Bourdain in the French Alps (avec Eric Ripert)

“It’s a fantastic book, but reading it again, fortified by local beverage, I thought, What would this book be like as a movie?” This was Anthony Bourdain in the French Alps with his good friend Eric Ripert, for a moment of joie de vivre.

“Worst episode ever!”

Relax, he’s joking. This was Tony Bourdain slogging through a snow field high up in the French Alps avec son bon ami Eric Ripert, in one of Parts Unknown’s more memorable episodes from the program’s milestone 10th season on CNN. Here’s Bourdain, out of breath, struggling against the effort of fighting wind, snow and Ripert’s incessant chatter, feeling the effects of eating too much cheese — merde, les Français aiment les fromage! — whining about, well, just about everything. Here’s some cheese to go with your whine. Stop global whining. How much whine would a wine drinker whine if a wine drinker couldn’t drink wine?

It’s a beautiful day. Sunny blue skies. Cold, but not bitterly so. A bracing cold, the kind of cold that makes one feel alive. Some of the most stunning mountain scenery on the planet. Bourdain: “I have a block of cheese in my colon the size of my grapefruit.”

Ripert, bowled over by the sheer beauty of the scenery — “It’s amazing…” and revelling in the moment.  “Tony, come on, don’t be grumpy.”

Bourdain: “Seriously, no, I hate this. Are we there yet?”

“No. The chalet is maybe — like, I don’t know, maybe be half an hour away.”

Ripert conveniently leaves out the part about most of that half-hour being uphill.

C’est l’enfer.

Cue Josh Homme and Mark Lanegan. (Fun fact, or if not fun exactly, certainly telling: Homme and Lanegan’s title tune for Parts Unknown is virtually unplayed outside the show; a so-called “full version" doesn’t exist, not even in the Queens of the Stone Age recording repertoire. That lends it a certain cachet, in keeping with the Bourdain ethos — and Homme and Lanegan’s ethos for that matter — of not cashing in simply for the sake of cashing in. You’ll never hear this ditty over an advert for McDonald’s, or for a lame, tepid American beer for that matter.)

Here’s the thing.

Some say the French Alps episode, which first aired on Oct. 8, 2017, is hard to watch today, because of how Bourdain’s life ended and the way fate decided that Ripert, Bourdain’s good friend and arguably closest confidant during his world travels, would be the first to find out.

I prefer to think of this episode as a playful romp, a sequel to the Sichuan with Eric Ripert, which first aired a year earlier almost to the day, in October 2016, in which Bourdain tortured his friend with one hot spice after another, knowing well that Ripert’s constitution was not made to handle hot spices, spicy food being to Ripert what kryptonite is to Superman. It was all part of the playful banter between them, and French Alps was Ripert’s chance to get his own back, knowing Bourdain’s issues with curdled milk, curds,  and whey.

Revenge is a dish best served with cheese.

I sat through French Alps the other night, and it was — for me, anyway — the perfect balm for the wretched world we find ourselves in today. Though some find the episode morbid, with its constant veiled — and in some case, not so veiled — references to death and our inevitable appointment with destiny, I found it cheerful and joyous, a reminder of Bourdain and Ripert at their best together, when everything seemed possible, even happy endings.

Besides, it’s gorgeous to look at. The French/Swiss Alps are simply stunning to take in, and their geographic location gave Bourdain the chance to weigh in, in his caustic — and funny! — way on world affairs and the nature of national personality traits. It’s often said that Europe is divided into two kinds of countries, beer countries and wine countries. France is a wine country and Switzerland (it’s a German thing!) is a beer country. Italy is a wine country, and there’s a telling moment in French Alps when Bourdain channels his inner George S. Patton and admits that he’s standing at the crossroads of one the world’s most beautiful places (that sudden, knowing smile from Ripert is genuine), with the wacky but lovely Italians on one side and the dour, stern Swiss on the other. (Gen. Patton, when asked by a reporter during the waning days of the Second World War what he would do if he found himself between the Germans and the Russians, famously replied that he’d attack in both direction at the same time. That was in the movie, anyway.)

“Bourdain braves the slopes, works up a sweat, and declares this ‘the worst episode ever,’” CNN’s bumf read at the time. “Then, in a fit of gastronomic frenzy on CNN’s dime, he ‘blows up the budget,’ ordering some of the finest foods the region has to offer. We’re talking killer cuts of meat, fine wines, and — obviously — cheeses of all genres and temperatures.”

The part about deliberately blowing up the budget was a thing with Bourdain in later seasons; there’s a funny, lively passage in Tom Vitale’s book, In the Weeds, about how Bourdain and his production cohorts chafed openly at cost-cutting and “austerity measures” in those later years, and how they determined to bring a bossy, dictatorial — newly installed — production supervisor down to size. (Things came to a head in the James Bond-themed Jamaica episode, in Ian Fleming’s original estate, when the crew went into full-on party mode; what you see on the screen, which is plenty, was nothing compared to what happened behind the scenes, as articulated in Vitale’s account. If you’ve not read In the Weeds, do so — it’s one hell of a ride … not unlike Bourdain’s life itself.)

The French Alps are gorgeous, no doubt about it. Not for Bourdain, though — at least, not all the time.

“Warm feet are important,” he offers at one point. “Nothing’s more demoralizing than cold, wet feet.”

Enough with the whine. Garçon, encore du fromage!

As with most things in life, there’s a silver lining.

“God bless the French,” Bourdain says, moments later. “They can’t go too long — not even down a mountain — without eating well.”

He’s not about to let Ripert off easily, though.

“Wow, look at that knife work,” he tells Ripert, poking the renowned restaurateur with a proverbial stick as Ripert dices up some food du jour. “You should be a chef.”

The French, post-revolution, embraced the mantra Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité and place language, culture, music, and the arts  — not to good food and fine wines — on a high pedestal, and national pride is almost a calling, possibly — though not solely — because of being invaded and occupied, not once but twice, by those dour, oppressive Germans with their giant kegs of beer. Wine countries and beer countries. …

That sense of nationalism, as opposed to populism and fascism, is a very French trait.

Yes, Bourdain is visibly grumpy at times, especially on the mountain — worst episode ever, remember — but it’s not hard to picture Ripert smiling broadly, to himself if not for the cameras, when Bourdain finally admits, “These mountains are majestic. And beautiful. You can walk them, take pictures of them, you can ski down them.

“They can also kill you.”

Zing!

"Those of you who’ve been following the show over the years know there are few things I love more than torturing my good friend Eric Ripert — or at least putting him in awkward situations,” Bourdain wrote in his Field Notes at the time. “As a distinguished three-Michelin-starred chef and a chevalier in France’s Legion of Honour, he has a reputation to protect.

“I, thankfully, do not.”

A good note as any to end on. If not entirely true.

Supplementary reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/french-alps/bourdains-field-notes-the-french-alps/

https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-the-french-alps/

Supplementary viewing:

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

CNN

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Bourdain in Singapore

“Jam-packed between the carefully feng shui’d architecture, skyscrapers, and office blocks, are rich, deep, very old, and deliciously funky remnants of the old world. Chinese, Indian, Malay. And a culture that still cherishes the joys of a simple, good thing.” — Tony Bourdain on Singapore, back in the day. Maybe, just maybe, Singapore has some lessons for us today.

“Spotless. Efficient. Safe. Protected. Controlled.” It’s hard — impossible, even — to revisit Tony Bourdain’s 10th season-opener of Parts Unknown, with its focus on the booming city-state of Singapore, and not be struck today — in April, 2025 — by the conversation that underpins the entire program: Namely, if you could give up privacy, personal freedoms and a free press for a system of government that promises peace, prosperity, good schools, decent housing for everyone, a booming economy, some of the most astounding architecture on the planet, a benevolent if authoritarian form of government, and good food, would you?

Bourdain’s answer in September 2017, when Singapore first aired on CNN, was a definitive no — “not for me.”

But.

In that ever curious, all encompassing way of his, his roving eye and his attention for social detail that marked his finest hours in TV program-making, Bourdain paints a compelling picture of a utopian city-state — “just 227 square miles, a little more than half the size of LA … run like a multinational company,” where street crime is unheard of, people seem happy — outwardly, anyway — and dissatisfaction is just a Rolling Stones song. Basically, Singapore works, both in theory and in practice. “Disneyland with the death penalty,” Bourdain quips at one point, and in that inscrutable way of his, it’s hard to tell if he’s joking or reciting a simple statement of fact.

In his Field Notes for CNN at the time, Bourdain reminded us that Singapore is a remarkable city for food, food so varied and sumptuous — “delicious,” he says in the program, more than once — that it kept him coming back, time and time again.

On her Eat Like Bourdain website, food writer Valerie Stimac Bailey lists no fewer than 32 “places where Tony ate,” culled from four separate visits over his 15 years of world wanderings, beginning with A Cook’s Tour in 2002 and culminating, for what would be his last time, with Parts Unknown in 2017.

Think about that. Thirty-two places, spread over 15 years, all different, all in one city — the debut episode of The Layover, the fourth-season opener of No Reservations, the episode that kicked off Parts Unknown’s 10th season, everything and everywhere from the Imperial Herbal Restaurant overlooking the Singapore River (fish soup in ginseng broth, braised codfish and fresh lily bulb topped with rice fermented in white wine sauce) to Guan Hoe Soon in the Victoria Food Court, one of the longest-standing restaurants in Singapore, where he discusses the meaning of things with chef Damian D’Silva over a plate of ikan asam nana, a Laotian dish of sour fish curry and pineapple.

Only in Singapore, Bourdain noted at the time, does one find the singular, exquisite mix of Chinese, Indian, and Malay dubbed ‘indigenous fusion’ by local chefs. thornyOver several meals in homes and at hawker stalls, the conversation turns to Singapore’s government; here residents seem to have traded civil liberties for a booming economy. At one point in the program, Bourdain pauses and asks a thorny question: “I mean, is free speech overrated?”

If you’re a recovering journalist, as I am, that’s the kind of question inclined to prompt an existential crisis. Free speech is one of the basic underpinnings of social democracy, dating back to Ancient Greece, and who knows how much longer before then? Early humankind didn’t emerge from the caves just because Moonwatcher had it going on and the other cave dwellers left it up to him to do all the talking, and make all the decisions. Whoever held the tiki around the fire was given permission to say whatever he or she wanted, and the others were inclined to listen. The following morning, a free press told everyone else what was said and decided in that get-together.

Singapore has its contradictions, which in Bourdain’s mind made it that much more fascinating. Enigmatic. Interesting.

Here he is, on those very contradictions:

“For a state in which an ounce of weed can put you in the jug for up to 10 years and the same weight of dope can mean death, where chewing gum is indeed illegal, a surprising number of vices are allowed here. Drinking age is 18. Prostitution is legal, with sex workers getting regular medical checkups. There are casinos and strip clubs. The government seems to understand that, along with a certain amount of repression, safety valves are required. Get drunk, get laid, and you are less likely to be difficult. Perhaps that’s the thinking. Or maybe it’s just business.”

Bourdain had no idea how prescient he was being when, in the summer of 2017, just six months after a new president swore the oath of office in on the Washington Mall in the US, he talked about the rise of populism throughout Western democracies, and how antithetical to Singapore’s ideal of globalism populism is. To wit:

• “To many, Singapore is the land of opportunity. People come here from all over the world to get a good job, to find a better life.”

• “Singapore has fully embraced globalization, and that’s proved, in their case, very rewarding.”

• “By some measures, Singapore is a welfare state, taking care of the less fortunate. But at its heart, it’s a cold-blooded meritocracy. You follow the rules—and there are many—work hard, and you’ll have a good life. That’s the message.”

• “Unlike most of the wealthy, developed world, there’s universal health care and little to no homelessness.”

• “By ensuring that its citizens are safe, housed, healthy, and for the most part economically successful, the Singaporean government has been effective at keeping the masses placated enough—willing to accept curbs on their freedoms and civil liberties.”

But don’t overlook the food. Never underestimate the importance of the food.

Bourdain: “It’s funny. I recognize every place here by the food.”

“I come here mostly to eat, because that’s what they do here. And they arguably do it better—with more diverse, affordable food options per square foot than just about anywhere on Earth.”

And much of that food is delicious, like the man said.

In the hands of episode producer-director Erik Osterholm, who worked on some of Parts Unknown’s most distinctive outings — Morocco, Congo, Bahia Brazil, Punjab India, Paraguay, Iran, Hawaii, New Mexico, Senegal, Antarctica; that’s quite the mix tape — Bourdain’s voice seeps into the subconscious and mind’s eye alike.

All Parts Unknown episodes have a distinctive voice and style — there’s not a single dud in the entire bunch — but Osterholm’s eye is particularly unique, it seems to me. His episodes are both gorgeous to look at and to listen to — man, that background music, when you think of the crap that passes for background music in most docuseries (hello, Netflix, that means you), the background music in so much of Parts Unknown is wow, just, wow — and you can’t help but come away from them thinking. That’s very unusual for TV these days, let alone a food and travel show.

One can never go far wrong, when talking about Parts Unknown, to end with Bourdain in his own words. Osterholm knew this. Tom Vitale knew this. And, lord knows, Bourdain knew it.

“One could be forgiven for thinking it’s a giant, ultramodern shopping mall. An interconnected, fully wired, air-conditioned nanny state. Where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. And those things are … kind of true, especially if you read the papers or the carefully monitored internet. You look around the litter-less streets, where everything seems to work just fine, and you think — or you could be forgiven for thinking — ‘Gee, maybe a one-party system is just what we need.’ You look at all the social problems and ethnic strife, street crime, drugs that Singapore has managed to avoid and you could think, ‘Is this the life we want?’ It ain’t my system, it’s not the world I want, but damn — it has its appeal.”

Cue the spring of 2025.

Supplementary reading:

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

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

https://www.jimhamill.com/anthony-bourdain-singapore.html

https://explorepartsunknown.com/singapore/recipe-pork-satay-with-pineapple-sauce/

Supplementary viewing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQB1S5sZQ0

CNN

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Bourdain in Porto

“We should know the past — and the present — before we attempt to judge it.”  Anthony Bourdain, in Porto, Portugal, some 10 years ago now. “Everything old is new again? Maybe not. I come close sometimes to believing that nothing actually ever changes.”

There are two kinds of places in the world: Pepsi places and Coca-Cola places. Judging by a glimpse of a lane in the opening moments of Parts Unknown’s Porto Portugal episode which bookended the program’s ninth (of 12) season in June 2017, Porto is decidedly a Coca-Cola place. (I’m not being entirely facetious; the further one travels from Bourdain’s home country of the USA, the more one sees how seriously Pepsi and Coca-Cola take branding rights in overseas markets. In some places you can’t even find drinkable fresh water for the asking but Coke signs — and to a lesser extent, Pepsi — seem to be everywhere. And you’ll rarely, if ever, find both in the same place. That would be tantamount to starting a civil war.)

There’s another criteria by which Porto is a bookend episode.

Over his years in front of a camera there were a handful of countries, cities and similar destinations that Bourdain would return to at various times during his career, reflecting not just his changing perspective on world cultures and local culinary scenes but his growth and evolution as a person, as a traveller, a social philosopher, amateur historian, a family man, husband, and dad. It was no accident that during his sit-down meeting — over noodle soup — with Barack Obama in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2016, that they ended up talking about their respective daughters (ketchup on eggs? that ain’t happenin’).

Los Angeles, five visits in all, cameras in tow. Vietnam, four visits.

Porto, though, was different.

Porto is where José de Meirelles, chef, restaurateur, one of Bourdain’s first bosses in the kitchen (at New York’s ‘) and arguably Bourdain’s formative mentor, is from originally. Meirelles is one of the first sidekicks Bourdain sat down to the table with during his visit to the Portuguese port city in 2017, as Parts Unknown was winding down toward the end of its run.

Bourdain first visited Porto in the first season of his then-new program A Cook’s Tour in 2002. A lot can happen in 15 years, as we know, and one of the most striking things that jumps out in their Parts Unknown reunion is how much older Bourdain looks, older than Meirelles even, and not just because of the grey hair. Porto finds Bourdain in a more reflective, lives-lived mood than that earlier visit, and for the casual viewer who watches closely, there’s something increasingly self-aware — and unsettling — about where Bourdain found himself at that stage in his life.

In A Cook’s Tour, Bourdain was basking in the glow of newfound celebrity — a hit book, an eponymous TV show, heady stuff for a young man who, by his own admission, was at the time little more than a jumped-up line cook and would-be crime novelist (think a younger Elmore Leonard, with a dash of Carl Hiaasen thrown in and a keen awareness of local food and exotic spices). Parts Unknown, especially toward the end, found him older, wiser, and more pensive, not just about the world around him but his place in it. By that point, he was exhausted, yes, but he was also filled with gratitude and appreciation for close friendships and warm  companionship. Just watch the way he interacts with Meirelles in Parts Unknown, and not just Meirelles but Sofia Príncipe and Joana Conde, of Taberna de Largo culinary provenance, and Porto resident culinary experts André Apolinário and Ricardo Brochado.

In her fine, thoughtful and emotionally detailed posts for the website Eat Like Bourdain, writer Valerie Stimac Bailey pays particular care and attention to Porto’s eateries in her post updated in just the past year — April 2024, to be exact — noting at one point that, of all the places Bourdain travelled through over the years, Porto is one of the most searched-for destinations and the one that, perhaps more than any other, people really, really want to know where he ate. These days, most blog posts you’ll find online run 100-150 words, if that, dressed up with pretty pictures and more about me/me/me than any useful intel for the visitor to the site. This is as true of legacy-media news sites — news professionals who should know better — and wannabe YouTubers high on new technology and always on the lookout for new toys, preferably comped for new media exposure. Valerie’s Porto post, on the other hand, runs 25 screen pages — this is a post for those who keenly, seriously are mapping out a visit to Porto, and who genuinely want to follow in the culinary footsteps of one of the modern world’s most intrepid travellers.

• A Cozinha do Martinho, tripe, with Port wine;

• Esplanada Marisquiera Atiga, oysters, crab, coastal shrimp, sea urchin, gooseneck barnacles, whelks, salt-baked sea bass, Portuguese-style clams;

• Cervejaria Gazela, cachorrinhos (think Portuguese hot dogs or, more specifically, Portuguese sausage sandwiches;

• Real Companhia Velha, nirvana for cheese tasters,

• O Afonso, Francesinha, a casual sandwich-style concoction of ham, sausage, steak, cheese and bread slathered in beer, Port, cheese and tomato sauce, food that, Bourdain quips at one point, is part of a local cuisine culture that is tailor-made to fast-track one to heart disease. The list goes on.

Viewer warning. The episode contains moments that are not for the faint of heart, including a long, drawn-out sequence of a pig being slaughtered for the table, screams and all — quite sad, actually, and made me want to re-watch the movie Babe (1995, dir. Chris Noonan, George Miller), a family classic nominated for no fewer than seven Academy Awards, including the big ones (best picture, adapted screenplay, best director), and a 90-minute PSA for veganism if ever there was one.

“I think people should know where meat comes from,” Bourdain explains in his voiceover, after noting that, during his days as a starter chef in New York City, meat came to him wrapped in plastic, sealed in shrink-wrapped containers, as if antiseptic, far removed from the messy business of killing the animal for its meat.

It’s important that people know, Bourdain says.

“And knowing, they should feel free to decide what they want to do from there.”

It’s a telling moment, not just as a reminder to all of us where meat on the dinner table comes from, but as a reminder to us too that there was a time when Bourdain, early in his career as an on-air documentarian and TV presenter, would not have risked viewers’ attention by showing the messy realities of life and death.

“It was an enlightening experience in many ways,” Bourdain wrote in his Field Notes at the time. “I learned a lot about José and his family. I learned a little bit more about the strange and unnatural practice of making television, and, for the first time after nearly three decades as a cook and chef, I learned — really learned — where my food came from.

“I had never seen an animal die before. I had never looked my dinner in the eyes as its life drained away. Sure, I had picked up the phone thousands of times and ordered meat—in boxes, in plastic bags, in neat, relatively bloodless sections, unrecognizable as the living, breathing creatures it had once been.

“José and family threw me a traditional pig feast, which in cultures all over the world—cultures as disparate as Sicily, Borneo, Romania, and rural Louisiana—is a cherished celebration involving whole communities, a joyous occasion where people come together to cook and eat and drink. It invariably involves the killing of an animal. And I will tell you: It was a deeply unsettling experience.”

Unsettling, yes.

And yet, in a strange way, watching this episode, from the September period of Bourdain’s May-to-September romance with the small screen, is an oddly life-affirming experience.

It’s real, in a way television is rarely real.

“What I do on my show is show how people live,” Bourdain explained. “How they eat. And where that food comes from. Oftentimes that is not a pretty picture. Whether it’s people struggling to feed their families in oppressive political or military situations or the chillingly dispassionate way people kill chickens, pigs, game—usually in the regions where they live closest to those same animals …

“I will unapologetically show you how people live around the world. I will try, always, to empathize or understand or at least try and see things from their point of view. And I will let you, should you choose to look, make your own judgments.”

Supplementary reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/porto/bourdains-take-porto/

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yxYDw5ydSQ

https://explorepartsunknown.com/directors-cut/why-obama-wanted-to-sit-down-with-bourdain/

Supplementary viewing:

Episode trailer and the 1st-season episode of A Cook’s Tour from Bourdain’s first on-camera visit to Porto, from YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzeo1BalAs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7EN2zL3vz0&t=426s

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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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