Bourdain in Oman

”There’s an unusual mix here—a very graceful, very proud mix of cultures and languages,“ Tony Bourdain said of the Sultanate of Oman, during one of his few sojourns to the Middle East, in 2017. “You know this cat … or just a village cat?” That, and a mention of The Simpsons too.

Why Oman? “Our Bedouin hosts took to their tea and their songs, laughing and telling stories in Arabic among themselves,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in his Field Notes for CNN, back in June 2017, when Parts Unknown was making a rare foray into the Arabian Peninsular, toward the end of the program’s ninth season.

“We, the non-Muslim contingent, slipped discreetly away to a nearby dune, where a bottle of bourbon was produced, a speaker that played music off our iPhones. In time, our senses pleasurably deranged, we—all of us, the shooters, producers, camera assistants, and I—sat there in the soft, yielding sand, listening to The Prodigy and Marvin Gaye, looking wordlessly out at an endless sand sea, a nearly full moon hanging swollen over the dunes. In the mountains near Jebel Akhdar, in a small village, I asked a woman about her children, her hopes and dreams for her daughters. She wept with pride. In Muscat I looked out at the sea. Black crows, like augurs, landed on the balustrade, looked at me, then took off. A Scotsman in a pub, a veteran of a war few remember, talked of fierce battles in the interior, a struggle whose global strategic importance dwarfed that of Vietnam or Laos. He fought side by side with the Omanis. We drank Guinness while he remembered the smells of blood and frankincense.

“Oman, if you haven’t gathered already, is a remarkable place.”

And there it is. The reason Bourdain went, knowing full well — both before and after — that viewers, his minders at CNN, and possibly even the movers and shakers at Zero Point Zero, the production company behind No Reservations, Parts Unknown and other Bourdain programs, would consider the Oman episode an oddity, an outlier, an eccentricity, a footnote in a season that had already touched on Laos, Antarctica, San Sebástian, and would soon carry on to Trinidad and Porto, Portugal, before taking a brief midsummer break and then onto Singapore for the next season, Parts Unknown’s milestone 10th.

Oman came at a time when Bourdain was looking for a respite, far away from big cities, and in the desert, the world’s largest, biggest and hottest sand desert, larger even than the grand ergs in the Algerian Sahara, with its sand seas covering an area the size of France.

Bourdain found something both elemental and elementary in Oman, a place to pause, consider life, reflect on the past and wonder about the future. A future, as fate would have it, that would prove all too brief, though he could not have known that at the time.

“It’s morning in the Arabian Desert, the place explorer Bertram Thomas called the ‘Abode of Death,’ Bourdain said in his voiceover. “But it’s a beautiful place, the kind of place I look for more and more these days: stark, empty, clean sand that stretches out seemingly forever.”

Oman, on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsular overlooking the Straits of Hormuz and bordered by the United Arab Emirates or UAE (stable) to the north, Saudi Arabia (stable) to the northwest and Yemen (not so much) to the immediate west is, interestingly enough, the oldest continuously independent state in the Arab world and remains to this day the spiritual and possibly literal home of the folk classic One Thousand One Nights, aka Alf Laylah wa-Laylah, أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, a collection of Middle Eastern folktales curated and published in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age (8th century to 13th century). The first English-language version was published in 1706, long before The Simpsons.

That’s instructive because there’s a disarming moment midway through the program in which Bourdain, immersed in a culture far away from the pop-cultural obsessions of the West, is recognized by some local women for a bit part he played in a Simpsons episode. The women burst out laughing … and to say Bourdain is caught off-guard is a little like saying the Washington Nationals are odds-on favourites to bag this year’s World Series.

Then there’s the food. Oman would not be a Bourdain show without a mention of food, and after the bare bones fare of Antarctica — vegans, beware — Bourdain was in the mood for more adventurous fare, at least where food was concerned. The food of Oman, Bourdain noted, is a mix of flavours and ingredients and tastes from Arabia and the wider reach of Oman’s former empire, as embodied in shuwa, Oman’s signature dish for special occasions.

“They do one version or another of this all over the world, but shuwa is special,” Bourdain noted. “They slather a goat with a spicy paste consisting of cumin, coriander, red pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg, then wrap the meat in palm or banana leaves, dig a hole, throw in some meat, cover it up, and leave underground for a day or two over hot coals.”

Yes, you read that right — a day or two. In this world, a microwave doesn’t cut it.

But wait, there’s more. (That’s a recurring Simpsons line.)

Bourdain: “Kabuli laham is slow-cooked goat in a rich rice pilaf scented with star anise. Musanif djaj, a local specialty, are pan-seared dumplings stuffed with chicken, pepper, ginger, turmeric and onions. And of course there’s Omani bread with honey.”

Of course.

Oman is a sea-faring nations by geographic proximity, but wherever one goes, the desert is not far away. It’s what drew Bourdain there in the first place.

“One hundred and thirty miles south of Muscat [Oman’s national capital, an ancient port city linking east and west since the first century], the pavement ends and you hit this: Sharqiya Sands, on the edge of Rub’ al Khali, the largest sand desert in the world. Once you get up in the soft sand, things change. Everything changes. You change ... “

Bourdain didn’t just change.

The Bedouin desert, with its shifting sands and vast, seemingly endless landscapes, made an indelible impression on his heart. Bourdain followed in the sands forged by explorers Sir Richard Francis Burton, Charles Doughty, TE Lawrence, Bertram Thomas, Gertrude Bell and Wilfred Thesiger, and found his own peace.

“The question of what’s next,” he said, in a moment of quiet reflection, “is a big, if often unspoken one.”

Fi amanillah.

Supplementary reading:

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

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

The full episode is available on YouTube at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvXs4C3IS6M

CNN

---

Bourdain in Antarctica

”It is no short hop” to Antarctica, Anthony Bourdain said in his sojourn to the Southern Continent in March 2017. “And no easy thing to see it the way it should be seen.” It would prove to be one of his finest hours of television. “The last unf**ked up place on Earth.”

Trust in science. Tony Bourdain’s whirlwind fly in visit aboard a Lockheed C-130 Hercules to Antarctica during Parts Unknown’s ninth season in 2017 showed a different side of the White Continent than that usually portrayed in the popular media. Antarctica, aka ‘The Ice,’ lies at the far ends of the earth; you might say it is the one place on the entire planet where scientists hold sway and the petty politics of an overcrowded, slowly spoiling world seem far away.

It is a place of unrelenting wind and extreme cold, and unexpected dryness. Despite the ice-covered razor-tooth mountains at its core and the sprawling sheets of ice that line its coasts, Antarctica is technically a desert, where it hardly ever snows and precipitation of any kind is as rare as it is anywhere else on the planet. The sun rises, and falls, just once a year.

Most TV programs focus on Antarctica’s unique wildlife and sprawling landscapes, and why wouldn’t they? Penguins, leopard seals, krill, and phytoplankton have evolved to survive some of the harshest conditions known to science, and there are still vast regions — unexplored terrain — yet to feel the human footprint.

At the outset of the program, Bourdain, fully decked out in “Big Red,” the standard — and mandatory — thick, goose-down red parkas of scientific expeditions in the southern continent, huddles in cargo bay of the massive plane, crouching together with the dozens of scientists, engineers, forklift operators and explorers who fly in at the beginning of the Antarctic summer on late September, and then fly out again months later, in late March and early April — right now, in other words — with the onset of the southern winter. Just 100 or so of the more than 1,000 seasonal arrivals tough it out through the long, dark months of winter, when darkness lasts 24 hours and the outside cold can reach as low as -89.2°C (19.3°F in American money), recorded at Vostok Station in July, 1983, some 10.7 °C (19.3 °F) colder than subliming dry ice.

This is a place where carpenters, mechanics, pilots, electricians, riggers, fuel workers, heavy equipment operators, waste collectors and cooks are held in equal esteem with Nobel Prize candidates, climate scientists … and TV celebrities. Everyone is equal. Everyone has a job to do. And if that job isn’t done — whether its wrangling helicopter parts or scrubbing floors — the entire operation is in peril. You get along, or you don’t go. It’s that simple. There’s a camaraderie there, an egalitarianism, a fraternity perhaps unlike any workplace on the planet.
“We’re driving Ivan (the Terra Bus),” the airport shuttle driver at McMurdo Station tells Bourdain on arrival, “forty feet long, 67,000 pounds, 23-years-old, made out of good Canadian steel. Sometimes, the heat actually works. This year, it does.”

“The first year is for the adventure,” a chef and five-time returnee tells Bourdain over a plate of stew, midway through the hour. “The second year is for the money. And the third year is because you don’t get this s**t anywhere else.”

There’s no rat race here, another long-timer explains.

You do get German talk radio, though — and stories of “evil, crazy Nazi cyborgs” (Bourdain’s words) hiding in the ice, awaiting their marching orders from You Know Who.

In Antarctica’s quieter, more pensive moments, Bourdain is brought to near tears, immersed in bittersweet reverie at the savage beauty of the place, humbled by the dignity and professionalism shown by the men and women he finds himself with. “Above us only the stars.”

From here, everywhere points north. There is no east, west or south from Antarctica— only north. This is a place where Mare Pacifica meets the Southern Ocean, where springtime blooms are short and sweet and circadian cycles are thrown out of sync, if only for a moment.

For all his travels around the world, had Bourdain lived to this day, it’s not hard to imagine him making Antarctica his home, his moral and temporal compass, the one place where every trick of the sun is a memory halo. It is, as Bourdain says, achingly beautiful.

Food is important here, don’t kid yourself. Ingredients are flown in, waste is flown out again.

“We don’t really do fancy food,” Bryan Denham, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station’s resident chef, tells Bourdain. “We do basic food well.”

It’s easy to see why line cooks command as much respect as the evolutionary biologist who’s just discovered a new form of life.

“We ate in the galley a lot,” episode producer Josh Ferrell told Zero Point Zero executive Helen Cho in her interviews with crew members for CNN’s Explore Parts Unknown blog. “They have a to-go station, (with) pre-wrapped sandwiches that you’d just throw in your bag. We always had a solid supply of that, but mainly we ate in the galley. The galley is where Tony caught me eating pizza with ranch dressing, which I will not hear the end of.

“By far the best was Rae’s [camp manager Rae Spain, Lake Hoare Research Camp, said to be the best cook on the continent]. “Rae does the best she can with what she has. The pork loin they had was from 2012, and she has a giant vault worth of spices. It was something special — it was a fantastic meal.”

The hour’s highlights: the helicopter flight over an active volcano — the helicopter a bright red against a backdrop of white ice and smouldering ash clouds — an afternoon spent with a colony of Adele penguins, the farewell beach party at the foot of an imposing glacial wall, and life-affirming conversations about what it means to live in extreme conditions at the bottom of the world.

Bourdain’s respect for science — real science, not the populist kind — shines through in virtually every frame. Science’s motto is not “trust us” per se; science’s true motto is the opposite. It is that of the Royal Society: nullius in verba, the Society’s motto after its founding in 1660, roughly translated as: “Take no one’s word.” Trust no one.

Or, if you prefer, trust  but verify. That’s trust in verifiable evidence — real evidence, demonstrative evidence, documentary evidence.

Bourdain again, in his own words — words that resonate today, if not more, than they did in 2017:

”At a time when science is held in open contempt … when painfully acquired data is actually being deleted from computers if it conflicts with preconceived policies, these guys are looking at some deep stuff. Where do we come from? How does it all work? How far can we go? What are we, as sentient humans, capable of?”

[pause]

“And what’s on the other side?”

Zero Point Zero longtime production executive Helen Cho’s behind-the-scenes crew interviews of what it took to film in Antarctica:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/antarctica/how-to-film-in-antarctica/

Supplementary reading:

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

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

https://explorepartsunknown.com/antarctica/the-antarctic-biennale/

https://explorepartsunknown.com/antarctica/what-you-should-know-about-climate-change-in-antarctica/

The full episode is available on YouTube at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUx6CqvuwwA&t=43s

CNN

---

Bourdain in Laos

Quiet, pensive, harrowing and eerily beautiful by turns, Anthony Bourdain’s May 2017 sojourn to Laos for CNN’s Parts Unknown was never going to roil the headlines the way his visits to neighbouring Vietnam did. And yet …

Quiet, pensive, harrowing and eerily beautiful by turns, Tony Bourdain’s May 2017 sojourn in Laos for CNN’s Parts Unknown was never going to roil the headlines the way his visits to neighbouring Vietnam did. And yet. There’s something undeniably haunting about this elegiac and strangely compelling tour of a forgotten “Long Ago” kingdom that, if the notes from history are to be believed, recorded more bombs dropped on it than the US dropped on occupied Europe and imperial Japan during the entirety of the Second World War.

And all this on a jungle nation with a population of barely 7 million people. It was all part of US President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s “Secret War” — an undeclared war at that — to disrupt Viet Cong supply lines to North Vietnamese regulars fighting in Vietnam’s south in the early 1970s.

The thing about these bombs, dropped from on high by wave after wave of B-52 bombers, is the tiny bomblets they scattered from the initial blockbuster explosions in countless directions, grenade-size bomblets — they look like baseballs! — scattered into jungle clearings and rice paddies, bomblets which remain to this day, all these years later.

At the time of Parts Unknown’s airing in 2017 these bomblets were still killing and maiming one person a day, many of them children playing in the fields with what looked to them like shiny round toys.

The episode opens and closes with long, quiet, shimmering dream sequences — no voiceover — as one might imagine a Buddhist music video to play out on the path to enlightenment.

Bourdain himself is not the caustic canard he usually is in these more politically driven episodes; instead Laos finds him in a reflective, soul-food mood. He does more listening than talking this time, and it’s clear from even a cursory glance that he’s deeply moved by what he sees.

Bourdain often talked about how Vietnam held a special place in his heart, dating back to A Cook’s Tour and No Reservations, and yet it’s neighbouring Laos, taking time to eat and drink with the Hmong people and listen to their story, that seems to have left the most indelible impression on him.

And others, evidently, judging from some of the viewer comments on Reddit.

“Yes!” one viewer posted. “Such a beautiful ending; possibly my favourite of his work.”

Burning candles, floating down a river… Lit lanterns, flying in the tropical night air. Peripheral quietness, sleepy rhythms and dreamlike transitions: this was Laos, as envisioned by Bourdain, director-producer Tom Vitale and cameramen Zach Zamboni and Todd Liebler.

“Laos appears, when looking at it from the seat of a motorbike, like an enchanted land,” Bourdain wrote in his CNN Field Notes at the time. “A heavily forested nation of mountains, karsts, and valleys that are often covered in mist in the early morning. The food is terrific; you see and taste ethnic Lao influences in parts of both neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand. The people are lovely.

“It is, however, a difficult place to get people to speak freely. … Most Americans aren’t aware of Laos — much less the secret war there — or the scale of the problems left behind. And this is sad and wrong.”

Food plays a role in the hour. How could it not? This is Anthony Bourdain, after all.

Bourdain is accompanied on part of his journey by Michelin-starred chef James Syhabout, founder of Oakland, Calif.’s Commis restaurant in Oakland, Calif, whose parents fled Laos for the US around the time Nixon and his cronies were insisting there was nothing untoward going on in the forgotten kingdom.   

Bourdain samples khao soI and khao piak sen, Lao noodle soup, wends his way through the imperial cuisine at the Ban Lao hotel, samples the alcohol on tap at Mekong Khem Kong restaurant, and indulges in his passion for street food with meat and fish skewers from open-air food stalls on the banks of the Mekong River.

A traditional Laotian table, according to Bourdain’s erstwhile guide Syhabout, revolves around a soup, a stew, sticky rice, a salad, and Beerlao, Lao beer, for the uninitiated. Comfort food, awk, is made from red curry paste (lemongrass, galangal or ginger, garlic cloves, Thai chillies, and shallots, sliced), a stew made from chicken, in small bites, hot peppers, green beans, shimeji and white mushrooms, kaffir lime leaves, chicken or vegetable stock, fish sauce, oyster sauce, and dill, chopped.

There’s only one real way to see Laos, Bourdain says, midway through the program.

“Motorbike: the only way to see this part of the world. The thick, unmoving air. The smell past rice paddies. Water buffalo. What feels like another century. Laos is the kind of place that can easily capture your heart and not let you go.”

It certainly caught his heart. And once caught, it didn’t let go.

Supplementary reading:

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

https://explorepartsunknown.com/laos/the-fight-to-demine-laos/

---

Bourdain in San Sebastián

And now for something completely different: the one in which Anthony Bourdain took in the sights and sounds — and food — of the coastal city of San Sebastián in Spain’s Basque Country, famous for its expansive views and fresh seafood.

And now for something completely different — a Parts Unknown outing that changed tack from the darker directions taken in eighth-season outings like Buenos Aires and Rome. San Sebastián, which followed the season-opening Los Angeles to kick off Parts Unknown’s ninth season in May 2017, found Bourdain in a more relaxed frame of mind. And while he looked visibly aged from the series opener in Myanmar just four years earlier, he talked about how the Basque Country had become his happy place, culinarily speaking (is that even a word?), from the rolling green hills and craggy white cliffs of Spain’s Bay of Biscay to the gourmand paradise of Donostia-San Sebastián, just 12 miles (20 km) from the Spain-France border, with its population of 450,000 people — virtually all of them foodies, if Bourdain’s take is to be trusted. And why wouldn’t it be?

As Bourdain himself noted in his Parts Uknown Field Notes (https://explorepartsunknown.com/san-sebastian/bourdains-field-notes-san-sebastian/), San Sebastián and the surrounding region has more “outrageously good” (his words) restaurants per square mile than just about anywhere in Europe. “Even the bad restaurants are good,” he said, which might sound somewhat fatuous but then that was Bourdain in his pomp. “San Sebastián is a place I make as much television as possible,” he added, though it only takes a few minutes of screen time, if that, to see how the culture and the food affected him. Truly, madly, deeply.

“One afternoon, hungry and at loose ends,” Bourdain recalled, “I stumbled lazily into one of those tourist-friendly restaurants with all the warning signs: an overwhelmingly non-local clientele, menus in English and Spanish, large colour photos of the menu items posted outside, and proximity to a popular tourist site.

“I ended up eating a delicious order of morcilla sausage, followed by some braised beef cheeks. And I was happy.”

Note his eye for detail there, from his caustic assessment of “tourist-friendly” eateries (“an overwhelmingly non-local clientele”) to the culture clash of English and Spanish menus garlanded with large colour photos of the menu items posted on the sidewalk for all to see (“Today’s specials…”) to the observation that, hey, the morcilla sausage and braised beef cheeks are, well, delecioso. And not just the sausage but the jamon — jambon to the French, or ham to you and me — the wild mushrooms, the grilled turbot, and “the last squid of the season.”

“Everyday eating feels like one long bounce from great little place to another,” Bourdain noted, best sampled with friends.

“As I must in every episode I shoot in San Sebastián,” he continued in his Field Notes, “I reconnect with two chefs who feel, by now, like family to me: Juan Mari and Elena Arzak, who have been keeping the generations-long tradition of excellence at their eponymous restaurant alive while moving gastronomy forward—always—in exciting new ways. …

“Now and again, wherever I am in the world, Juan Mari calls me, and we somehow manage to have a warm conversation in a tortured mix of French, Spanish, and Pidgin English. They will always be my guides and mentors and my friends. Since the death of my father, I found myself looking to Juan Mari to fill that hole. Though I am sure he would prefer to see himself as an older brother …”

The delectability of Basque Country cuisine is not unique to one man and one chef, either: There are more Michelin-starred restaurants in San Sebastián per capita than anywhere on planet Earth. Who knew?

For the benefit of Parts Unknown viewers looking on from CNN, Bourdain dined on Iberico ham with mushrooms, crab tartlets, seared wild mushrooms and foie gras with egg yolk (a house specialty) at Ganbara; rock prawn (head and body cooked separately, naturally, head grilled and body served semi-ceviche), grilled squid with onion-green pepper sauce — the only way to have it — cocochas (hake fish), and grilled turbot at Elkano; marinated prawns on lemongrass and mint with beetroot and crunchy krill, roast pigeon with mastic and potato, and grilled monkfish with pecan paste at Arzak; and seared mushrooms with egg yolk and pine nuts, grilled tuna, peas in a consommé of Iberico ham, and squid at Casa Urola, among other eateries.

There’s an olde Basque saying: We are because we were. It’s an old culture, Bourdain reminds us to this day, dating back to long before the Roman invasions, with its own language and history handed down orally over generations.

It wouldn’t be Parts Unknown if it was just about the food: Bourdain also found time to talk history and anthropology respectively with Xabier Agote, shipwright and founder of the Basque Maritime Museum, and Olatz González Abrisketa, documentarian and professor of social anthropology at Spain’s University of the Basque Country.

If there’s an overriding theme to the hour that Bourdain no doubt wanted us — all of us — to take with us in the years after San Sebastián first aired, all those years ago now, it was this: that despite centuries of misunderstanding, culture clash and different languages, we can get along, if we just knuckle down and work harder. The Basque border separating Spain from France, for example.

“Things are different here. The relationship between Basque and French cultures has always been more graceful, less contentious, and you can see it, and feel it, and taste it at the table.”

Bon appétit. Disfrute de su comida.

Supplementary reading:

https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-san-sebastian/

---

Bourdain in Rome

Il Duce v. Il Douché. The year 2016 found Anthony Bourdain in Rome for CNN’s Parts Unknown, and as luck and misfortune would have it, 2016 would turn out to be an inauspicious year, both for Bourdain and for the world. Bourdain’s home country was about to elect a new leader. And history was about to repeat.

I watched the infamous Parts Unknown episode Rome for the first time just a couple of nights ago. I was dreading it. I had put it off for, well, ever since I first immersed myself in the Tao of Bourdain, many years ago now, during a long-haul overnight flight down the length of Africa from northern Europe, looking for something on my iPad to watch. I had recorded an episode of Parts Unknown at random, having known Bourdain by name and reputation only. I had done some work with CNN that year, and it was impossible at the time to have anything to do with CNN and not know the name Bourdain. In a few short years he emerged to become an indelible presence at the network, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Parts Unknown had become the news network’s most watched, most talked-about program. By far.

Even now, all these years after his passing on June 8, 2018, the name Bourdain carries special import at the now beleaguered news channel.

I don’t know what I expected to see in Rome, but not that exactly.

The spectre of Asia Argento — that’s the one and only time I’ll mention her by name here — permeates every single frame and hangs over the hour like an all-enveloping fog, and the resulting effect is, well, weird and oddly discombobulating.

As sidekicks go, it’s hard to see how this person — the actress daughter of horror schlockmeister Dario Argento, a filmmaker who, for my taste and perhaps this is just me, made some of the ugliest, nastiest, most heartless and pointless films ever made — warranted so much attention when so many of Parts Unknown’s other sidekicks evolved over the years to provide Bourdainophiles with some of their fondest and most warmly recalled memories of the man and who he was. Eric Ripert, Zamir Gotta, Darren Aronofsky, the list goes on — sidekicks who were, by turns, witty, warm, perceptive, loquacious, receptive, thoughtful, introspective, given to listening, and giving of other people. She was none of those. Bourdain spends time in the episode with the enfant terrible filmmaker and fellow New Yorker Abel Ferrara — perhaps you know him from such neo-noir film works as Bad Lieutenant (1992), Ms .45 (1981) and King of New York (1990), chronicles of violent crime in urban settings, but with spiritual overtones — who considered the Eternal City his second home. Frankly, I could have used more of him and less of her, but that is not the episode Bourdain set out to make. (The whole sorry chapter of Rome gets thorough treatment in both Tom Vitale’s personal tell-all In the Weeds and Laurie Woolever’s definitive Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography; Woolever was Bourdain’s longtime personal assistant and Vitale directed  and produced the episode in question. In the many, many lists of Bourdain followers’ favourite episodes, Rome rarely rates a mention, and it’s easy to see why.

Food, the raison d’être of Bourdain’s TV persona — in the beginning, anyway — gets short shrift here. In a 22-page account of Bourdain’s three visits to Rome, for A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations and Parts Unknown posted on the all-encompassing foody site Eat Like Bourdain, food in the Eternal City gets scant mention, other than brief references to Osteria dal 1931 (“By Bourdain’s standards, it’s a light meal of antipasti (with) prosciutto and artichoke, followed by an entree of cheese and basil ravioli”) and Trattoria Morgana, where he dines on ragù fettuccini and Roman snails with filmmaker Ferrara and Ferrara’s family.

Together they share a lively conversation about the clash of cultures between Italian and American dining, the joys — and perils — of raising a family, and the life ritual growing old with grace and wisdom.

As I say, I could have used more of Ferrara and less of, well, her.

For me, the biggest surprise of the hour, a reminder — once again, yet again — of how, if anything, Bourdain’s Parts Unknown’s programs have become even more relevant over time, Rome holds a lens to the dark underbelly of fascism and the ruinous rule of dictator Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini and its warnings for us today. Think of it as Il Duce vs. Il Douché.

After leading Italy into a catastrophic war that saw much of Italy razed and flattened, Mussolini was summarily executed by partisans in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy in April 1945; his body was taken to Milan and hanged by the feet from a metal girder in a suburban square, the Piazzale Loreto, after angry crowds beat the body with sticks.

In its most powerful — and eerily prescient — moments, at the beginning and again at the very end, Rome finds Bourdain in a pensive mood, warning against the perils posed by fascism in our own times.

Rome was filmed in the spring of 2016 and aired later that year, after today’s US president The similarities between Il Duce and Il Douché are uncanny; the latter has consciously styled himself after the former, and made no bones about it. In virtually every posed photograph, with few exceptions, he strikes a Mussolini-esque pose.

Bourdain felt strongly about this, as strongly as he felt about anything in the world of politics — anywhere.

“As so many have found throughout history, it’s easy to fall in love with Rome. She is seductively beautiful. She has endured and survived many things. … You fall into a trance here. You think, no matter what, this beautiful dream will last forever, and then suddenly, s**t gets real. Before World War I Benito Mussolini was considered a bully and a crackpot, a short-tempered, ever-pontificating soapbox orator from the small town of Predappio. In time, though, the country was divided and in crisis, It saw itself as besieged by enemies within and without. It needed someone who said he could make Italy great again. He was a man on a horse saying, ‘Follow me.’ And they did.When fascists marched on Rome, the prime minister resigned and Benito Mussolini was appointed leader by the king.

“It can happen [pause] anywhere.

“It happened here.”

Supplementary reading:

https://medium.com/parts-unknown/mamma-roma-2362271634cc

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

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

CNN

---