Bourdain in Japan with Masa

“Outside tastes much better,” sushi chef Masayoshi “Masa” Takayama told Anthony Bourdain during their time together in rural Japan, in 2016. “Everything taste better outside,” Bourdain agreed, in what would become one of Bourdain’s most fondly recalled outings of Parts Unknown.

“It’s always great when you can tell the story of a place through the eyes of an individual,” Tony Bourdain said of Masayoshi “Masa” Takayama in his Parts Unknown sojourn to the rural farming community of Nasushiobara, Japan in November 2016. “It’s even better when that individual is an extraordinarily creative and talented artist with a unique way of looking at the world. How did they get from there to here? What mysterious forces shaped them? What was it about the place and circumstances of their upbringing that helped push them, gave them the drive and the hunger to be different, to be bold, to insist on carving out their own path?”

What indeed.

Japan with Masa bowed on CNN midway through Parts Unknown’s eighth season, mere weeks ahead of visits to Buenos Aires, Minas Gerais in Brazil, and famously — or not so famously, depending one’s Bourdainophile point of view — Rome.

Japan found Bourdain in a reflective, lives-lived mood, and Masa, chef, restaurateur and owner of Masa, the three-Michelin-starred sushi restaurant in Manhattan, was happy to oblige. Japan remains a favourite among Bourdain aficionados; the episode rated more than 850 comments, all favourable, on the social media gathering room Reddit.

Masa was born in 1954, two years ahead of Bourdain, in Nasushiobara, a small town three hours north of Tokyo. Parts Unknown followed the pair to Ishikawa Prefecture, where Masa has friends and family, where they sampled foods at Omicho Market Kanazawa, including sea urchin, Kano-Gani snow crab, grilled unagi eel livers, and giant oysters. From there they sat down to a formal aiseki, a traditional, formal, multi-course meal with Masa’s friend Yaeko Taguchi, owner of the Fujinoya teahouse. They dined on sea bream over rice, grilled rockfish steamed in smoking wormwood and bamboo shoots, cod and sake-cured roe, flounder with grilled tomato rub, a clam hot pot with plum, clam, sea urchin and Japanese broccolini blossom, and Wagyu beef with soy and Mirin table sauce.

Food is one thing but conversation is quite another, and Bourdain and Masa found common ground in discussing life’s strange twists and turns. It’s the reason the Japan episode claimed so many hearts, even today, years later.

“I am grateful that I had the opportunity to go all the way back with him,” Bourdain wrote in an essay for Medium of his time with Masa and his beginnings as a chef. “I gained a truly different view of Japan than on previous visits. I ate spectacularly well—from family meals with the Takayamas and kaiseki in Kanazawa to some of the best sushi at Ginza Sushiko and mountain sukiyaki with Masa’s old friends from high school.

“[This episode] is food porn at its finest — but first and foremost [it’s] a portrait of an artist and his journey.”

Fans, followers and casual viewers noticed, and responded in kind.

Sample comment: “This is my favourite episode of Parts Unknown. When they're chillin’ in Masa's friends’ house with the grill in the middle of the floor — Tony looks so happy.”

And so it goes.

“Mr Takayama said it best: What I liked about Anthony Bourdain it wasn't really about the food, as much as it was about the culture behind the food that interested me in his shows.”

And another:

“He had this child-like wonder that never dimmed with age. And he always had such a genuine, respect and appreciation for foreign cultures that I never felt with any other western personalities.”

And another:

“For those who know what Masa is talking about in the first segment, Mr. Bourdain’s death is all that more tragic. Tony, you were my only hero growing up. I’ll miss you forever, my friend.”

And another:

“I am watching that episode now. His descriptions of meals is so detailed and precise. I could listen to his voice for hours. Goddamn it.”

And then there’s Bourdain himself, in a back-and-forth with his friend Masa, from the program:

“Is umami a flavour or a sensation?”

Takayama: “Umami is essence, strong essence.”

Bourdain: “So it’s a mysterious force?”

Takayama: “Yeah. Much bigger than the universe.”

Bourdain: “Bigger than flavour?”

Takayama: “Of course.”

The family moments are, well, just like family.

Bourdain, to Masa’s older brother, Kazuo: “So, back in the days of the family catering business, when you looked at your younger brother, did you think, This guy’s gonna make something of himself?”

Kazuo Takayama: “Not particularly.”

“The Japanese often bear a heavy burden of responsibilities,” Bourdain reflected at the time, ruminating on the restorative powers of an onsen bath [hot spring to you]. “Societal expectations, family obligations, tradition, work.

“But when they relax, they really do it well. They are better at it than anybody.”

As for the meaning of life and words of wisdom from the tao of Bourdain, this:

“Get together with some friends and cook up some alfresco, mountain-style sukiyaki, bitches, maybe a little tempura made from foraged wild asparagus and fukinoto [a kind of green leafy shoot].

“And when it’s sukiyaki time after a whole lot of, shall we say, home-brewed sake, you just kick back, stir in the maitakes and the shiitakes and some Tochigi beef, and enjoy the day.”

It was a beautiful day.

Supplementary reading:

https://medium.com/parts-unknown/country-boy-5418627439bf

https://explorepartsunknown.com/masas-japan/bourdain-off-the-cuff-japan/

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/8puqwp/michelin_star_chef_masa_takayama_speaks_about_his/?rdt=50666

CNN

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Bourdain in London

“As I’ve become older,” a reflective Anthony Bourdain noted during a visit to London for Parts Unknown’s eighth season, “I realize that the food I yearn for is the food I react to in an entirely emotional way.“ Cue the pig’s head and potato pie. “Salt and fat. Nothing better.”

In the various lists and polls of favourite Bourdain episodes, London rarely rates a mention, aside from the occasional comment — on Reddit, for ex. — that the Parts Unknown outing, which bowed in October 2016, is one of the more underwhelming of his 100 or so shows for CNN. (A handful of those 105 shows were clip shows or specials; the real number is closer to 91.) More than a few Bourdainophiles, it seems, took issue with the program’s early focus on Brexit — which passed a public vote just as Bourdain  arrived, crew in tow — while others grumbled that he spent too much time with overly familiar sidekicks who you may remember from such earlier Bourdain works as A Cook’s Tour (ep. 22, season 4),  No Reservations (ep. 9, season 1) and The Layover (ep. 4, season 8).

Brexit was a no-brainer — and not just the Brits who voted that, all in all, they’d be better off without Europe — in part because, as Bourdain himself noted in his Field Notes, London was yet another example of “my crew and I heading out to do one thing and, due to a sudden change in circumstances, finding ourselves doing something else entirely.”

“What we wanted and expected to be a happy, carefree, food-centric show became squeezed by the sudden arrival of an elephant in the room. I love London and have many dear friends there. I thought, what a simple thing to do: Make a show about the typical, simple pleasures of old-school British cookery, revisit some cherished favourites, connect with some old friends. A bit of lighthearted fun, some great, traditional food, some nice scenery. But I woke up the day after arriving in London to a very different country than the one I’d gone to sleep in.”

In other parts of the world, mind — known and unknown — that would be the pretext for an army coup, followed by a panic rush to the airport and many jittery, handheld camera shots of throngs of evacuees on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And you thought booking a flight on American Airlines can be a hassle.

“I woke up to a London blinking in shock. Stunned. Within hours, the prime minister announced his resignation, the leadership of both of the main political parties was in disarray, the value of the British pound plummeted to horrifying new lows and the country’s credit rating was downgraded. The future looked very different than the day before. This was a new phase, reflective of another England than the admittedly rarefied bubble of London. An inward-looking, fearful, angry, even xenophobic England, mostly rural, mostly white; their vote in many ways a mirror of the same feelings of disenfranchisement, frustration, and rage—the sense that no one cares about their disappearing way of life—that we see in Donald Trump’s base.

“In times of uncertainty and unpleasantness, when all around me seems to threaten to spin into chaos, it’s nice to have friends. It’s especially nice when those friends can cook.”

And so … we’re given  an hour with Fergus Henderson of London’s St. John, “probably the most inspiring chef I know;” Nigella Lawson, “a true and loyal friend, a person of great kindness and dignity, who has always looked after me and my knucklehead colleagues when we have worked together”; and Marco Pierre White, “the chef we all wanted to be when I was coming up as a young cook and wannabe chef. A legend.

“To see him at rest, surrounding himself with beautiful things, in the countryside he has always felt strongly connected to, went a long way towards reassuring me that there are happy endings.”

All that, and a side trip to kiss the ring and have a chinwag with the legendary cartoonist and unapologetic curmudgeon Ralph Steadman, who you may remember from such anti-establishment classics as Roger Waters-era Pink Floyd and bomb thrower writer Hunter S. Thompson, a Bourdain hero if ever there were one.

Ruminating on the political state of affairs — in the UK and elsewhere — with Steadman allows Bourdain to fire off one of his more acerbic quips, that seeing Boris Johnson and Donald Trump together is like bearing witness to “a supernova of bad hair.”

London, as Paul Theroux wrote in his travel classic, The Kingdom By the Sea (Penguin, 1983), is not England, and Londoners are as different from Scousers and Geordies as Brighton is from Bristol — or Trump Tower from Woodstock NY.

It’s worth remembering — I can say this, as London is my birth city — that London was not exactly a bastion of culture and ancient civilization in the beginning; Londinium, as it was known then, was founded as a garrison town for the Romans when they invaded England in 43 AD, chosen for the point in a river where it was narrow enough to bridge — not unlike Rome itself, which predated London by some 700 years (Rome was founded also at the narrow point of a famous river, in 625 BC).

Athens, Lisbon and Naples are all older than London, and they have better winters.

For Parts Unknown, Bourdain dined on such English staples as roast bone marrow with parsley and caper salad; pickled calves tripe with radish, shaved carrot and watercress; skate poached in court bouillon and pan fried kidneys on toast; and, last but not least, pig’s head and potato pie. McDonald’s, watch your back.

For Nigella Lawson, it’s a pub crawl — but posh! — at the Princess Victoria in West London, complete with scotch eggs, whitebait and thick-cut chips (don’t you dare call them fries, and if you call them French you’re liable to be drawn-and-quartered on the spot).

Bad hair and Brexit aside — sounds like the name of a dodgy new wave punk band — Bourdain finds time for a little fun and pointed barbs.

Even Brexit, and the inevitable economic crash to follow, can be mined for humour, Bourdain found, as he tells indie rock guitarist Jamie Hince, of The Kills: “I’m enjoying your currency lately. (London) has suddenly become very affordable.”

His respect and admiration for Nigella Lawson comes naturally. Fighting a hangover on his way to Lawson’s home, he ruminates, “When the world seems like it’s spinning out of control and the inside of your skull feels like it’s being gnawed on … when you wake up still tasting tequila, feeling shame, fear, and regret in equal measures, it’s good to have friend who without judgment gives you a shoulder to cry on and maybe a simple good thing like some eggs and sympathy.”

Not to mention bread fried in rendered beef fat — spice, runny eggs, and grease.

“It’s really a matter of how many Guinness's you’ve had.”

Marco Pierre White: “As the French say, ‘We never grow old round the table.’ They also say, ‘Only the first bottle is expensive.’”

You know, perhaps it’s true what they say. Perhaps happy endings are possible.

Supplementary reading:

https://www.bonappetit.com/story/bourdain-the-definitive-oral-biography?srsltid=AfmBOorzxQvRtxjrvU5AkAtrf9JUBG6Bih2o4O-sXaZJwjgeJqKCumyJ

Nigella Lawson offers some poignant, profound remarks about Tony Bourdain in Laurie Woolever’s absorbing, compelling compendium Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography (Ecco, 2021). The entire book is worth reading, in fact, for any would-be Bourdainophile.

Key art: Photo by ©Alex Welsh/The New York Times/Redux

CNN

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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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