground-breaking season of Parts Unknown that won several Emmys and the prestigious Peabody Award — broadcasting’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, established by the (US) National Association of Broadcasters in 1940 to recognize the best in broadcasting news, entertainment, documentaries, children’s programming, education, interactive programming, and public service.

Public service? Yes, that’s Bourdain.

The Peabody is judged by a select committee of academics and broadcasting historians modelled after the Nobel Prize Committee. It is the Nobel, Academy Award, and Pulitzer Prize all rolled into one, and it goes without saying that it is not given away like candy.

Ambition doesn’t always go before a fall, but it helps.

That must have been what was on Anthony Bourdain and Korea sidekick and segment co-producer Nari Kye’s minds when they broke ground on the opening episode for Parts Unknown’s 5th season, which made its debut on CNN  on April 26th, 2015, nearly 10 years ago.

The idea was inspired by — paid homage to, motivated by, stolen from, take your pick — Oppenheimer filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s neo-noir psychological thriller Memento, made in the year 2000. Memento tells its story in reverse chronological order about a man with short-term memory loss who tracks down his wife’s killer. A story told from end to beginning, in other words. “I” before “E” except after “C,” except when it isn’t.

What if, Bourdain posited, he returned to Korea for another go-round?

Bourdain visited Korea some 10 years earlier for No Reservations, TV cameras in tow, accompanied by Korean-American filmmaker Nari Kye, by then a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and one of the first hires by Parts Unknown production company Zero Point Zero.

Kye, a self-styled “fun-raiser” on a mission to get everyone to fall in love with Korean culture, accompanied Bourdain again, a little older this time, more travelled and less open to suggestion. Kye herself is still active on social media, thanks to Instagram (where she posts as @narzattack) and in YouTube videos like the get-to-know-you introduction video posted by the Council of Korean Americans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzCFFxp224c).

What if, this time, they started at the end, with Bourdain blotto from a week of carousing in his happy place, and ended at the beginning, with Bourdain in the contemplative and reflective mood we’ve all come to know and respect?

Bourdain was smart enough to realize that not every viewer might get jiggy about his telling his story backwards.

In a Q&A after the show aired, Bourdain confessed that he wanted to open the show with the end credits, but CNN wasn’t too keen on the idea, guessing — again, probably with good reason — that fans would think they missed the show and turn to something else to watch.

Even now, years later, Parts Unknown’s Korea gets, um, decidedly mixed notices on chat forums like Reddit, in which one reader chalks it up to Bourdain’s being burned out from one too many frequent flyer miles and someone else remarks, again not without reason, that it’s no fun seeing Bourdain hopped up on hooch, veering from one hallucinatory vision to another, only to end up playing violent video games that don’t look so much like good clean fun as, well, creepy.

So … is Korea worth seeing again, or even a first time, after all these years?

The short answer is yes, and for a simple reason: It’s still Bourdain.

The caustic wit is still there, and so is that life-affirming humanity and insight into the human condition — at least, when he’s sober enough to tell the difference between han, the Korean concept of resentment and feeling the need for revenge, best served cold — or hot, Bourdain doesn’t mind — and jeong, the Korean cultural tradition of loyalty and feeling a strong emotional connection to people and places.   

The hour improves as it goes along — well, sure, the story is being told backwards! — and even for those not in on the joke, it always helps when the show-ending summation — the part of the process Bourdain arguably liked the least and wasn’t afraid to say so — sums up the show and does it with the grace, style, and raw emotion we’ve come to accept.

“The past, the present, the future,” Bourdain says toward the program’s end or, rather, make that beginning, “in Korea, they all bleed together. If you’re there for the whole ride, one explains the other. Drop in the middle; it makes no sense at all.”

Not to mention the food.

Korea, Nari Kye will be quick to tell you, is known for unique — some might say eccentric — cuisine, unmistakably Asian but quite unlike anything else in Southeast Asia — or northern Asia, for that matter.

Bourdain noshed on spicy rice cakes and japchae (glass noodles served alongside veggies and beef) at the Gwang Jang Market in Seoul; still-wriggling sea worms, soju, and a bubbling pot of meh oon tang (spicy seafood stew) at the Garak Market at 298 Garak-Dong, Songpa-gu; and, with Nari Kye, Korean fried chicken and beer at Ggu Da Dak on Dhowa-dong, Mapo-gu (yes, these are all real places, and the food is real too).

Yes, much of the program is borderline incoherent — no pun intended regarding borders and conflating the North Korea border and DMZ with fast food and noodles.

That said, there’s much to recommend it, including a seriously weird sequence toward the end — or is it the beginning? — of Bourdain sampling DIY what-the-hell-is-this, surrounded by what looks to outside eyes like a cross between a makeshift TV studio and an underground military bunker.

Bourdain is determined not to allow the ever-present threat of Emperor Flat-Top across the way harsh his buzz, however. Or his wit.

Bourdain on silkworm soup, for example:

“Eating bugs? That is so last network.”

Don’t get him started on the past.

“Last time I was here, I was working for some other channel. The Bacon Channel? The Competitive-Eating Channel? What was that old show called? It was so long ago.”

For some of us, though, not that long ago at all. Some things don’t change. Not really. Korea was cool then, and it’s kind of cool now.

Korea is just cool, period. The southern part, anyway.

Supplementary reading:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/korea/han-jeong/

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/destination/korea/

CNN

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Bourdain in Jamaica

“I mean, that would be sort of ridiculous if Jamaicans can’t go to the beach in Jamaica.”  How all Anthony Bourdain wanted to do after a year on the road in places like the Islamic Republic of Iran was kick back in a hammock and relax with a rum punch — and ended up help save a public beach.

Ja-maica me crazy.

Tom Vitale, Bourdain’s longtime colleague, confidant and creative collaborator, devoted an entire chapter to behind-the-scenes conniving, conspiracy and cosplay in Parts Unknown’s Jamaica episode in his book In the Weeds, and why not? June 2014 had been one of the most bizarre months of his life. It began with his 34th birthday in Iran and ended with Bourdain’s 58th birthday in Jamaica, and a (heck) of a lot happened in the time between.

Jamaica opens with an homage to the opening titles of a James Bond film, complete with widescreen underwater special effects in slo-mo and jazzy credits (‘Filmed in Zambonivision’) to the strains of jaunty John Barry-style music: Jamaica, after all, was where the recovering WW2 spy handler and would-be writer-in-residence Ian Fleming created the character James Bond and set down roots in his private, out-of-the-way beachside villa he dubbed “GoldenEye.” Fleming would go on to write Casino Royale, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia with Love, and Dr. No, among others, and Bourdain was a big fan. Bigly so, you might say — though if you said that to Bourdain’s face, he’d likely throw you to the sharks in that shallow cove down by the beach.

Bourdain’s affinity with Bond and his admiration of Ian Fleming as a writer weren’t the only reasons Parts Unknown’s brain trust chose to close the program’s breakout fourth season with an episode filmed in the sunswept Caribbean. After the trials and tribulations of filming in Iran while trying to avoid having their footage confiscated by the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary overseers — or being held hostage by the Bisaj (Iran’s ultra-righteous religious all-male youth wing) — Vitale noted, “Tony made it extremely clear that the top priority for our next location — and the last shoot of the season — was ‘some low-impact beach time’ and accommodation of ‘unspeakable luxury.’”

Cue GoldenEye. Sequestered on Jamaica’s wild, read: less touristy, northeast coast, where old banana plantations and dense jungle spill down to a coastline of rocky coves and white sand beaches, where waves break against coral cliffs. GoldenEye itself, a luxury compound highlighted by a villa with gleaming white walls perched on a cliff overlooking the Caribbean behind a barrier of tall trees — “gated, guarded, and absolutely private,” as Vitale describes it — would be the perfect place to relax, unwind, and plot to take over the world. True to the Bond ethos, the compound came complete with a winding staircase that led down 60 feet to a private beach that included a grotto. A grotto! A grotto, Bourdain noted in his wry voiceover, that had the added, not inconsiderable benefit of never being used by Ron Jeremy. A winding staircase leading down to a private beach! Shades of Scaramanga’s island lair in The Man with the Golden Gun. Where movie audiences had to make do with Christopher Lee, however, CNN viewers got Tony Bourdain, and in fine fettle, too.

At the time of filming, Fleming’s original villa was the de facto presidential suite of the larger hotel complex; at a cool $12K a night, it certainly fit the Bourdain bill of “unspeakably luxurious accommodations.”

As is his habit, though, Bourdain strays farther afield, to Dr. Hoe’s rum bar, where “the Alligator Fund” — about $1,000 per shoot — went a long way, and barflies were just steps away — literally — from the eponymously named James Bond Beach. It was here, no doubt, that Bourdain became Dr. Yes ™®.

The farther afield Bourdain strays, though, the more he becomes attuned to the divide between the haves and have-nots. The big companies that own the beach resorts — well … they want more of the beach.

“Who gets to enjoy paradise?”  Bourdain says. Exactly. Certainly not you, he says, and certainly not the locals who actually live there.

The tone of the program shifts, and suddenly Jamaica is not just fun downtime on the beach but rather a Bourdainian spin on Bob Marley’s anthem of the people Get Up, Stand Up.

Take, for example, Margaritaville.

“All I knew,” Vitale wrote in In the Weeds, “was that the vacation-themed bar and restaurant chain was owned by Jimmy Buffett, who Tony had practically made a career of publicly trashing.”

What could go wrong?

Well … nothing a little rum can’t solve.

”You should have a rum punch,” Bourdain tells Vitale at one point. “They’re excellent.”

Vitale: “I can’t. [The new production manager] is really clamping down on our drink bills.”

Bourdain, looking over his iPad at a hovering minder:

“I’d like sixteen rum punches, please,” and then, turning to Vitale: “You can have one of mine.”

The more of the island Bourdain and the crew see, the more difficult it is to ignore the harsh contrast between the resorts and the communities that serve them.

Vitale again: “Shockingly, it appeared Jamaicans didn’t really have much access to their own beaches, unless they worked in the resorts.”

By this point, far from the season-ending day at the beach Jamaica promised, it is fast becoming another exposé of what really goes on in foreign climes … in other words, the show CNN thought they were getting in the first place.

Bourdain being Bourdain, though, this is no dry lecture. There’s a sharp wit, a cutting edge to his observations.

From In the Weeds:“‘Where’s my robot piranha? Summon the robot piranha! (Expletive) fat herpetic with a novelty drink. Someone should put a stop to his reign of (expletive) terror right now and every other bald (expletive) with a ponytail. Things to do tomorrow: Destroy Margaritaville. Start worldwide revolution… Where’s the fixer!?”

Make it so.

And there it was. Parts Unknown’s fourth season was a wrap.

Bourdain: “If this were a Bond film,” he tells Vitale, “you’d be being torn apart by piranhas now. Piranhas would be swimming in ten different directions with your (naughty bits).”

The fixer arrives, rum punch in tow.

Bourdain. “Thank you, sir. Life is beautiful. I’d like twelve more of these, please.”

Conscience intervenes, as it always seems to do where Bourdain is involved.

Bourdain: “How do you do this and be a good person? If you wanted to spend three months of the year in a hammock, looking out at the Caribbean on a secluded beach like this. Could you do that and also be a good person?

“No, you have to do bad things to do this. Right? James Bond’s a hustler. He gets this for a couple of days before he moves on to the next location.

“The guy who lives here is the Bond villain. That’s what I’ve been missing.

“Ian Fleming was much closer to Blofeld or Hugo Drax.  Those guys had lots of leisure time, sitting in hammocks, trying to figure out how to take over the (expletive) world.

“Lots of downtime in world domination. Bond was working-class …”

Bring in the crabs. One down, 49 to go.

Jamaica is sweet.

Jamaica first aired on Parts Unknown on Nov. 16, 2014. Today, ten years later, give or take, Winifred Beach is still there … and it’s still public.

Supplementary reading:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/jamaica/bourdains-take-jamaica/

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/jamaica/episode-intel-from-jamaica/

    http://thedrylandtourist.com/anthony-bourdain-winnifred/

CNN

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Bourdain in Iran

“Good to be here… finally. It’s taken some time ... like, a lot of time ... like, four years I’ve been trying. Finally.” This was Anthony Bourdain in Iran, “a big blank spot on nearly every traveller’s resume.”

It was never just about the travel, or even the food.

Anthony Bourdain was always after some kind of deeper meaning, even if he — he of all people — struggled at times to find the right words. For someone who kept to much to himself that was personal, Parts Unknown opened the wider world to countless people from all races and all cultures across the globe, to not just other cultures but a different way of thinking. “The journey is part of the experience, an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent,” he once said. “One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.”

That’s why one episode of Parts Unknown in particular resonates to this day.

Iran premiered on the 2nd of November in 2014. Still, within the first 10 minutes of the program, it is clear — even if it may not have been clear to Bourdain or his hosts Jason Rezaian, at the time the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, and Rezaian’s Iranian-born journalist wife Yeganeh Salehi during their long lunch together at a sitdown eaterie in the mountains overlooking the outskirts of Tehran.

Over chelo-kebabs, saffron rice and flatbread, Bourdain recalled in a pithy — and exquisitely personal — op-ed in the Washington Post, weeks after he and his producer/director Tom Vitale, cameraman Zach Zamboni and other ZPZ crew members had returned home, but weeks before the episode aired on CNN.

“There was a family mood to the afternoon,” Bourdain recalled, “parents with children, older couples and teenagers — all happy to be at leisure on a beautiful day.

“They delighted in pointing out for our cameras all the names of dishes which had originated in Persia (kebab, biryani, etc.),” Bourdain wrote in a pithy — and personal — op-ed in the Washington Post in August that year. “There was a family mood to the afternoon, parents with children, older couples and teenagers — all happy to be at leisure on a beautiful day.”

As was Bourdain’s habit — and, remember, journalists do like to talk, at least those journalists eager to share with the world what they have learned about life and life’s deeper meanings — the conversation took on a life of its own and broadened and widened to include Bourdain’s curiosity about one of the world’s oldest cultures and the unique part in history ancient Persia and present-day Iran alike have played owing to its geographical, spiritual, political and culinary location between East and West.

“They acknowledged the difficulties of living in a nation very different from the United States, where they had last lived,” Bourdain wrote.

“But they were clearly in love with Tehran, and they spoke respectfully and affectionately of the country they lived in. They had not let the difficulties of reporting for an American newspaper get them down — and they did their best to explain what, for outsiders, would appear inexplicable. At one point, I asked if they planned to move back to the States any time soon. No, they told me, because it was so easy to love the city and the country. This feeling, they said, was widely shared. They were content. They were not agents provocateurs.”

One has to understand that to get to this point in the program — and this is just 10 minutes in, remember — Bourdain and Vitale needed to introduce first-time viewers possibly unfamiliar with Iran and why it has played such a seemingly outsized role in the news headlines, then and now. told the history of Iran in the style of one of those Academy Award-winning short films, drawn in jittery, scratchy charcoal-and-ink stick figures while a small girl tells the story of Iran’s modern-day history in a halting, lilting child’s voice, a story told from a child’s point of view in a style reminiscent of then 11-year-old child activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai in David Guggenheim’s 2015 animated film He Named Me Malala.

“Once upon a time, there was an ancient kingdom where they found a lot of magical black stuff under the ground. But two other kingdoms had the key to the magical black stuff. And when they wouldn't share, the people of the ancient kingdom got mad.

“They voted, and their leader said the magical black stuff is ours to keep. But the other kingdoms were afraid of losing all of the magical black stuff, so they gave money to some bad men to get rid of the leader. They put back in power another leader. And they gave him money, too.

“To some, he was a good king. But to others, he could be very cruel. After many years the people of the kingdom got mad. This time, even madder. So they scared the king away forever.

“And then things started to get really messed up.”

“OK,” Bourdain says simply in the program, in voiceover.

“OK, that’s a simplistic and incomplete way to sum up the last 100-odd years of Iranian history. But the point is there were a lot of issues and differing agendas leading up to the explosion of rage known as the Iranian hostage crisis.

“Look, we know what Iran the government does. George W. Bush famously called them part of the Axis of Evil. Their proxies in Iraq have done American soldiers real harm. There was no doubt of this.

“But I hope I can be forgiven for finding these undeniable truths hard to reconcile with how we are treated on the streets everywhere we go.”

Because, as Bourdain noted in his show-opening voiceover, “I am so confused. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

“Of all of the places, of all the countries, all the years of travelling, it's here in Iran that I am greeted most warmly by total strangers. The other stuff is there: the Iran we've read about, heard about, seen in the news. But this -- this, I wasn't prepared for.”

And the food!

“So forget about the politics if you can, for a moment. How about the food? The food here is amazing.

Chelo-kabob is as close as you get to a national dish and the king of kabobs. Ground lamb with spices is a good place to start. …

“(And) chelo-kabob wouldn't be complete without Persian rice. Fluffy, long-grained, and perfectly seasoned with saffron, the rice in this country is unlike anything you have ever had.”

“As print journalists, our job is difficult,” Rezaian told him. “But it's also kind of easy. Because there is so much to write about. You know it, the difficult part is convincing people on the other side of the world that what we are telling you and seeing in front of our eyes is actually there. When you walk down the street, you see a different side of things. People are proud. The culture is vibrant. People have a lot to say.”

And then. Moments later.

Bourdain again: “Despite the hopeful nature of our conversation, six weeks after the filming of this episode, Jason and Yeganeh were mysteriously arrested and detained by the police. Sadly in Iran, this sort of thing is not an isolated incident.”

Little less than an hour later, after an episode of Parts Unknown that showcases the show at its finest, by turns warm and witty, alluring and acerbic, exciting and sad, and enthralling to watch, as in a massive, thunderous sandstorm surrounding the Milad Tower, Iran’s tallest building at 1,000 feet and a source of national pride, with Bourdain, his crew and government minders trapped briefly in the tower’s glass-walled observation deck (“Stay away from the the glass!”), that puts CGI-generated special effects in Hollywood movies to shame. This is real. There are moments in Iran, good and bad, that are just about unforgettable. And sad.

Remember the name Nika Shakarami, a teenager who was arrested and died while in custody during the 2022 anti-government protests in Iran. She was 16.

“After ten weeks,” Bourdain says at the program’s end, “Yeganeh was finally released. But as I read these lines, Jason remains a prisoner. His future and the reasons for their arrest are still unknown.

Fast-forward to the here and now.

Rezaian, as it turned out, was released in January 2016 in a prisoner exchange with the US government. He had been charged with espionage, which was bogus, charges, Rezaian has gone to pains to point out since he had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with his interview with Bourdain. In fact, he said, his interview with Bourdain — widely known and well respected worldwide — was a kind of protection. During Rezaian’s months and years behind bars, Bourdain was a tireless advocate for his safety and eventual release. In a 2018 interview with media columnist Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, Rezaian made the point abundantly clear.

“The show actually had nothing to do with us being arrested,” Rezaian told Stelter. “If anything, I think our appearance there — with really one of the most beloved television personalities and people of our generation — raised awareness in a different kind of way that nothing else could have.”

Rezaian himself wasn’t able to see the Parts Unknown episode until after his release — obviously.

“I mean, it aired originally while I was in prison,” he told NPR in an interview years later. “So the first time I watched it was a few days after my release, and I thought it was fantastic. I still do. …

“I'm so glad that I was able to take part in that production, and that there's this sort of indelible historical document that Yegi and I were part of that and part of that moment in Iran. And yeah. I mean, for me, I think of it as one of the most important things that's happened to us in our lives. I also think it's probably the best representation of modern Iran that's ever appeared on American television.”

Now, in the weeks, months and years after Bourdain’s passing, the shoe is on the other foot.

Rezaian asserted, in not so many words, that it has almost become a sacred responsibility to keep Bourdain’s memory alive.

"We should keep reading him, we should keep watching his shows, we should keep travelling around the world.”

Hail and amen.

Supplementary reading, in Bourdain’s own words:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/iran/field-notes-from-iran/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/iran/field-notes-from-iran/

CNN

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