Bourdain in Sichuan

“That resistance, that boing! that rubberiness, that elasticity — it’s kind of the last frontier for Western palates.” This was Anthony Bourdain in Chengdu, China, tormenting his friend Éric Ripert, co-owner and executive chef of New York’s Le Bernardin restaurant and famously doubtful about anything hot or spicy, in one of Parts Unknown’s more joyous, life-affirming hours.

Tony Bourdain, as we all know, was not just a solo act. Take, for example, Éric Ripert.

By the time Parts Unknown rolled round to Sichuan in that program’s eighth season, Tony Bourdain had indulged in one of his favourite pastimes — prodding, probing and poking Ripert into a kind of culinary ecstasy, coupled with mortal fear of what Bourdain might do to him next — on seven separate occasions. First, in April 2002, there was The French Laundry Experience in Ripert’s native France, for Bourdain’s nascent program A Cook’s Tour. This was followed in short order by Chicago, Paris and Brooklyn for No Reservations from 2009-‘12, capped by Peru and Marseille in Parts Unknown, in 2013 and ’15 respectively.

“My friend Eric Ripert,” Bourdain wrote on Medium in 2016 (Hot, Hot, Hot!), “maybe you know him from such previous buddy films as Peru or Marseille, had never been to mainland China. Due, perhaps, to his adherence to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism — and a friendship with Richard Gere — he had concerns about what kind of a welcome he’d receive. For the first few nights he slept with a tinfoil helmet around his head, convinced ‘they’ were onto him every time his cellphone dropped a call. I assured him he was the very last person any Chinese secret service agent would give a shit about, but he was unconvinced. His paranoia was acute.”

In Sichuan, which bowed on CNN in October 2016, Bourdain subjected Ripert to some of the reddest, hottest chilli peppers ever known to humankind. Ripert, famously is about as fond of hot spices as Elvis Presley was of fish. Parfaite!  Bourdain must have though to himself. All the better to test, torment and torture Ripert with.

Bourdain’s livelong love affair with life, his joie d’vivre, if you will, his exultation of spirit and general happiness, would be sorely tested by the time Parts Unknown’s eighth season wrapped in December 2016, but for this one moment, with arguably his bestie Ripert — one of them, anyway — he allowed himself to indulge in the joy of conversation, the joy of eating, and the joy of anything he might do.

To this day, Sichuan remains a favourite episode, if not the favourite, of many Bourdainophiles. It’s fast, funny, frenetic, and by the end, given how Bourdain’s life story ended, surprisingly poignant.

Today we  Bourdainophiles can watch Sichuan and be happy, a moment’s escape from the vissisitudes of life, and a respite from reflection and regret. Sometimes, as one viewer commented on Reddit at the time, memories good and bad can trick you into believing what you want to believe about the past. Sometimes, one can gain a small measure of solace from how we glorify and romanticize our past lives.

Enough of that shit! Bourdain might interject at this point. Bring on the red hot chilli peppers.

Sichuan is the spiciest, sensualist heartland of all the things Bourdain loved about China, he readily confessed in his voiceover … “food that can burn you down to a charred, smoking little stump.”

For Parts Unknown, that meant dropping in on Dan Dan Tian Shui Mian for some “old traditional Chengdu dishes” — welcome to the weird neurological effect of Sichuan peppers — followed by a trek to Tian Tian Fan Dian, as the site Eat Like Bourdain describes it, “a more intense Sichuan dining experience,” with La zi ji, spicy chicken to you; Mapo tofu, granny tofu to you (ground beef and tofu in a fiery chilli sauce of oil, bean paste, garlic shoots, Sichuan peppercorn, and MSG); and Qing hua jiao yu, green peppercorn fish to you.

Then there was Liang Lukou Hot Pot, for a volcanic broth leavened with fish, tripe, vegetables, tofu, seaweed, and quail eggs, washed down with copious — and we’re talking Bourdain here, so we’re talking truly copious — quantities of Baijiu (a colourless Chinese liquor between 35% and 60% alcohol content) and beer.

To help keep the heat under control, you know.

In case you were wondering — and, seriously now, how could you not — prototypical alcohol making in China dates back to the Neolithic Age, with archaeological discoveries of “alcoholic beverage containers” dating back some 2,000 to 10,000 years BC, aka the latter days of the Stone Age in Europe, Asia, Mesopotamia and Africa. Now you know.

“More comically,” Bourdain continued on Medium, “the level of heat in the Sichuanese specialties he sampled in Chengdu, where we spent most of our time, was, shall we say, rather more than his delicate French palate was used to. Coddled by years of foie gras, runny cheese, flaky pastries, and the subtle notes of many fine wines, the searing burn of dried chilies and the numbing, delightfully disorienting effects of Sichuan peppercorns were a challenge.”

Chengdu, China did impress Ripert on one basic, subconscious level, Ripert admitted early in the program, telling Bourdain: “I’m very surprised already of what I see in the city here. I was expecting, like, a gigantic Chinatown.”

Jeez, an exasperated Bourdain shoots back: “That’s some racist shit, right there.”

Later, Bourdain advises him, “Drinking culture is very important here. If we go to a formal meal, your ability to drink leads to a number of assumptions about you: your general manliness, penis size, your worth as a human being…”

“I’m comfortable with my size,” Ripert assures him.

Hello!

But wait, there’s more wisdom where that came from.

The idea that MSG is bad for you, for example. A myth, Bourdain insists.

“You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome?” he tells Ripert. “Racism. ‘Ooh, I have a headache; it must have been the Chinese guy.’”

If you can’t stand the heat … well, you know the rest.

Here’s Bourdain on mapo tofu: “And if you ever have a hangover — and you will, my friend, you will — this will scare the evil right out.”

Sichuan is pure Bourdain, never more evident than in the moment when he regards Ripert struggling manfully with piping hot peppercorn fish.

“Any second now,” he notes dryly, ”that perfect hair is going to burst into flames.”

Touché.

Sichuan may not have been Parts Unknown’s finest hours, but it was one of the funniest.

“Who would you rather see in a Speedo?” he asks Ripert with during one spontaneous tête-à-tête: “Wolf Blitzer, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, or Anderson Cooper?”

Ripert: “Ooh, that’s a tough one.”

Bourdain: “No, actually, there’s an easy answer.”

Supplementary reading:

https://medium.com/parts-unknown/hot-hot-hot-fed7957e65cf

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/16gcmo0/bourdain_and_ripert/

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

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Bourdain in Buenos Aires

“This is the kingdom of doubt.” That was Anthony Bourdain’s assessment of psychotherapy in the Buenos Aires episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown that first aired in November 2016, just two years before his untimely passing. It remains one of his finest hours of television in a lifelong journey of personal discovery that took him from Bhutan to Vietnam.

Hindsight has a funny way of working. What you see at the time is often not how you remember it years later.

Tony Bourdain’s sojourn to Buenos Aires, his second and final ‘grand tour’ with cameras in tow, originally aired on CNN in November 2016, but the various streamers and rights holders to Parts Unknown over the years have made such a dog’s breakfast, pun intended, of scheduling the program over the years — not helped by an ill-advised move by CNN to temporarily pull the episode entirely following Bourdain’s untimely passing in 2018 — that it’s hard to pin down exactly when and where the episode was first seen. Or even available today. (CNN, as industry insiders know, is owned by the chaotic, constantly morphing media company known, depending on the hour of the day and which way the wind’s blowing, as Time-Warner, HBO, HBO MAX, Time-Discovery, Warner Discovery, Discovery Communications, Warner Bros., Warner Bros. Discovery, or just plain old MAX; by the time you read this it may well have changed its name again, to perhaps the People’s Most Generously Excellent Entertainment Kompany of NYC, or PM-GEEK-NYC for short. Who the hell knows?)

Truth is, the Buenos Aires episode is available, and can be found, with a little sleuthing. I found it on Apple iTunes, but that’s in Canada, which, as we know, Mango Loco now regards as the US’s 51st state; your iTunes may not be the same as my iTunes. (Apple is not immune to this corporate game of name-changing, especially now that it’s in the hands of CEO Tim Apple; iTunes no longer exists, depending on your postal code and/or zip code; it’s now called Apple TV, or Apple Music, or Gimme Your Money, or something like that.)

The Parts Unknown Buenos Aires episode is worth tracking down, chiefly for scenes scattered intermittently throughout the end of the hour, in which Bourdain sits down with a psychotherapist. Argentina, home of noted headshrinkers Sylvia Bermann, José Bleger and Néstor Braunstein, has its own Wikipedia page titled ‘Argentine psychiatrists,’ which tells you all you need to know about hearts and minds in the country known for its gauchos, steak — arguably the best in the world — and such noteworthies as Jorge Luis Borges, Eva Perón, Che Guevara, and Lionel Messi.

“I communicate for a living,” he says, lying back on the proverbial couch, “but I'm terrible with communicating with people I care about. I'm good with my daughter. An eight-year-old is about my level of communication skills, so that works out. But beyond, that I'm really terrible."

It’s those moments when Bourdain is being analyzed — it’s hard to tell whether he’s aiming for laughs or genuinely baring his soul or, more likely, a combination of both — that turn the hour into a kind of personal Rorschach test, in which viewers — you and me — see what we choose to see.

Not everyone can handle it.

Certainly, no two fellow Bourdainophiles, knowing how Bourdain’s life story ended, will see it in the same way.

I personally find the episode, even now, to be alternatively maddening, poignant, frustrating, telling, profound, unspeakably sad and deeply moving — and, when least expected, and this is very Bourdain, laugh-out-loud funny.

Bourdain, at one point in the episode, when pressed on what he thinks of Argentina vegetables, admits that he’s quite taken by the chicken.

Yes, kids, in a red-meat society, chicken is a vegetable.

Bourdain confesses that he’s never really been comfortable around people, even though his TV work is based on exactly that, and that it’s hard for him to open up.

He admits the only person who truly gets him, and that he in turn got absolutely, is his daughter Ariane, just eight at the time. What adult, grown man finds his deepest life connection with an eight-year-old, he wonders.

Old souls are like that, though. It’s a heartbreaking admission, but also speaks volumes about the two of them. Leaving a kid behind without her dad is arguably the hardest thing to reconcile about his entire life’s story arc, and how it ended.

“I tell stories for a living. I write books. I make television. A reasonable person does not believe that you are so interesting that people will watch you on television. I think this is evidence of a narcissistic personality disorder to start with ”

I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention the extraordinary work of episode director Tom Vitale in this episode and, throughout the course of the entire series, cinematographers extraordinaire — though, like most cinematographers I know and have met, they’d probably be just as comfortable being called cameramen — Morgan Fallon, Todd Liebler and Zach Zamboni.

The Buenos Aires episode is a tough watch, no question.

It’s also, in hindsight, one of the most telling, revealing, meaningful — and important — hours of television he ever made.

“This is the kingdom of doubt,” he said of Argentina’s dance — the last tango — with psychotherapy.

After days of self-reflection, he finds himself tapping his inner Gabriel Garcia Marquez — 100 years of solitude, compressed into 61 years of worldly observation.

"I've had this dream again that I've had for as long as I can remember. I'm stuck in a vast old Victorian hotel with endless rooms and hallways trying to check out, but I can't. I spend a lot of time in hotels, but this one is menacing because I just can't leave it. And then there's another part to this dream, always, where I'm trying to go home but I can't quite remember where that is.”

He turns to psychoanalyst.

“What do you think? I mean, is there hope for me?”

Oh, yes. Always. His spirit — who he was — lives on forever.

Hail and farewell.

Supplementary reading:

https://medium.com/parts-unknown/last-tango-18c764acd3b4

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/9zggos/parts_unknown_buenos_aires/

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

https://explorepartsunknown.com/directors-cut/when-something-was-good-he-would-tell-you/

CNN

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Bourdain in Hanoi, with Obama

September, 2016. Be warned. You're now entering Anthony Bourdain's "place of dreams; my spirit house. A city of ghosts:” Hanoi, Vietnam. And a talk about fathers and daughters over a bowl of bun cha noodle soup with former US president Barack Obama.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Einstein said that, but it could just as easily have been Tony Bourdain.

“You like food and are reasonably nice at the table? You show me hospitality? I will sit down with you and break bread.”

Bourdain did say that — he wrote it in his Sept. 25, 2016 essay for Medium — in his telling account of how his famous sit-down with then-President Barack Obama over rice noodles and pork meatball soup at Bún Chå Huong Liên noodle shop in Hanoi, Vietnam. “Located in the old part of Hanoi,” Tom Vitale writes in his book In the Weeds, (Hachette, 2022) about his decade of experiences co-producing and directing CNN’s Parts Unknown alongside Bourdain in countless noodle shops and sit-down eateries around the world, “it was so much more visual and in line with the ethos of the show than the safe and sterile locations where the Secret Service wanted us to film. But who were we to interfere with their judgment?”

Well, the makers of the show, for one. Obama had just five months remaining in his two-term presidency and he was in his legacy phase. Vietnam was arguably Bourdain’s favourite country outside his own home and native land, certainly the most formative in terms of his TV travels, and Vietnam was also the locus of a defining moment in US history and foreign policy. Symbolism, much?

“I’m not a journalist,” Bourdain wrote that weekend in Medium. “Or a foreign policy wonk. My politics are my own. Contrary to the assertions of angry Twitter warriors who think I’m getting regular guidance from the ‘Communist News Network,’ I’ve never once received a phone call or an email or had a conversation that contained the words, ‘Wouldn’t it be a great idea if…’ or, ‘How about?’”

As it turned out, the episode Hanoi would open Parts Unknown’s eighth season, by which time Parts Unknown was in its pomp, as the Brits say, a global phenomenon in its own right that was weekly appointment television wherever CNN’s signal reached — which, basically, is the entire planet.

The episode is familiar enough — at least to those in this group — that I don’t need to repeat it here, except perhaps at the very end. A coda, if you will, a look back at yesterday, a moment for today, and a sign of hope for tomorrow.

“Though I may admire him,” Bourdain continued, “I wasn’t going to be a platform for discussion of a particular foreign policy agenda. Barack Obama was apparently interested in sitting down for a meal with me — and I intended to speak to him only as a father of a 9-year-old girl, as a fellow Southeast Asia enthusiast (the President spent time in Indonesia as a young man), and a guy who likes a bowl of spicy, savoury pork and noodles with a cold beer.”

Vitale’s riveting account of the meeting’s filming — tense, funny, chaotic, impressive, insane, wonderful and terrifying by turns, and fascinating in its detail — tells the less familiar story of how the sausage was made for television. In a chapter titled The Quiet American, after the Graham Greene novel (Heinemann, 1955) about the breakdown of French colonialism in Vietnam and early American involvement in the Vietnam War, Vitale writes about how he reached the point nervous breakdown — “Yes, the Bun Cha restaurant (is) amazing, but I don’t know; the place has got to be a firetrap. If one of those woks burst into flame, we’d all be f**ked!” — fretting about everything that could go wrong, from clumsily using expressions like “shoot” and “windows” and “line of sight” in front of horrified White House liaisons to a clandestine pre-show meeting with “Mitchell,” the head of Obama’s security detail that day, “a very serious-looking Secret Service agent … wearing dark aviator sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt. The whole thing reminded me of some sort of B-movie spy thriller. I was about to say as much when I thought better of it.”

Wise move. ”Mitchell” was one those the no-nonsense types. “You’ll have forty-five minutes with the president beginning at seven-thirty p.m.,” he told Vitale and the episode producers in no uncertain terms. “Local Vietnamese authorities will be performing security checks throughout the day and then begin shutting down the area surrounding the restaurant in the early afternoon.

“So anybody and anything you want there needs to arrive by one p.m.”

Everyone. That meant including Bourdain.

Yes, that Bourdain. The Bourdain who was used to showing up ten minutes before filming started on any given scene.

How much would he get wound up if he had to sit there for six hours, fretting over every small detail. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, as it turned out, from a bum air conditioner that needed to be replaced for filming lest the crew — and Obama — die from heat exhaustion, to a makeshift lighting rig (for the cameras) that suspended heavy lights from a concrete support beam that hung precariously over Bourdain and Obama’s heads, where the whole assembly could come crashing down at a moment’s notice.

“Enough people had been put in harm’s way over the years as we pushed boundaries with the show,” Vitale writes in his book, “and I wasn’t eager to add the leader of the free world to that list. In fact, it was keeping me up at night. At the same time, I was terrified of under-delivering with the stakes so high.”

”It’s strong, don’t worry,” veteran cameraman Zach Zamboni told him. “Don’t worry!”

Don’t worry, be happy!

“My mind involuntarily ran through a laundry list of worst-case scenarios,” Vitale continued, his fears going from bad to worse. Metastasizing, even. “What if someone picks up a chopstick and stabs the president through the ear before the Secret Service could do anything?

“What if Tony only talks about Richard Nixon’s obsession with cottage cheese? Are we going to get a scene out of this?

“And is that guy who carries the nuclear football going to be here?”

Bourdain wasn’t taking his forced six-hour wait well either. Six hours is not ten minutes. Six hours is a long time to brood.

“I noticed Tony was sitting by himself at a table in the corner looking withdrawn and nervous,” Vitale continued. He was never at his best around famous people, but his expression today was extremely unusual and unpleasant. I went and sat down across the table … “

“Make sure to get a good picture I can tweet,” Bourdain told him, an or so hour later, as Obama was arriving.

The picture worked, as it happened, and the tweet went out:

“Total cost of bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00. I picked up the check. #Hanoi.”

Vitale: “I chuckled at that. Regardless of how you did the accounting, the meal had cost far more than six dollars. When you think about the production costs to cover crew, things like equipment, airfare, lodging, not to mention the fee for commandeering a restaurant. There was the money expended by the Vietnamese government in security personnel required to lock down a quadrant of Hanoi. Then of course there was the Secret Service and presidential entourage followed by the press pool of at least seventy, the jet fuel to move everyone and the motorcade, all the salaries plus the cost to rent the JW Marriott. I’m guessing the cost of that meal could easily have surpassed the annual GDP of a small nation, and now, having survived the experience, as far as I was concerned, it was worth every penny.”

As for hope, well, there’s this, as anyone who’s seen the episode will recall.

Obama to Bourdain: “This is why a show like yours is terrific. Because it reminds people that actually there’s a whole … world that on a daily basis is going about its business, eating at restaurants, taking their kids to school, trying to make ends meet, playing games. The same way we are back home.”

Vitale: “I’d been worried Tony would choke and totally flub the interview, but it appeared Tony had, in fact, known what he was doing. It was actually so beautifully simple. Just two dads hanging out, having some noodles and a beer in Vietnam.”

Bourdain to Obama: “As a father of a young girl, is it all going to be okay? It’s all going to work out? (Will) my daughter be able to come here. In five years, ten years, twenty years, (will) she be able to have a bowl of bun cha and the world will be a better place?”

Obama: “I think progress is not a straight line, you know? There are going to be moments in any given part of the world where things are terrible. Where tragedy and cruelty are happening. Where our darkest impulses pop up. I think there are going to be some big issues our children are going to have to address, because we didn’t address them.

“But, having said all that, I think things are going to work out. I think the world’s a big place, and I believe that people are basically good. I think humanity is still in its awkward adolescent phase, but it’s slowly maturing, and if we get a few big things right, I think we’ll be all right.”

That’s as good a thought as any to end on.

Photo credits: key art, Pete Souza, official White House press photographer for Barack Obama.

Other photos: David Scott Holloway, personal photographer for Anthony Bourdain, ZPZ Production and CNN.

Supplementary reading:

https://medium.com/parts-unknown/hanoi-326e00642e18

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

https://vietnam.travel/things-to-do/eating-vietnam-anthony-bourdain

CNN/Courtesy of Charles Scott Holloway

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Bourdain in Cologne

A conversation over schnitzel and Kölsch: This was Tony Bourdain on the immigration debate in Germany in 2016, though it could just as easily have applied to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan and Wisconsin in November 2024. “As often happens on Parts Unknown,” Bourdain said at the time, “the show you are going to see Sunday night is not the show we intended to make.”

Ying and yang, For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Or, put another way, one of the remarkable things about Tony Bourdain’s Parts Uknown for CNN those 10 years ago now, give or take, is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Take the past week’s events, for example.

Germany, Cologne-style.

Bourdain visited Cologne and its sister city, Dusseldorf, in season 7, episode 7 of Parts Unknown. It was his only visit, though he alluded to other visits in the past that inspired filming an episode comparing the two with a view to the outside world.

First, Cologne. The ying. Carnival. and the restaurant Bei Oma Kleinmann, which opens the episode that first aired on CNN on the 5th of June, 2016.

“Bei Oma Kleinmann handles enormous crowds of revellers,” Bourdain sniffed at the outset of what would prove to be what one commenter on Reddit labelled “the best episode of the season IMO. Maybe because I've been to Cologne and had a great time there, or maybe it was because it was a bit more ‘food-centric.’ Either way, I thought it was the most interesting one this season.”

Back to Carnival. Back to Bourdain.

“Fortunately, the madness is still a few weeks away. And this is my old friend Tracey [Gudwin, friend and one-time producer for No Reservations], who had the good or bad fortune, depending on how you look at it, to travel and produce shows around the world with me for many years. Anke [Lönne] is from Cologne and makes me feel better about my Carnival phobia.”

The trio swapped anecdotes over schnitzel, in Bourdain’s words, “surfboard-sized slabs of veal and pork filled with many wonderful things, dredge in breadcrumbs and fried in magical, deep fat.”

The restaurant Bei Oma Kleinmann, even today, rates four and a half stars on TripAdvisor, based on more than 1,500 reviews.”Die Gaststätte "Bei Oma Kleinmann" ist eine traditionsreiche, alte, kölsche Kneipe mit jungem Herzen!

“Outstanding,” one commenter noted on TripAdvisor just this past month. “Great food, fabulous service and an unbeatable atmosphere. What's not to like? The best Wiener schnitzels we've had.” No, this review is not an inside job, as TripAdvisor’s (somewhat defensive) caveat notes. “This review is the subjective opinion of a Tripadvisor member and not of Tripadvisor LLC. Tripadvisor performs checks on reviews as part of our industry-leading trust & safety standards. Read our transparency report to learn more.” On second thought, save yourself the trouble.

“Carnival,” Bourdain repeats. To Tracey Gudwin: “I do, and I'm not ashamed to say it.”

Bourdain: ”Will jesters and bards and medievally attired pranksters be popping up during my stay here?”

Tracey: ”You're missing out. You're really ar—“

Bourdain: “Mimes? No mimes, troubadours, jugglers, uh, human statues?”

Tracey: “Oh, come on.”

Anke Lönne: “All of them are wearing bonkers costumes and look like shit. I don't like it. No, I always get embarrassed about those people.”

Bourdain: “I hate Carnival.”

Anke: “I hate Carnival, too.”

Bourdain: “Are there parades?”

“Yes.”

Bourdain: “I hate parades.”

Tracey: “OK.”

Bourdain: “Are there clowns?”

Tracey: “You hate clowns.”

Bourdain: “I hate clowns.”

“Jesters?”

“Yeah, occasionally.”

Bourdain: “Festive attire? I have beer right now. I don't need no stinkin’ Carnival to drink beer, man. And as I understand it, I am urged to drink beer as part of a community of beer drinkers with other bros. I hate bros.”

Tracey: “It's not just bros. It's a whole community of people speaking in dialect, singing songs in dialect.”

Bourdain: “Singing, I forgot to mention that.”

Tracey: “Singing is good.”

Bourdain: “I hate that too.”

Tracey: “There is another side, and if you open your heart, you would see it.”

Bourdain: “My heart is a cold, cold place, and there's no room in it for jugglers. What did you think when you heard that I wanted to come to Germany and go to Cologne?”

Tracey: “I thought that’s awesome because Cologne is unlike any other city in Germany that I can really identify with. It's like I have this love affair with it.”

Bourdain: “I often say that the places I go, there's a pheromonic decision made very quickly. You step outside the airport terminal, and then you go, maybe you know right away: There's something about this place that's … that I think I'm going to like.”

And so, on to Kleine Glocke, “a hangout for Cologne’s artist community since the First World War,” where Bourdain sampled sauerbraten (pot roast) with chef René Srtessi; Ox & Klee Köln, where Bourdain met former rocker Irmin Schmidt of the Krautrock band Can, where they discussed the state of the world — and world music — over grilled lobster with a dash of eel and fermented and grilled scallop with black salsify served with a consomme of burned hay, lemon gelee and walnut oil.

Up next: Brauerei zur Malzmühle, where Bourdain dined with Heinz Grüne, a connoisseur of — and world-renowned expert in — German beer, in particular Kölsch, a pale ale created and brewed in Cologne. They downed Kölsch over a meal of cured pork, Gouda cheese on rye, mettbtötchen, raw minced pork on a roll, and Himmel und Erde, blood sausage served with fried onions, mashed potatoes and applesauce.

Overall, Bourdain had himself a merry old time — the ever-looming threat of Carnival aside.

And now the yang.

Bourdain again: “So, let's talk about the elephant in the room. We know that Cologne is a proudly tolerant, fun-loving, beer-drinking, pork-happy and friendly little city. But just a few days before we arrived, Cologne became the focus of the whole argument over Europe's refugee crisis.”

Immigration.

“Cologne, of all places, is now the example for both sides of an increasingly bitter argument over whether Europe, and by extension the world, should turn their backs on the millions of refugees spilling out of Syria, Iraq, and a Middle East spinning into chaos and slaughter.

“With the bodies of children washing up on Greek beaches and few other countries willing to help, Germany has taken in 1.1 million people fleeing ISIS, Russian and Syrian bombs, and war. One should, I believe, be admired and even celebrated for doing the morally right thing over the probably wise thing.”

Sound familiar?

At this point there’s probably a small minority of followers of this page who are starting to grumble, ‘Leave politics out of it; keep your politics to yourself,’ but to think that is to fundamentally misunderstand Bourdain and the tao of Bourdain and everything that made his television so compelling, in a way that speaks to every corner of the globe, all these years after his passing.

Bourdain again: “So here we are, Cologne, one of the most liberal, if not the most liberal cities in Germany. A city doing the right thing. And on New Year's Eve, the whole attitude towards refugees, not just European policy, but the whole moral question, was thrown into doubt.

“Cologne found itself the test case, both the example of tolerance and hope and worst-case scenario. … On the night of December 31, 2015, witnesses saw crowds of up to a thousand men described as predominately Arab and North African near Cologne Central Train Station. Some broke off into small groups, assaulting hundreds of women as they left the train station. Police were completely unprepared. The situation reportedly continued for hours.

“Three weeks after the incident, the official numbers were as horrifying as first reported. 766 criminal complaints, of which 381 are sexual offences, including three rapes. Many across the world, of course, saw this as the perfect ‘I told you so’ moment. A sadly understandable reaction. There is no minimizing 381 sexual offences in one night.”

Bourdain discusses immigration and, yes, politics — ick! — with friends and family of some the earliest refugees and immigrants to find a new home in modern-day Germany, at the Artistanbul Restaurant Innenstadt — gotta love that name — over Raki and a mezze of spicy mashed vegetable, hummus, tzatziki, beetroot and olive dip, friend eggplant, pastries with feta, and meatballs with tomato sauce and mint.

“Do you think it will change the political climate is what I'm asking,” Bourdain asks his hosts. “Before, it was relatively easy for a German politician to say, ‘Look, have a heart here. Let's do the right and moral thing." And it is being used as a club to beat any politician or leader who would like to have a more conciliatory or more welcoming attitude towards people who clearly need help.”

Food cures all, and good food over a fraught situation is what Bourdain was all about — a meeting of cultures and a way to settle differences of opinion free of violence, prejudice and seemingly intractable philosophical differences.

“We are open-minded,” Bourdain is told — by both sides in the immigration debate. Yes, this is Germany, the new, post-war Germany, but still. It’s a global message. "We try to be fair to everybody,” his German hosts tell him. “We are welcoming. We're proud of that. That will never change.”

Or will it?

“I’m not that optimistic, to be honest,” another of Bourdain’s hosts tells him. “Because I’m convinced that it’s not just a German problem. It’s a world problem. It’s a European problem. We’re all stuck in the same boat.”

Like so many others, I watched last week’s US election results with a growing sense of unease, sadness and revulsion. Don’t kid yourself — immigration played a large part in voters’ decision-making. I saw what happened, and then, looking for succour, I turned to the Bourdain video library and watched a food-centric Parts Unknown made nearly ten years ago, heard what Bourdain had to say, listened to the people around him speak, and I thought, wow, wow, wow.

Bourdain was one of the greats, and he made a lot of sense that could help fix the problems in the world. Some of them, anyway.

Supplementary reading:

https://medium.com/parts-unknown/the-right-thing-af88aff2aa08

https://www.postcard.inc/@partsunknown/l/4aBvthoBjJh/cologne

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

CNN

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Bourdain in Senegal

“A rebuke to those who’d paint a whole continent as a monolith of despair, or Islam as something to be feared.” This was Tony Bourdain in Senegal, in the fall of 2015.o be feared.” This was Tony Bourdain in Senegal, in the fall of 2015.

Senegal.

In Tony Bourdain’s words, “A rebuke to those who’d paint a whole continent as a monolith of despair, or Islam as something to be feared, Senegal turns simple-minded assumptions and prejudice on their heads at every turn.”

More than a few people who followed Bourdain on his travels over the years — including some of those in this group, quite possibly — may have been surprised by how taken Bourdain was with the West African country of Senegal, which he visited just once in his many years on the road, in the fall of 2015.

The essay he penned for the social media platform Medium, the day before Senegal premiered on CNN’s Parts Unknown in May 2016, left little doubt, however.

Bourdain had set foot in Africa before, a vast continent with more than 50 countries, in Congo for Parts Unknown’s debut season, followed in short order by Morocco, South Africa, and Tanzania in 2014, Madagascar in 2015, and Ethiopia a year later.

He would go on to visit Nigeria and—famously, in his final season of Parts Unknown, which aired posthumously in 2018—Kenya with Kamau Bell.

Years earlier, for Travel Channel’s No Reservations, Bourdain wound his way through Ghana, Namibia, and Liberia, ending with Mozambique in No Reservations’ last season, titled — somewhat portentously — The Final Tour.

Senegal, though, was different, as he made clear in his essay for Medium.

“So let this episode in Senegal, an African nation which is over 90% Muslim, serve as both rebuke and example. It is a country that proudly elected as their first president after independence a Christian — because they felt, in their best judgment, that regardless of his faith, he was the best person for the job.

“It is a country that defies stereotypes and expectations at every turn. Emerging from French colonial times as a functioning multi-cultural, multi-lingual, extraordinarily tolerant society, it has managed to avoid coups, tribal wars, dictatorships and most of the ills that afflicted so many of its neighbours. It remains an absolutely enchanting place to visit, with delicious food, absolutely extraordinarily beautiful music, and a relatively free and easy attitude towards intermarriage, mixed race, intertribal relationships and foreign visitors. It has a powerful and proud tradition of hospitality that endures to this day.”

This was in 2015.

Remarkably, the same is still true today, nearly 10 years later, despite everything that’s happened in the outside world in the years since.

And is still happening, as Bourdain himself would have been quick to point out.

The fascinating thing to me, as a frequent visitor of that vast continent, is that all 54 countries are different. That may seem like a trite thing to say, condescending even, but then you must understand that most — virtually all — Africans see themselves that way, as the residents and citizens of strikingly different countries, with separate cultures and separate languages. I have heard it said that while South Africa — possibly the most westernized of African countries, certainly in the big cities of Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, has 11 official languages, in fact, the country of 64 million people is thought by some to be home to 86 different native languages. To homogenize the entire continent in a single word — Africa — is the height of condescension, but that’s what colonial thinking does to one.

Tony Bourdain got that.

That’s why he was openly welcomed wherever he went on the continent — that, and his love for good music in all its forms. And African cultures have indelibly close ties to music in all its forms. The Sahara Desert and the Sahel hinterlands — possibly a vast, seemingly empty wasteland to you and me — are home to some of the most respected, well-attended music festivals on the planet. And here’s the fun part. Those music festivals are about 95% local and only 5%, if that, touristy.

Bourdain got that, too.

And so, in Senegal, he sits down and breaks bread with Senegal’s native-born Youssou N’Dour, not just sharing quality time with N’Dour but thanks to CNN’s Parts Unknown and Zero Point Zero Production’s cameras allowing us, the viewers, to share quality time not just with a remarkable singer and musician but a poet-philosopher, a political activist, an active humanist, who is Christian, secular and Muslim all rolled into one.

A truly remarkable person. Peter Gabriel is a frequent musical collaborator of N’Dour’s, and he’s not alone among Western musicians of note. Gabriel will tell you he’s the pupil and N’Dour the mentor, not the other way around.

It’s worth noting, too, that N’Dour performed his anthemic 7 Seconds, featured in all its gorgeous fullness in the Senegal episode, in 2005’s Live 8 concert in an extended duet with Dido, who was born in Kensington, London and hails from a background as different from N’Dour’s as is humanly possible.

Think on this: Live 8 — sobering and deeply moving to look back at today, given the fractious state of world affairs today— was performed live, and I’m not making this up, from London, Paris, Rome, Philadelphia, Barrie (Ontario, Canada, my home country), Chiba (Japan), Johannesburg, Moscow, Cornwall and Edinburgh. Think about that: good music brings the world together for a common cause.

Tony Bourdain got that, too.

“So what’s the future?” he asks N’Dour, about midway through what, with the benefit of 10 years’ hindsight, is one of my favourite Bourdain sets.

The two met in Dakar’s Bazoof restaurant over plates of mafe, a Senegalese stew of beef thickened with ground peanuts. To hear Bourdain tell it, “There are similar preparations throughout West Africa, but the Senegalese version is particularly great. Sear the beef; cook the onion, garlic, peppers, and carrots; deglaze with ground peanuts and broth, bringing up all that good stuff from the pan; then simmer until tender and awesome. Serve hot over rice.”

“The future?” N’Dour replies, perhaps surprised by the question.

Bourdain: “Yes, the future. Twenty years from now, where will Senegal be?”

N’Dour: “What I hope is, in 20 years, Senegal is going to be the place for great and big contributions of what we call Islam.”

Bourdain: “Do you think there's any danger of the kind of radical Islam that we see taking hold in many places in Africa?”

N’Dour: “All these people who are using the religion, the Muslim religion, to do bad things — I think Senegal sets (a good) example. This country I love, my country has many different models of the religion. This country, you know — you are here. I'm doing my local bissap “ — a drink made from a hibiscus flower known as the Roselle; the sepals of the hibiscus, when infused in hot water, leave a pink, red, magenta or dark shade of water — “and you are here, with your beer, in a country that is 95 percent Muslim.”

Bourdain: “Right.”

N’Dour: “And I think this example can help all the world.”

Bourdain: “I hope so. Inshallah.”

By the end, Bourdain is profoundly moved by this country of 18 million. Shaken to his core. What better way to close this, then, than with his own words,.

“Senegal is one of the best arguments for travel I can think of. Because the more we see of the world, actually meet who we are talking about — or think we are talking about — the more we take a walk, however briefly, in other people’s shoes, see how other people live, people who are supposedly so different than us, and find ourselves — as so often and so inevitably happens — recipients of random acts of hospitality and kindness from total strangers, then the better we shall be.

“And the happier. Knowledge — exposure — to ‘the other’ is not a contaminant.

“It enriches us. It makes — or should make us — more humble.

“Senegal. It’s someplace that everyone, given the chance, should go.”

Inshallah.

Supplementary reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/senegal/senegal-women-equality/

https://explorepartsunknown.com/senegal/senegal-episode-facts/

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

CNN

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