Bourdain in Georgia (Sakartvelo)

“I don’t know what it says about a place that since I’ve arrived in this country … I’m either drinking or hung over.” This was Tony Bourdain in Georgia (the country, not the state), faithful sidekick Zamir Gotta in tow.

One of the many joys of Tony Bourdain’s sojourn to Tbilisi, Georgia, for CNN’s Parts Unknown in November 2015 comes near the end of the hour, when gallery owner Tamuna Gvaberidze, the friend of Keti Borchorishvili, Georgia’s Deputy Minister of the Economy (“I like to show off my country! You know, I want to sometimes scream, ‘Look! This is my country! Come and visit!’” ) tells Bourdain that he bears a striking resemblance to the filmmaker David Lynch.

This is not entirely flattering to Bourdain, as Lynch is a full decade older.

Not true, Bourdain protests. “I’m David Lynch? Really? He has better hair.”

Gvaberidze turns to Borchorishvili — who, remember, is the country’s deputy minister for the economy —and tells her friend: “I’m so happy he says he likes Georgia, really.”

“Why would I not?” Bourdain says, downing another shot of chacha, the local brandy.

This, after noting in his voiceover that, “The ladies convinced us to make the 90-minute drive to this village and this restaurant, and I’m glad they did. By the time I’ve had some more of the delicious and lethal chacha and many glasses of Georgian wine, after boiled beets in a wild plum sauce and freshly foraged mushrooms with chilli pepper and mint tarragon, baby lamb stewed in its own fat with cumin and cooked together with wild rice biryani-style… after all this, I am convinced. I am co-opted. I am recruited. Count me as a useful idiot, a witting agent of the Ministry of Tourism, for I may as well be.”

“You’re becoming a Georgian,” Gvaberidze tells him. “Be careful.”

Georgia. Sakartvelo. [sak”art”elo]. A country in Eastern Europe (pop. 3.7 million) — transcontinental, meaning it links Eastern Europe with Western Asia.

Wenn der wind von osten weht. “When the wind blows” — from the north and the northeast.

Neighbours: Russia (north and northeast), the Black Sea (west), Armenia (south), Turkey (southwest), and Azerbaijan (southeast), aka in Russia’s long shadow. Not far from those bastions of peace and civility, Iran and Syria. Best not mention Abkhazia or South Ossetia. That’s how wars start.

Georgia is also known — and this is where Anthony Bourdain and his ever-faithful fixer, sidekick, erstwhile host and one-time travelling companion Zamir Gotta enter the frame — as one of the world’s earliest known sites of winemaking (“‘World’s oldest wine’ found in 8,000-year-old jars in Georgia,” BBC News, 13 Nov. 2017).

Georgian wine has the reputation it has, fresh and pure, because of its unique fermentation process, free of the additives that would be needed if it were bottled and exported but which would affect the natural taste.

And then there’s the food.

Food is considered one of the pillars of Georgian society. You do not mess with the food.

Bourdain’s interest would have been piqued right there. Enter CNN, to pay the bills, and Parts Unknown, to provide the excuse to go.

First, though, there was the small matter of of history, recent and past. Georgia, originally part of Tsarist Russia, was an independent republic under German protection briefly, in 1917, following the Russian Revolution, but found itself invaded and annexed by the Soviet Red Army in 1921.

Georgia, always one of the more rebellious of the former Soviet republics, carved out the independence of a kind with secession from the Soviet Union in 1991 some 70  years later, just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the die was cast.

The bad blood between Georgia and Russia goes back a long way.

Georgia officially adopted Christianity in the 4th century — you can practically sense the seething hostility from the country’s Islamic neighbours — not to mention those non-believing Soviet Marxists, never too keen on any religion, let alone one with reminders of Russia’s own Orthodox Church, banned by the Soviet apparatchiks at the time.

After the Rose Revolution (peaceful) and official breakaway from post-Soviet Russia in 2003 —“More vodka, Comrade Yeltsin?” —  Georgia actively pursued a pro-Western foreign policy and introduced the democratic and economic reforms needed to win the appreciation of — and full integration into — the European Union and NATO.

For Russia, led by Vladimir Putin at the time (yes, Putin has been around that long, pulling strings the entire time) and his ideological partner in crimes against humanity, Dmitry Medvedev, this was distinctly uncool.

And so — the Russo-Georgian War, also known as “the Russian invasion of Georgia” [sic], which broke out in August 2008.

The entire South Caucasus became a fire zone, complete with the bombing of civilian towns and villages and accusations of genocide. Sound familiar? Today, the Russo-Georgian War is considered to be the first European war of the 21st century. It would not be the last.

Human Rights Watch accused both sides of breaching international rules governing war — again, does this sound familiar? — and again, decent, ordinary, everyday working people and their families got the worst of it.

In the end, the International Criminal Court, International Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights couldn’t figure out what was going on, let alone who was primarily to blame, so why should you?

Enter Bourdain, ZPZ camera crew in tow, with CNN paying the bills, coupled with Georgia’s historic relationship with good food and fine wine.

Of course, having Zamir Gotta in tow — affable, loquacious, willing to put up with all kinds of nonsense at the hands of the famously irascible Bourdain, including, and I’m not making this up, a semi-naked pole dance — helped.

“You need some nightlife,” Zamir tells him, after they fail at a game of roulette in the off-season resort town of Batumi, Georgia’s second city. “I mean, the losers deserve some relief, right?”

“Yes,” Bourdain replies. “(There’s) nothing like a loser in a nightclub and I emanate loser, so let's go.”

“Unsurprisingly,” Bourdain adds in voice-over, “Zamir and I suck at gambling with a force equivalent to a thousand suns. I should have just pulled my pants down and handed over my money the second we walked into the door. But actually, that came later.”

Cue the pole dance. Zamir on the pole. Some sights, once seen, are hard to unsee.

But wait, there’s more.

Together, they sample the local chacha (brandy to you) in Batumi’s aptly named Clouds Bar—as in, the clouds are where your head’s likely to be after downing one too many shots of the local hooch.

They retire t5r8to Sazandari Restaurant, a traditional Georgian eaterie known for its hangover cures. Those cures include chashushuli, slow-cooked veal with tomato and onion seasoned with chillies, coriander and fennel, and khashi, a broth made with beef bones and tripe served with fresh garlic, though Bourdain admits in a moment of weakness that perhaps khashi might not be the best cure for a hangover.

Ditching Zamir temporarily — the semi-naked pole dance might have been a bridge too far — Bourdain moves on to Tbilisi, Georgia’s foremost city (pop. 1.2 million), where he noshes on local culinary delights and debates the meaning of life at Gabriadze Café with expat journalist Paul Rimple, local bureau chief for the online food resource Culinary Backstreets.

Together, they pick their way through a salad of orange, almonds and honey before turning to manly-sized portions of shkmeruli, chicken slow-baked in an oven and simmered in milk and garlic, together with lamb ribs, grilled and served in a pomegranate sauce with slices of fried eggplant and a walnut filling.

Excursions to Sofia Melnikova’s Fantastic Douqan Restaurant (that’s its name) follow, where Bourdain samples khinkali, dumplings filled with broth and spicy beef, eaten in the traditional way using one’s hands, and finally to Culinairum Khasheria, known for its fusion of traditional Georgian soup with caramelized onions and wild trout tartar, and chakapuli stew, made with mussels simmered in tarragon and wine sauce … coupled with yet more shots of chacha — a digestive, naturally; why, what did you think it was for? — and tonis puri, Georgian bread cooked in an outdoor tandoori-style oven.

If by this point you’re thinking the episode is focusing more on food than some of Parts Unknown’s more politically and geographically minded outings, well … you’re not far wrong.

In the end, for all Georgia’s troubled past and geopolitical tensions of the present, Georgia is a remarkably uplifting and life-affirming episode.

I reached out to Zamir before filing this post to the group.

Keep in mind that of all the people who met and had chance encounters with Bourdain along the way. Zamir is one of a relative few who got to know him at his best, and less than best. What better way, then, than to close with Zamir’s own words, in the present day — Zamir Gotta, on the tao of Bourdain and the legacy he’s left behind.

“The Georgia episode happened to be my last one with Tony. While there, he inspired me to come up with my own ‘Zamir Vodka’ brand, which I eventually did. It helps me keep up his legacy. I hope ‘the Bourdain congregation’ follow me and revisit his footsteps in countries like Georgia and Uzbekistan. I’m a lucky man to be able to continue my Peacemaking mission with his blessing. [Georgia] is symbolically sad but a very meaningful episode for me.”

And there it is.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/parts-unknown/georgia-7d4c84411ffd

     https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/j1ndki/tbilisi_georgia_episode_parts_unknown/

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

CNN

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Bourdain in the Greek Islands

And now for something completely different: an escape from the news headlines. “Pretend that everywhere is just like here: beautiful, sleepy, delicious food. Everything is just fine.” This was Tony Bourdain, getting away from it all in the summer of 2016.

It's a restive world right now. Lebanon. Gaza. Ukraine. The climate crisis. Growing signs of financial turmoil in the markets. An endless litany of horror stories on the nightly news.

Anyone looking to get away from it all — as Tony Bourdain did in October  2015, nine years ago now, during a swing through Greece’s Cyclades islands for CNN’s Parts Unknown — could do worse than to revisit, or perhaps visit for the first time, Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode set in the Greek islands.

Bourdain gave the familiar tourist hotspots — Mykonos, Santorini, — a pass in favour of the island of NaxosThe Greek Islands, settle on the Mediterranean isle of Naxos for several weeks, far away from news headlines of a global market crash, street riots in Athens, refugees fleeing a widening war in the Middle East and the ever-present threat, now a clear and present danger worldwide, of the climate crisis.

This is actually a perfect time to revisit the Parts Unknown episode The Greek Islands, if only because the more things change— well, you know the rest.

Bourdain was coming off a year of travelling through hardcore conflict zones, regions beset by civil unrest and roiled by poverty, growing inequality and political turmoil. Through his lifetime affinity for Greek mythology and a desire to kick off a new season of Parts Unknown by taking a break from CNN’s usual fare of fire and fury, Bourdain, tailed by veteran producer/director Tom Vitale and a crew that included Bourdain’s longtime cameraman Zach Zamboni among others, started out with a simple premise, as he put it in his Field Notes at the time for CNN, to “go to a really nice, laid-back Greek island — one with an actual local culture, businesses and income streams outside of tourism — and slide gently into another year of making television whilst maintaining my suntan from summer vacation.”

Preferably an island without a sea of other visitors. Leave Crete to the cretins, as he might have said — but only in a moment of weakness.

And so, lo and behold, this. The Greek Islands. Praise the gods of Ancient Greece. Mt. Olympus and their human enablers:  Apollo, Aphrodite, Poseidon, Athena, Dionysus, Hera, Demeter and the gang, ably aided and abetted by their human enablers, heroes all (well, nearly all): Achilles, Theseus, Odysseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Orpheus,  Helen of Troy (actually, she was from Sparta, but why quibble over a mere detail).

Think of it: an idyllic two weeks or so of languishing in the Mediterranean, hoping and dreaming of a better world, surrounded by good food and good people. Bourdain’s idea was to resurrect a sense of not just what the Mediterranean was during Homer’s time, not the cartoon character but the worthy wordsmith behind those classic epic poems of Ancient Greece, Iliad and The Odyssey. Those heady times could return, Bourdain insisted, after several glasses of Mylonas “Naked Truth,” a wine easy on the nose  —those in the know say)  “evolved and complex with quince, cheese and a certain nuttiness,” while on the mouth, “full and round, warm and nutty — the finish is long!” If only those-in-charge had the wisdom and foresight — yes, that’s a touch of Bourdainesque sarcasm in play there, clever of you to catch it — to nurture and encourage the pursuit of pleasure, be it philosophical or physical, public or ion private, far away from the madding crowds and a world beset with trials and tribulations and, in the Eastern Mediterranean and much of the Middle East, governed by religious fanatics. Enough of these Netanyahus and Yahya Sinwars — bring back Pericles, Leonides and Agamemnon (during his better days; his worse days, not so much).

Of course, reading Greek poetry in peaceful, contemplative solitude wouldn’t be Bourdain without his ready wit and caustic observations of the human condition. And The Greek Islands, while bucolic and pleasantly restoring, has all that and more.

Naxos, for one.

Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades and the centre of ancient Cycladic culture is not a tourist island. It’s best known for its being the source of emery, a rock rich in corundum, and for being the place where the young Zeus of Greek mythology was raised in a cave on an island the poet Homer lionized as Dia, the sacred island “of the Goddess.” There is no nightlife. Not even Coldplay. The party scene is virtually non-existent, or at least it was at the time Bourdain visited. This was about as close to the classic Greek islands as anyone was likely to get in the early 21st century.

Vitale and his camera team wanted to keep the camera constantly moving, ever-so-slowly even, to create a kind of dreamy drift through the chill life in the Greek islands. Naxos is relatively secluded, despite its size, and steeped in a deep small-island tradition of locally sourced food and good wine, a place where close friends and family are what matters, not catering to cruise ships and the great unwashed who board them.

“We shot an offshore dive on a sunken shipwreck, drank raki with the local governor and his in-laws, and sampled fresh fish right off the boat,” Jerry Risius, the episode’s director-of-photography, wrote in his blog at the time, shortly before Greek Islands aired on CNN.

“We had an amazing meal with the politically outspoken group the Stray Bitches, and travelled to the mountainous village of Apeiranthos, where we shot Tony enjoying a traditional celebration in the town square.

“Sometimes, we luck out with local crews … and in Greece, we lucked out. We had the most amazing crew. They helped keep our cameras in constant movement. It was solitary Tony magic with a location-appropriate tempo, and it created a Greek epic.”

Parts Unknown was all about showing us the world through Bourdain’s eyes, in his own words, and on that front, he didn’t disappoint. Bourdain wouldn’t be Bourdain without, well, Bourdain.

On Greece’s financial crisis in 2015, about to happen again? “It’s bumming me out. It’s harshing my total buzz.”

Sorry, Homer, but Odysseus, aka Ulysses, was somewhat of a cad. “I can tell you this: Ulysses was kind of dick. I mean, he left his wife alone for how long?”

On getting away from it all: “The pressures of the outside world I don’t want to think about. I’m on a Greek Island here. It's a beautiful day. I’m planning on passing out on the beach, snorkelling, you know, maybe doing some watercolours, doing a little cooking, napping, eating, more napping, contemplating the mysteries of the universe, or napping, either one or eating cheese — all of those are honourable options. I mean, that’s a vacation to me: staying put and doing nothing.”

The party scene in small-town Greece, in Apeiranthos: “The sort of place where you can still walk into a town square and find yourself caught up in a celebration. This one celebrates Greco-American actor John Stamos’ return to ‘Full House.’”

Bottom line: In the end, Bourdain sought a little peace and quiet, and peace and quiet is pretty much what he found. “The narrow slices of life depicted in this episode,” he wrote in his Field Notes at the time, “are me learning right there along with you.”

Can’t go wrong there.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/greek-islands/greece-episode-facts/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/greek-islands/bourdains-field-notes-the-greek-islands/

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

CNN

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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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