Bourdain in Trinidad (and Tobago!)

”The food, if you look at it, is this incredibly harmonious stewpot,” Anthony Bourdain said of Trinidad and Tobago, back in the day. ”But I guess life doesn’t work as well as food.” And there it is.

Two solitudes. Trinidad and Tobago are often named in the same breath, but as Anthony Bourdain noted in his Parts Unknown outing in June 2017, the program’s 71st episode overall, one is not like the other. Oil is part of the reason — Trinidad, officially the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is the southernmost island country in the Caribbean and lies just offshore from Venezuela, an oil state if ever there was one — and tourism, the life blood of Tobago, is at odds with the island nation’s dark history of colonialism, indentured servitude — aka slavery — and gang violence. Trinidad and Tobago is a land of contrasts, in other words, and contrasts lie at the heart of much of Bourdain’s work throughout Parts Unknown’s dozen seasons on CNN.

Trinidad is famous for its Carnival — think New Orleans couple with Rio de Janeiro, similar and yet different — but Bourdain was uncomfortable with carnivals in general and at one point in the program confesses he has never been to a proper carnival, not so much out of a fear of feeling the vibe of good times in a street setting as his fear of being seen dancing in public and fraternizing with clowns. Bourdain, as most people with a passing familiarity of him know — and he was quick to remind, on and off camera — had a mortal fear of clowns.

Trinidad is not particularly memorable as Parts Unknown episodes go — it rarely makes anyone’s bucket watch-list on Reddit, for ex — but it is worth watching just the same, if only for Bourdain’s uncanny ability to mix fun — Trinidad’s catchy street food scene, the different ways to mix rum, figuring out local lingo like “liming” (just chillin’) and “wining” (dancing, baby, dancin’) — and serious social issues such as racism, social integration, the complex connection between endemic poverty and street violence, and the burden of history that comes with an island state that was settled and colonized in turn by the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the British, and now … American tourists.

Bourdain: “Many visitors come to Trinidad for one thing and one thing only: Carnival, which locals say is the biggest party on Earth, a pre-Lenten festival of costumes, food, copious drinking, and the kind of dancing you better be good at before trying in public.”

Bourdain claimed at the time that he was no good at dancing — I say ‘claimed’ because there’s a small part of me that suspects he would be accomplished at just about anything he tried, and his affinity for martial arts would appear to make him a natural for shaking his booty without making a fool of himself — so that took care of that. He came for the beaches but stayed for the history.

“The faces you see in the streets are African, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern in features, and every shade of mix in between. This patchwork of ethnic identities and colours is a direct legacy of Trinidad’s colonial past.  … Trinidad, it should be pointed out right now before you start packing your Speedo and your cocoa butter, is an industrial island. And, like so many places, industrialization is changing the landscape here. But some things persist, remain, echo from all the way back then.”

And not always in a good way.

Bourdain: “It ain’t all good for everybody here by a long shot. Trinidad, with a population of only 1.3 million people, had 463 murders last year, giving Port of Spain a higher per capita murder rate than Detroit, Oakland, or Chicago.”

The music, though, is different. The music is bright, lively, cheerful — both counterpoint and antidote to the island nation’s violent past, volatile present, and uncertain future.

Trinidad, for lack of a better way of putting it, is the birthplace of calypso music, noted for its use of steel pans —  a holdover from the oil days, when would-be musicians of limited means figured out a way to use all that shapeshifting metal from discarded oil drums.

Trinidad would become to calypso what Jamaica was to reggae, and, like Jamaican reggae, calypso had elements of political messaging.

Bourdain again: “Boogsie [legendary steel-pan composer-arranger Lennox ‘Boogsie’ Sharpe] composes his pieces by layering different types of drums on top of each other. The engine room, made of unpitched percussion, lays down the groove. Next, a section of six bass pans drops a bass line. The guitar and cello pans add harmonies that sound kind of like strumming. And the front line pans play the melody. The result: a symphonic wall of sound.”

It wouldn’t be Bourdain without a mention of food, of course, and Bourdain isn’t just talking about Trinidad — or Tobago for that matter — when he notes, “The food is the glue that binds the society together.”

It’s a mantra that, for Bourdain, applies just about anywhere.

“As in Brazil and the Deep South, African slaves were given little to work with when it came time for the meal. More often than not, if they wanted meat, they had to make do with what the slave masters did not want: a tongue here, a cow foot there. Here, as elsewhere, they figured out how to make something tender and delicious from whatever there was, like souse — pig foot … pickled in be chadon beni, onions and hot peppers, and then topped off with cucumbers. …

“The food, if you look at it, is this incredibly harmonious stewpot. But I guess life doesn’t work as well as food.”

Across the water, just a skip and a hop away: a completely different way of life. And being.

Bourdain again: “Thirty miles east of Trinidad, its sister island Tobago: A whole different vibe around here, more like what you hope for when you waddle away from the buffet on the SS Norwalk cruise ship. Lazy beach days, boat drinks, villas, all set to a calypso beat.”

And if you go there, don’t forget that Speedo and cocoa butter; the sun at these latitudes can get mighty fierce.

Bourdain being Bourdain — and this is one of the reasons so many follow his every word to this day, so many years later — his final thought resonates, by managing to imbue lazy days on the beach with a deeper meaning.

“No island in the sun is paradise on earth, however it might look from the concrete blocks, glass cubicles, or wood boxes we may live in. And all the dancing and music and great food in the world can never hold together, by itself, what would keep us apart. What might look like a utopian stew of ethnicities and cultures living together under swaying palms is of course a far more complicated matter. But Trinidad has done better than most and in proud and unique style.”

And how.

Supplementary reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/trinidad/freetown-collective-a-band-in-search-of-freedom/

https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-trinidad-tobago/

https://explorepartsunknown.com/trinidad/recipe-corn-soup/

The full episode is available on YouTube at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-JxipUJEjI

CNN

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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

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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

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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/

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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/

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