Bourdain in Manila

You can’t go home again. Or can you? In this one, Anthony Bourdain examined the cultural impact of ‘OFW’s,’ “Overseas Filipino Workers,” and left at least one viewer in tears by the end.

If any longtime Bourdainophile had any doubts that Anthony Bourdain was no longer doing a strictly “food travel show” with Parts Unknown, those doubts were dispelled once and for all by the seventh-season opener, which kicked off on CNN with an eccentric, hard-to-read look at Manila, Philippines on April 24, 2016.

When Bourdain and his by-then close-knit team — Zach Zamboni, Todd Liebler, Tom Vitale and others at Zero Point Zero, a team that had been together thick and thin through countless excursions around the world for more than a decade — made the jump to CNN from the Travel Channel, the clue was in the name: The focus would be more on culture, politics, history, philosophy and, yes, the news, as opposed to the primarily food-focused lean of A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations and The Layover. It’s hard to look at A Cook’s Tour today and not see it for what it was — Anthony Bourdain Unplugged, the acoustic Bourdain, the brash, outspoken born-and-bred New Yorker, food enthusiast and frontline chef behind Kitchen Confidential, his tell-all “Hide the Kids, This Is Going to Get Ugly” look at how a busy, top-of-the-line restaurant kitchen really works. If A Cook’s Tour was Bourdain’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Parts Unknown was his Dark Side of the Moon: sophisticated, serious, meditative, studious, solemn, profound, handsomely mounted, mature, all grown up, and a global, worldwide smash. This was Bourdain in his pomp, no longer playing to a tiny audience of hardcore devotees on some obscure, out-of-the-way cable channel but rather playing to a global audience of everyone from hard-working, decent, everyday blue-collar folks to world leaders and global celebrities — basically, anyone and everyone with a working Internet connection. If the world was truly a global village, Bourdain was its town crier, librarian, historian and father confessor, a man of the people, for the people, and by the people.

And so, Manila.

Not everyone was a fan. Manila, with its curious shifts in tone — it’s Christmas in April! Here’s a biker cover band! Mom’s cooking is always the best, and don’t you forget it! Filipinos are some of the hardest-working people on the planet! The Philippines and Filipinos have endured an awful history of colonialism, invasion, exploitation, oppression, climate chaos, and some of the most rapacious, murderous and incompetent leaders who ever lived, and yet they're some of the nicest, neatest people you’ll ever meet!

It was never going to be for all tastes. Looking at viewers’ posts on Reddit today, a couple of points jump out.

1. Can it really have been nine years ago? It seems like only yesterday.

And 2, the world has changed so much in just nine short years.

Not just Bourdain’s world, but our world. Gaza. Lebanon. Ukraine. October 7th. The ongoing environmental destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The collapse of ecosystems around the world. Climate chaos. MAGA. The UN on the verge of total collapse. If there’s one comment — you couldn’t really call it a criticism — about Bourdain’s work in Parts Unknown today, it’s that much of it doesn’t seem too relevant to today’s world.

And yet … the more things change, the more much of Bourdain’s truthtelling seems prescient today. Eerily so.

In his essay for Medium at the time — see the link below — Bourdain explains that production of the Manila episode was hampered by an oncoming, full-blown typhoon, which restricted their movements around one of the largest, most populous and poverty-stricken cities on the planet.

And so, rather than visit every culinary nook and cranny in a city renowned for its wide variety of food experiences — familiar and unfamiliar eateries like Van Gogh is Bipolar in Quezon City, Neil’s Kitchen in Manila’s Westgate Center, Sebastian’s Ice Cream (“the Premiere Artisinal Ice Cream in Manila!”), and so on — Bourdain and his creative colleagues chose to focus on families cooking at home, biker cover bands, balikbayan boxes (corrugated boxes containing Christmas packages sent home by overseas Filipinos), the Filipino diaspora and the undeniable cultural, economic and social influence of “OFWs,” overseas Filipino workers who have scattered around the world, doing the menial jobs no one else will do and sending the money back home.

Manila was special, as one Reddit reader commented, because, for all the talk about despots like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the tribulations endured under Japanese occupation during World War II, and the flattening of Manila by US carpet bombing during that same war, “he always throws us a bone with a food-centric show here or there anyways.”

And another:

“The show isn’t necessarily about food tourism like No Reservations was … Bourdain wanted to tell his personal story along with one of his directors, who was raised by the Filipina nanny in the episode. That Filipinos give and care for strangers’ kids, even when they had to sacrifice decades of getting to know their own children. He wanted to show the love that all those balikbayan boxes represented. That even our fast food is literally ‘Jolly Bee, and we export it around the world. He wanted to show the joy and happiness that people exude in the face of adversity, at home and abroad. I think he did a wonderful job. My mom was in tears at the end of the episode.”

Think about that.

When was the last time you watched an hour of TV that left anyone in tears at the end? Let alone a so-called ‘food tourism’ show.

That’s what CNN inherited when they somehow convinced Bourdain to leave the Travel Channel for the bigger world and a global audience, and it’s what we inherited when Bourdain emerged to become the cultural lightning rod and philosophical guidepost he still is today.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/parts-unknown/unfinished-business-8b9021ed432d

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/manila/domestic-worker/

     https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/the-sacrifices-of-an-immigrant-caregiver

     https://richardrguzman.com/ofws-anthony-bourdains-manila/

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Bourdain in Istanbul

Is there still a place in the modern world for romantics, or will they slowly be crushed by modernity? This is the question Tony Bourdain wrestled with during his 2015 visit to Türkiye for CNN. The question stil applies, perhaps even more so today.

It’s uncanny how even today, all these years later, Tony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episodes remain relevant on a global scale — not just the domestic US-based hours, as relevant as those are, but the foreign-based hours, with their global, international implications. Turkey, for example. Who can watch his  Parts Unknown episode about Turkey, his second visit to that country, and not think about the situation facing viewers in his home country of the US, today.

Here’s Bourdain at the end of Istanbul, which first aired on CNN on the 8th of November in 2015:

“Democracy is always a fragile thing. Ninety-two years ago, modern Turkey was assembled from the fragments of the Ottoman Empire. It always struggled to find a balance between those in power and the consent of its widely diverse population.

“Since the filming of this episode, Turkey's newly-elected parliament failed to form a coalition, and President Erdogan quickly called for new elections. … Many claim that he effectively plunged Turkey into conflict to take advantage of an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty and improve his party's chances of success. This is not an unreasonable assumption on anyone's part. Fear works. Fear gets votes. The opposition had hoped that the tide was turning. It remains to be seen if they have any reason to hope.”

Hope, too, it would appear, is a fragile thing.

Earlier in the program, talking to Sezar Dallaryan, the son of Armenian restaurateurs in a diverse ethnic neighbourhood of Istanbul — Greek, Turkish, Jewish and Armenian —  slated for redevelopment, like much of Istanbul during Recep Erdogan’s drive to modernity through a construction boom and the economic might a construction boom will bring, Bourdain asks his host if there’s still a place in Istanbul for romantics and the old way of life.

Political protesters, he is told, were kidnapped, and many disappeared. Ordinary, everyday people. “They were romantics,” Dallaryan tells Bourdain. “They killed those people. They used real guns. … It's the way people feel now. Because of the way that our president talks. It's not only a political issue; it's a reality. Somehow, he let people fight with hate. … That's what I'm afraid of. That's why I'm telling you that the young generation, Armenians, will leave this country.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” Bourdain tells him. “I mean, I’m not really an optimistic person, but I hope you're wrong about Istanbul, because it's an amazing place.”

“I hope you will be the one who's right,” Dellaryan replies.

Don’t think the episode is a total downer, though. That isn’t who Bourdain was, deep down, and it isn’t the reason so many of us follow him to this day.

There is always time for good food, for example. Bourdain never said so in so many words — that would have been too obvious for him, and Anthony Bourdain didn’t do obvious — but for people with disparate views, breaking bread together was, and still is, the great peacemaker.

Food now, Bourdain says. “We’ll save the world later.”

So — cue raki, Turkish anise liquor.

Iskembe çorbasi, tripe soup.

Pide, Turkish flatbread, with ground meat, cheese and onions.

A traditional spread of mezze, Bourdain notes, “an extremely tasty, very diverse assortment of dishes originating in every corner of the former Ottoman Empire” — Circassian chicken, fava beans, rice with mussels, eggplant, stuffed grape leaves, poached eggs with yogurt — ”all classic and all delicious.

“Man, this is so... Let me say, this food is extraordinary. I mean really, really, really amazing.”

Restaurants visited: Akar Lokantasi, next to Mihrimah Sultan Camii, Fatih; Poyraz Sahil Balik Restaurant in Istanbul’s Beykoz neighbourhood; Mutfak Dili Ev Yemekleri, Terane Caddesi, Ziyali Sokak No. 8, Karaköy; Karpi, Beylerbeyi Mahallesi, No. 2 Üsküdar, Istanbul; Mikla, the Marmara Pera, Mešrutiyet Caddesi, No,. 15, Beyoglu, Istanabul.

And if that sounds like a mouthful, it is a different country, different culture. Different language.

Bourdain’s sidekicks for the outing included Esra Yalçinalp, his longtime friend from his No Reservations visit — Esra opened and closed that hour as well — Ìhsan Aknur, Istanbul’s most famousest — and most garrulous — taxi driver (“How can you ask a taxi driver, did you make an accident?!” he shrieks at Bourdain, narrowly avoiding just that, on-camera at that); and Gündüz Vassaf, psychologist and author, and Vassaf’s friend, Serra Yimaz, an actress.

“What does it mean to be Turkish?  Bourdain asks them.

“Serra, are you Turkish?” Vassaf asks Yimaz playfully.

“Yes,” she replies. “But it’s not my fault.”

Speaking for himself, Istanbul finds Bourdain in an alternatively pensive and hopeful frame of mind.

“Ten years from now,” he asks Nuri Egeli, a prominent, successful businessman and avowed supporter of Erdogan’s policies, at a posh rooftop bar overlooking the night lights of Istanbul’s fast-growing skyline, “will we be able to come to this bar, or a bar like it, and drink lots of gin drinks and misbehave?”

“No problem,” Egeli replies. “This is still a party town. We drink hard.”

Bourdain: “So it's all about money.”

Egeli: “It's all about money. Everything is all about money in the world.”

Well, not exactly. Don’t forget the food.

There’s always room for food.

Na zdorovie.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/parts-unknown/istanbul-812a0d6b30d6

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

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Bourdain in Borneo

“Travel isn’t always pretty … the journey changes you. It should change you.” This was Anthony Bourdain going up the Skrang River in the heart of the Borneo jungle in November 2015.

Borneo was the first episode of Parts Unknown I ever watched. Truthfully, it was the first hour of Bourdain I ever watched.

I was stuck in cattle class on a 12-hour flight to Africa; I had some TV programs loaded on my iPad, and I’d heard good things about this guy, Anthony Bourdain. I wanted to see one of his programs set in the developing world, as opposed to one of his stateside shows — because, let’s face it, while “well done” (pun intended), Bourdain’s stateside settings are familiar to those of us who live in North America. I happened on Borneo quite by accident. It was random selection, as opposed to natural selection.

By then, Bourdain had knocked about the TV world for about 15 years. His first foray into food TV, A Cook’s Tour, debuted on the Food Network in 2000; Borneo aired 15 years later, on CNN’s Parts Unknown.

A Cook’s Tour was the brainchild of then-NYU film graduate Lydia Tenaglia, who was working at New York Times Television at the time.

Tenaglia had read Bourdain’s book sensation Kitchen Confidential. She learned that Bourdain was pitching a Mark Twain-esque Innocents Abroad-type travel journal as a follow-up project.

Much had changed by the time Tenaglia and her production company Zero Point Zero, co-founded with Chris Collins, settled on Parts Unknown for CNN. Those nascent episodes of A Cook’s Tour were filmed on the fly — and a budget — with a pair of Sony PD100 DV camcorders. Not exactly the Sony CineAlta cameras in wide use in the film industry today, but fit for purpose at the time.

For me, Bourdain was somewhat of an unknown when I first watched Borneo.

As a longtime viewer of CNN, going back to the Ted Turner years and before Warner/Discovery messed things up, I assumed Bourdain was some yutz CNN had parachuted in to fill a hole in their primetime schedule.

Obviously, a Bourdain TV show for CNN wasn’t going to be a life-changing, seminal moment in television history — more like a viewing alternative to Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. But I was trapped in cattle class on a 12-hour flight to Africa; what else was I going to do? I knew enough at the time to always have an iPad and a decent pair of headphones with me on long flights; the so-called in-flight entertainment on some of those African airlines makes CNN look like Citizen Kane.

So I turned to Borneo, somewhat reluctantly, and within five minutes — literally, that’s all it took — I knew. I was wrong. Bourdain was something special. A creative talent of the first order. Hell, I’m going to stick my neck out here and just say it: Bourdain struck me as the 21st-century equivalent of Mark Twain. Think  Innocents Abroad, re-imagined for the Apocalypse Now generation.

The analogy is apt.

The Parts Unknown Borneo, directed and produced by longtime Bourdain director/producer, creative companion and favourite whipping boy Tom Vitale, is structured a lot like the Coppola film, right down to the part where Vitale, as with Coppola on Apocalypse Now, had a near nervous breakdown during filming. More on that in a moment.

The story, and there is one, is simple. A lifelong wanderer and world traveller journeys up a largely unexplored jungle river in search of his destiny and a larger meaning, whatever that might be. Coppola and his fellow screenwriters John Milius and the Vietnam War journalist Michael Herr based their similarly themed screenplay for Apocalypse Now on the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness, first published in serial form in 1899.

As Vitale explains in his autobiographic book In the Weeds — highly recommended, by the way — “Tony’s first visit to Borneo in 2005 was a trip that had marked a turning point in his life and career, as well as mine. … That trip during the first season of No Reservations had been an emotional one for Tony. His marriage of twenty years was breaking up, and he’d fallen in love again and was feeling unusually poetic around the camera.”

The episode’s theme was inspired by the bejalai, an Iban philosophy about taking a journey of self-discovery. An Indigenous group native to the vast jungles of Borneo, the Iban consider the bejalai central to their culture; the bejalai is a voyage of discovery that every Iban must take. The idea, Vitale writes in In the Weeds, is to go on an adventure, and learn something about the world.

Vitale: “When all is said and done, hopefully, you’re better for what you’ve seen, and you share the knowledge you’ve acquired with your home village. The Iban then commemorate the experience with a hand-tapped tattoo, à la ‘travel leaves marks.’”

It was the perfect metaphor for an hour of TV about travel.

Bourdain had navigated similar emotional terrain in the Parts Unknown episode Congo, from that show’s first season — which, as fortune would have it, was another nightmare-inducing experience for Vitale, though in that one, at least, Bourdain didn’t try to strangle Vitale on the spot. More on that in a moment.

Ten years later, he wanted his own ceremonial tattoo to mark his emotional journey, becoming a new man — older, wiser, more worldly, more sophisticated, and more mature. A remote village of repentant headhunters, hidden in a faraway corner of Borneo’s sweltering jungle of steep, slippery, thorny, leech-infested bush seemed the perfect tonic — pun intended.

This time, though, as recounted in Tom Vitale’s autobiography In the Weeds (seriously, if you’ve not read it, the book is a must), Borneo had changed dramatically, not unlike Bourdain himself.

“Much had changed in the decade since Tony’s last visit,” Vitale wrote. “The old longhouse where the whole Iban village lived together under one roof in apartments off a communal hallway had been torn down and replaced by a newer one. The tribe had converted to Christianity and been convinced to bury their bouquet of skulls.

Much of the jungle had been clear-cut by loggers, and Itam [Bourdain’s guide from the No Reservations expedition ten years earlier] was dead.”

The shoot was arduous from the very beginning, nothing like the experience from a decade earlier.

Vitale: “We had decided to devote half the shoot to [the Iban festival] Gawai, but nothing was happening aside from repetitive drinking. At Gawai, everyone drinks. Kids, adults, the village elders, and especially honoured guests like us. Every five feet, you’re obliged to accept another shot of lankau, a homemade rice whiskey only marginally lower octane than jet fuel and known to induce mildly hallucinogenic effects. It’s considered an insult to refuse, which is probably why our travel doctor here in case of emergency was lying passed out drunk on the floor.

“In addition to that, I’d discovered that the translator-sidekick I’d brought along to the drinking festival was a recovering alcoholic and didn’t drink. Which didn’t really matter because, as it turned out, he also didn’t speak Iban. And none of the Iban spoke English.

“As if that weren’t enough, I didn’t have much to visually connect this visit to Itam—the narrative backbone of the episode.

“Worst of all, Tony had decided he didn’t want to go through with the Bejalai tattoo scene (after all). I was counting on that damn tattoo.”

Matters went from bad to worse.

Vitale stumbled over Itam’s widow, now 95, in the middle of the night, and realized he had an opportune moment to finally string things together — only he couldn’t find a cameraman. Or a camera.

“Ninety-five years old, she was knocking back shots from a handle of Johnnie Walker Blue with her preschool-age great-grandson. Now, that might have been a useful shot to bring back to New York, but, of course, there were no cameras to be found.”

Vitale confesses he had a few shots of his own by then, and not being a drinker by nature or habit, this was a very, very bad idea — especially in that heat and humidity.

Vitale came across the crew drinking with Bourdain in a ceremonial tent for that purpose, and to put it as delicately as possible, he lost it.

“Without question, I shouldn’t have had so much to drink, and I was totally out of line to speak that way to the crew. But my biggest mistake was doing it in front of Tony. I’d been pushing him for content all day, which always got under his skin. But drunken behaviour and being ‘uncool’ was even worse. Quite drunk himself, Tony got to his feet and yelled, ‘That is f**king it! You’re done, demoted! … if I see you one more time tonight, you’re off the show! For good.  Now get upstairs to your room and sleep it off.””

There was just one problem: Vitale did allow himself to be seen by Bourdain again that night, no more than twenty minutes later, and that’s when Bourdain launched himself on top of him and tried to throttle him on the spot.

“I wanted to believe we’d been on a Bejalai, but deep down, I was terrified the last decade had just been aimless wandering while making a TV show,” Vitate recalled. “On some level, I’d convinced myself the tattoo would be proof there was meaning in the chaos.”

Being strangled alive in the middle of a jungle night halfway around the world was not exactly the meaning he was after, though, and at that point it looked as if Parts Unknown was going to cause ZPZ and CNN a very big headache indeed.

Here’s the genius part, though.

Much as with Coppola during the making of Apocalypse Now — and, before that, Conrad in writing Heart of Darkness, the remote jungle setting coupled with the dark night, heat, humidity, biting flies, leeches, copious quantities of alcohol and emotional turmoil inspired revelatory soul-searching, and some of the best voiceover Bourdain would ever compose.

On that first visit to Borneo a decade earlier for No Reservations, Bourdain ruminated about the nature of travel in a moment of reflection, soul-searching, and lucidness.

It was, Vitale recalled, the single best quote about travel he had ever witnessed … from anyone, anywhere.

The footage was unusable, though, thanks to “the unrelenting barking of a dog in the background!” and it never made it into the final cut.

Vitale had the presence of mind to transcribe what Bourdain said, however, and it’s just as well he did. At the end of the Parts Unknown episode, a now-sober Vitale persuaded a now-sober Bourdain — post-murder attempt — to voice those words again for the episode-closing voiceover.

It’s his favourite quote about travel, Vitale wrote in In the Weeds, worthy of anything in Paul Theroux’s 2011 travel-quote anthology, The Tao of Travel.

Bourdain:

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts; it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

Hail and amen.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/parts-unknown/happy-gawai-5d54df41338c

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

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

CNN/David Scott Holloway

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Bourdain in Ethiopia (with Marcus Samuelsson)

“This stuffing of food in your fellow diners’ face is called gursha, and that’s what you do to show your affection and respect. Try this at the Waffle House some time and prepare for awkwardness.” Tony Bourdain in Ethiopia, in 2015.

“Admit it. You hear the name Ethiopia, and you think of starving children with distended bellies. You just think famine and despair are so awful you frankly do not want to even think about it anymore.

“But take a look, Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia. A cool, high-altitude urban center that will both confirm and confound expectations. Fueled largely by direct foreign investment and a returning Ethiopian Diaspora eager to be part of the new growth, things are changing in Addis. It is one of the fastest growing economies in the world.”

The music. The food. Diaspora. Returning to one’s roots. The value of friendship. The importance of family.

These are the things Tony Bourdain chose to focus on in his Parts Unknown episode Ethiopia, which first aired on CNN in October, 2015. The famous — or perhaps that should be infamous — famine of 1983-’85, Bob Geldof and Live Aid rate just a brief mention, not because Bourdain chose to ignore it but because, he implies, others have done it before him, and better. Geldof, for one.

Instead, there’s the music: Mahmoud Ahmed, performing as Mehamud Ahmed, on Embeba Gora, Bemem Sebeb Litlash and others; Hailu Mergia, with Musicawi Silt, from the album Tche Belew; Thomas Gobena, aka Thomas T. Gobena, with Brothers, from the album The John Prester Sessions; and Abegasu Shiota, with Wonchi Breeze, as performed by Shiota and bandmates Misale Legesse, Girum Mezmur, Yared Tefera, Misale Legesse, and too many othersa to mention here.

If I’ve been overly specific with the song names and tracks — Bourdain and Parts Unknown background composer Mike Ruffino also found room for a Western standard, Sha-la-la, performed by his writer/composer friend Josh Homme and Mark Lanegan of Queens of the Stone Age — it’s because music plays such an important role in Ethiopia, and because, thanks to our modern-day age of technology and global access to world music at the touch of a button, any song, anywhere, is yours for the asking. Bourdain was at his best when combining specificity — attention to cultural detail — with existential bigger-picture questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? It’s one of the reasons Bourdain is still with us, why we’re still watching his shows and talking about him today.

And there’s Africa. The lure and pull of that amazing, enthralling, contradictory and maddeningly complex continent, with its 54 countries and 3,000 tribes and languages with roots that underpin many of the world’s major language families, drew Bourdain in as it has countless others, myself included. Ethiopia finds Bourdain in a relaxed, joyous frame of mind, but also quietly reflective. Africa is the birthplace of humankind — noted anthropologist and paleontologist Mary Leakey more-or-less settled that issue on July 17, 1959, with her discovery of the fossil remains of Zinjanthropus boisei, one of humankind’s earliest known ancestors, later nicknamed “East Africa Man,” aka “Nutcracker Man,” at Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti plains of Tanzania, a stone’s throw down the Great Rift Valley from southwestern Ethiopia. Bourdain finds himself profoundly moved by Ethiopia, and not for the first time in that part of Africa, and is momentarily caught at a loss for words — which, as any avid viewer of Parts Unknown knows, was rare indeed.

Bourdain’s friend, companion and spirit guide on his Ethiopian expedition is Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised, Harlem NY chef Marcus Samuelsson — birth name Kassahun Tsegie —whose family fled Ethiopia in the turmoil of Ethiopia’s 1974 civil war, a blood-soaked conflagration that saw then-emperor Haile Selassie deposed by a motley crew of Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist rebels in a coup d’état that vaulted an ambitious young army officer and reluctant bureaucrat Mengistu Haile Mariam to power, a self-righteous dude and diehard Communist who would go down as one of history’s more notable bad guys, if not an out-and-out nut job. Selassie died in 1975 of “natural causes,” according to the official record, though evidence later emerged that he was strangled on orders of Mengistu’s military government; Mengistu’s apparatchiks no doubt irritated by Selassie’s presence and his continuing insistence on staying alive.

Samuelsson, who first became interested in cooking through his maternal grandmother in Sweden, would go on to become the executive chef of Aquavit, the Scandinavian fusion restaurant in midtown Manhattan, at the ripe old age of 24.

He was voted New York’s finest chef in 2003 by the James Beard Foundation and would go on to pen the African-inspired cookbook The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa in 2006.

You might say Samuelsson comes by his culinary roots honestly, as did Bourdain. They both put in the labor and long hours necessary to get where they did in the cooking world.

You might also say that New York as a town was big enough for the two of them: They became fast friends.

Samuelsson’s literary efforts didn’t end with Soul of a New Cuisine: the Wall Street Journal wrote of his 2013 memoir Yes, Chef (co-written with journalist Veronica Chambers): “Plenty of celebrity chefs have a compelling story to tell, but none of them can top [this] one.”

(Bourdain, from somewhere Up There, might lay claim to equal time on that one but, truth is, that wouldn’t be his style.)

A shout-out is due here for Parts Unknown director-producer and cameraman Morgan Fallon, who took on all three duties for Ethiopia. His official bio — not to mention his Instagram and Twitter accounts — note he was nominated ten times over the years for an Emmy but didn’t win as often as he could have — should have. Would it be overcooking things to say that makes him the Stanley Kubrick of cameramen? (Kubrick, let the record note, never won an Oscar for directing, though he did win one for special effects, for 2001: A Space Odyssey — an insult, really, that smacks of condescension more than anything else.)

Ethiopia is about food and family and life itself, but little can top the final few minutes when Samuelsson, trailed by Bourdain, is reunited with his frail, elderly biological father, Tsegie, in the Ethiopian village where Samuelsson was born.

Their reunion is especially poignant because Samuelsson’s mother died in a tuberculosis epidemic when he was just three years old. As recalled in Parts Unknown, Samuelsson and his older sister Fantaye were separated from their family in the tumult and chaos of the 1974 civil war, and were adopted by Swedish geologist Lennart Samuelsson and his wife Anne-Marie and raised in Göteborg, Sweden (Gothenburg to you and me) before Samuelsson’s cooking apprenticeship in Switzerland, Austria and, in 1994, the US.

It’s a remarkable story of sacrifice and success, and refutes this idea of today’s populists that immigration is a scam.

“So, how does it feel to be back?” Bourdain asks Samuelsson at Ethiopia’s end. “I have to tell you, if I can be honest, you seem conflicted.”

“Yes,” Samuelsson says quietly. “There are a thousand thoughts going through my head. I feel a little guilty that I got out.”

Bourdain: “If you stayed, what do you think you would be doing right now?”

“I would have been a farmer or dealt with some type of cattle.”

“I’m pretty sure you would be a shit farmer,” Bourdain says, with a wry smile. “You’d be the best-dressed goddamn farmer, though, that’s for sure. Where is home for you, man? What do you think?”

“That’s the eternal question for me, you know,” Samuelsson replies. “I feel at home in New York. I feel very much at home when I am in Africa. But I also feel out of place, and coming to this very place, Abru Gundana, it gives me a lot of humility, but I can’t say it’s home. I can’t say it’s home.”

As for his happiest moment in Africa, when Bourdain presses him:

“Happiest moment, I think, is … the village. For me, when the whole village comes together — music, food, culture bringing everybody together. Eating together, being together — that is by far the happiest to me.”

That’s a hell of a way to end.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/@Bourdain/ethiopia-98c2bf948d90

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/ethiopia/on-my-african-mother/

     https://eatlikebourdain.com/?s=ethiopia

CNN

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Bourdain in Okinawa

Where King Tacos meets tofuyo and taco rice, and US military bases rub up against Chinese tourists: This is Anthony Bourdain in Okinawa, almost ten years ago to the day.

It’s a measure of Anthony Bourdain’s power as a storyteller, not to mention that he’s remembered after all this time, that even an off-the-cuff episode like Parts Unknown’s sixth-season outing to Okinawa has one commenter on Reddit saying that it made him want to go there.

It also says a lot for Bourdain that he found something interesting and little-known to say about a foreign land that has seared itself into the consciousness of a generation of Americans and others who fought in the Pacific toward the end of the Second World War. As Bourdain recounts in an episode that is by turns gripping, emotionally wrenching and oddly whimsical in parts, a history lesson reimagined as a cultural, sociological and culinary take on an enigmatic, often misunderstood corner of the world.

As Bourdain recalls, early in Okinawa, a U.S. invasion fleet of nearly 1,500 ships, a landing force of 182,000 combatants — 75,000 more than Normandy — approached Okinawa on April 1, 1945.

April 1945. Think about that. In Europe, Nazi Germany surrendered on May 7, just five weeks later. Imperial Japan would sign the official “Instrument of Surrender” four months after that, on Sept. 2 of that year.

The battle for Okinawa was hard fought, and terrible.

Bourdain reminds us in his voiceover that what came next was what Okinawans called ‘The Typhoon of Steel.’  Having island-hopped across the Pacific, Allied forces saw Okinawa as the key base from which to stage air operations and ready a landing force for the final push into the Japanese mainland and V-Day in the Pacific.

“The fighting was brutal for both sides. The cost of lives and resources for the Allied forces was tremendous. And, when it was over, military planners looked at the mainland, looked at what Okinawa had cost them, and projected even more appalling losses. What came next, we all know.”

That one line, for me, perfectly explains what separated Bourdain from the countless other travel documentarians out there: “What came next, we all know.” He didn’t feel the need to explain what happened. He took it as a given that his audience—those of us who watched his programs, rapt with attention and marvelling at his stories—were, and still are, smart enough not to be spoonfed every little detail.

“What is not widely known,” Bourdain continued — and this is another Bourdain tell, that he frequently/often/always told us things we didn’t know — “is that more people died during the battle of Okinawa than all those killed during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

There are more things we didn’t know, or at least that I myself didn’t know before watching Okinawa: that Okinawans are a separate people with a separate language, culture, cuisine and history to mainland Japan, always subservient and kept under the thumb of their larger, more traditional neighbour to the north. And during the war, Okinawans, the majority of them civilians — men, women, and children alike — paid a terrible price for being caught in the middle, an accident of geography, a footnote in history were it not for people like Bourdain who take those familiar, taken-for-granted words from Remembrance Day (the UK, Canada) and Memorial Day (the US), “Lest we forget,“ and imbue them with genuine meaning.

This is Bourdain, though, with all the wit, passion, and acerbic observations and observances we’ve come to know and expect — and enjoy — from his best work throughout Parts Unknown’s 91 hour-long episodes over 12 seasons and six years.

Bourdain: “Okinawa is a place with a fighting tradition—a history of ferocious resistance, but it’s nothing like what you might think. Not at all.”

“For all the relative rigidity of the mainland, Okinawa answers in its own unique way. Don’t eat the same thing each day. That’s boring. There’s even an Okinawan term for it, chanpurū, something mixed—bits borrowed from all over, served up for anyone to eat.”

And the playful side. This, during a martial arts (karate) exhibition:

“I’m not accusing anyone of gambling” — illegal, or shall we say “quasi-legal” in Okinawa — “but, um, I see some money changing hands.”

And the food:

“In Okinawa, pork is king. OK, they’ve got tofu, too.”

To one of the local fixer/handlers/restaurateur/chefs who share their family histories with this tall, upstart visiting American with the shock of white hair and a mouth to match:

“Your mom would’ve been like a hipster hero.”

Karate and puffer fish!

Yes, but what of the future? As anyone with even a rudimentary grasp of the news headlines knows, Okinawa is home to 30,000 US servicemen and women anchored on several of the largest, most prominent US military bases in the Pacific, casting an increasingly wary — and perhaps nervous — eye toward mainland China.

Toward the end of the hour, Bourdain breaks bread, in a manner of speaking, with Tetsuhiro Hokama Sensei (born 1944, not a terrific year to be born in that part of the world), chairman of the Kenshikai Goju-Ryu karate group, and Vivian Takeuchi, a local who has lived in both the U.S. and Okinawa. Takeuchi’s aunt, Sumiko, was an entertainer who sang at American military bases after the war.

“Okinawans may be easygoing and laid back,” Bourdain says, “but the island is also a relative hotbed of political activism, largely inspired or provoked by what Okinawans see as high-handed treatment from a central government with different cultural and historical traditions, who do not consider their needs or priorities. (Not to mention) their disproportionate shouldering of the U.S. military presence for the entire country. There are close to 30 “military installations” on Okinawa, and even though it is one of the smallest Japanese prefectures in terms of livable area, the bases account for more than half of the foreign military presence. Even more problematic, Bourdain notes, much of Okinawa's arable land suitable for farming on an island whose whole traditional identity was built around farming is being eaten up by military bases.

Everything is relative, though.

“Tourism is probably the future of Okinawa,” Bourdain tells Takeuchi at one point. “You have beautiful weather, beaches. If the bases leave, it is going to be big hotels and resorts and golf courses.

“Which is worse? Chinese tourists or American Marines?”

Takeuchi considers the question for a moment, weighing military bases against Chinese tourists and the inevitable gentrification of hotel complexes and credit card swipe machines unchecked tourism would bring, and smiles ruefully.

“I will stick with the Marines,” she says, and Bourdain laughs.

There it is.

As James Pankiewicz, Brit expat, black belt in Shōrin Ryū karate and translator for many of the karate sensei on the island, tells Bourdain: “They are saying, please eat. Less talking, more eating.”

Better than the alternative, as always. Life is about compromise, after all.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/parts-unknown/ryukyu-f7569582bbeb

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

     https://visitokinawajapan.com/discover/food-and-longevity/okinawan-food-culture/

CNN

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