Bourdain in Puerto Rico

“How American is Puerto Rico? How American do they want to be?” This was the question Anthony Bourdain posed for his CNN Parts Unknown visit to Puerto Rico in April 2017. And then, six weeks later, Hurricane Maria made its fateful landfall.

Hurricane Maria made its first landfall on the Caribbean island nation of Dominica on Monday, September 18, 2017, as a Category 5 storm with winds topping 160 mph. It was the strongest, most violent hurricane on record to make landfall in the region.

Days later, Maria would become the first Category 4 hurricane to directly affect Puerto Rico in 85 years.  Maria made landfall in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico at approximately 0615 (1015 UTC) on 20 September, this according to the official records of the US National Weather Service, with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph, Puerto Rico was still recovering from Hurricane Irma at the time, which had battered the island with high winds just two weeks earlier. Maria was the 8th hurricane of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season.

By the time Maria finally passed over the island, it left virtually the entire population — some 3 million American citizens — without electricity, and many without homes.

“It has been six weeks since the hurricane, and 70 percent of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million American citizens are still without power,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in his CNN Field Notes on November 1, days before his Puerto Rico-based episode debuted on Parts Unknown. “About 25 percent are without fresh drinking water—people are drinking from streams and other contaminated sources. They are burning their dead. This is, of course, unthinkable. And grotesque. It is also true.”

Bourdain and crew visited Puerto Rico with our cameras in April, five months before Maria.

“We, of course, found the beautiful place we expected: turquoise and gin clear seas, bright greens, colourful and delicious things to eat, a painful history — and a complicated and ambivalent relationship with the rest of a nation who once took them by force, and has held onto them since.

“Things on these lovely islands filled with great food, incredible music, wonderful people who’ve given so much to their country — served its military, been such a vital part of our collective culture — were already tragically absurd. A state of financial limbo, political paralysis, and powerlessness that defies both decency and belief. A Kafkaesque situation that was already bleeding them out.”

In his Field Notes, Bourdain left out the part about then-President Donald Trump famously tossing rolls of paper towels into the crowd during a five-hour presidential trip to Puerto Rico’s reeling capital of San Juan, some two weeks after the hurricane, following complaints that the US government’s handling of the storm's aftermath had been too slow.

Trump tweeted it had been a “great day” in Puerto Rico, but San Juan’s mayor at the time, Carmen Yulin Cruz, saw it differently. She described Trump’s televised meeting with officials as a “17-minute PR meeting,” and added that the sight of him throwing paper towels to people in the crowd was "terrible and abominable.”

As the BBC’s Aleem Maqbool noted at the time, “It may have been a ‘great day’ in Puerto Rico for Donald Trump, but more than 90% of the 3 and a half million people living on this island remain without power and phone communications.

“It means many of them would not have heard his remark about how much the disaster in Puerto Rico was costing the US government.

“Nor would they have seen that he only visited Guaynabo, a wealthy part of town, and joked with people there that they no longer needed the torches being handed out.

“Many of those we have met who are aware of this week's visit say this is more evidence that the president views them as second-class American citizens.”

That idea — the belief many Americans view Puerto Ricans as second-class citizens — would form the focus of an episode that was both sad and introspective by turns. Bourdain was visibly aged by the time Puerto Rico aired on November 17, shoehorned between Parts Unknown’s outings to Sri Lanka and Seattle. Sri Lanka and Seattle rank among Bourdain’s best work on Parts Unknown, but it was becoming clear by this point that the program was exacting a heavy toll.

There are moments of genuine joy and poetry in Puerto Rico, but watching it today, it’s hard to escape the feeling that it was nearing the end of the road — and taking Bourdain with it. Thirteen episodes — a baker’s dozen — would remain of the 91 fresh, first-run episodes Bourdain and his team produced for Parts Unknown overall.

Those remaining episodes would include outings to Uruguay, Armenia, Hong Kong, Berlin, Bhutan, Kenya and Indonesia among outings to more familiar home ground, including West Virginia, Far West Texas and Mardi Gras Cajun country.

The year 2017 marked a notable shift in tone for Parts Unknown, though — more cerebral, more introspective. It was as if Bourdain was considering his own mortality, and more determined than ever to share other people’s misfortunes around the world with what he knew by then to be a vast, global, worldwide audience.

“How American is Puerto Rico?” Bourdain asked, only partly rhetorically. More to the point: “How American do they want to be? How much responsibility are we willing to take for their aspirations, their well-being, their basic rights as humans, as citizens? The answer to that last question appears to be: not much.

“I ask these questions again and again of Puerto Ricans who have stayed and fought and persisted. Who have tried to build up, or at least hold on, to the basic things and services, the very land in the place of their birth. Teachers; doctors; ordinary people who are proud of the work they do, in spite of the fact that their resources, their funding, even their pensions seem to be draining inexorably and hopelessly away. And this was before the catastrophe.

”I hope people watch this episode and get a sense of who we are talking about when we talk about Puerto Rico — and what they have lost.”

You can’t put your arms around a memory — a lyric from the song by Johnny Thunders, one of the original punk rock guitar heroes, and a song referenced often in Bourdain’s travels. Noisy and epic. Thunders, the artist formerly known as John Anthony Genzale, Jr., spent his days, as the music writer Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted on the Rovi database, Spotify’s default music source, churning out tough, sloppy, three-chord rock ’n roll, “and gaining nearly as strong a reputation for his decades-long struggle with addiction as for his music.”

Bourdain could not have said it better. Of himself.

Later, after his original visit, Bourdain circled back to Puerto Rico with musician-songwriter Alfonso “Tito” Auger, who closed out the Parts Unknown episode singing Salimos de aquí (We Come from Here) with his band Fiel a la Vega. As Food & Wine’s Bridget Hallinan would later post on the Condé Nast Traveler   site page, “Auger considers himself fortunate. His family is safe and his house is still intact. But the magnitude of the disaster — and the painfully slow path to recovery — has now sunk in.

“‘We don’t know for real what’s going on. We’ve been told six months, nine months, a year to get electricity back, which is the most basic, fundamental thing that we need right now to get everything else going and running,’ (Auger) told Bourdain. ‘We don’t understand why, during the first two weeks, things didn’t move faster. We feel like there’s a lot of bureaucracy going on behind the scenes.’”

It was ever thus.

Still is, in fact. Bourdain was ahead of his time, once again.

Supplementary reading:

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/recap-anthony-bourdains-parts-unknown-visits-puerto-rico

https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-puerto-rico/

Supplementary viewing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhW0ivYXuhU

CNN

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Bourdain in Sri Lanka

“Harsh question: Why should Americans watching this — why should we give a s**t? Why should people care about Sri Lanka?” This was Anthony Bourdain in Parts Unknown, in October 2017. Bourdain posed the question — and then proffered a poignant and at times profound answer.

The other night, while revisiting Tony Bourdain’s 2017 sojourn to Sri Lanka for Parts Unknown, I couldn’t help thinking about Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost.

Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje’s 2000 follow-up to his widely praised The English Patient, follows the story of Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan who, as an idealistic medical student in her late teens, leaves Sri Lanka for Britain on a scholarship, and returns years later in the midst of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war as a qualified forensic pathologist.

She has been seconded by the United Nations as part of an ongoing human rights investigation into war atrocities. Together with a Sri Lankan archaeologist, Sarath Diyasena, they try to unravel the mystery behind the discovery of an unidentified body found in a mass grave in a government-controlled district in the proverbial “middle of nowhere.”

Fired by the righteous indignation of youth, Anil is determined to identify the body no matter what, to bring about justice for the nameless victims of war and, if nothing else, bring peace to at least one grieving family in a bitter conflict that lasted — and this is true — 25 years, nine months, three weeks, and four days.

By now, you get the idea that Bourdain’s time in Sri Lanka was not exactly one of those fun ride, food-centric romps around kitchens of the world. Perhaps more than any other Parts Unknown episode before it, Sri Lanka shows Bourdain in his more mature, pensive CNN mode, where a country’s history — and the thoughts and concerns of the people who live there, both in their historical context and as it reflects the events of the day — rule the hour. One of the great shames about Bourdain’s untimely passing is that he’s not around today to open people’s eyes to the injustices of the world, both at home and away.

Sri Lanka, formerly the British dominion of Ceylon and reformed as an independent republic in 1972 , was home to, among others, the legendary science-fiction author and avid deep-sea diver Arthur C. Clarke — Clarke and Bourdain had that in common — and Ondaatje himself, who was born of Tamil and Burgher descent in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1943 — not exactly a peaceful year for British dominions around the world — before his family moved to the UK when Ondaatje was in his early teens. He later settled in Canada, first in Montreal, then London, Ont., and, eventually, Toronto.

Bourdain, well-read and himself appalled by the world’s injustices, shared something else with Ondaatje — a keenly observed poetic ability.

Lest you’re afraid that Sri Lanka is an endless dirge of misery and remembrances of past conflicts, it’s worth noting, too, that Sri Lanka, in its modern guise, is a tourist mecca and tropical playground for deep-sea divers around the world. That’s what drew Arthur C. Clarke to the island in the first place.

Sri Lanka is also where the English pop-rock Duran Duran basically invented the music video, in the early 1980s, when, together with Australian filmmaker Russell Mulcahy, they crafted the videos Hungry Like the Wolf, Save a Prayer, and Lonely in Your Nightmare.

Those music videos went viral around the world, before “viral” became a thing, and showed Sri Lanka to be a land of verdant jungles, pristine beaches fronted by turquoise surf, and — most importantly to Bourdain and countless others who followed him — a deep spirituality.

It’s probably no coincidence that Bourdain’s first-ever episode of Parts Unknown was set in Myanmar, another would-be tropical paradise — and former British dominion — beset by constant civil war and political turmoil. Bourdain’s Sri Lanka is full of ghosts.

It is also where Bourdain took a 10-hour train ride — this is a man who grew impatient quickly, remember — from the capital Colombo to the northern coastal city of Jaffna, once a city of almost unparalleled beauty … and scene of some of the most bitter fighting of the 25-year civil war.

Bourdain: “Early morning, Colombo station. The platforms bustle with a mix of commuters, long-distance travellers, and the occasional tourist. Breaking free from Colombo’s gravitational pull, the land opens up. Speeding past shimmering rice paddies and mountain vistas, second- and third-class compartments host a mix of people, smells, and slices of life. Roving food vendors sell snacks to hungry travellers.

“Commuters get on at one station, off at another. Others like me are in it for the long haul: 10 hours from Colombo to Jaffna.”

That train ride is arguably the episode’s centrepiece, the piece de resistance, the source arguably of some of documentary photographer David Scott Holloway’s most iconic and memorable images taken from years, decades even, of following Bourdain around the world. Holloway could hardly have guessed at the time that his captured-in-the-moment images would not only outlive Bourdain himself but would become the de facto historical record of who Bourdain was and why so many follow him to this day.

“Sri Lanka was once the crown jewel of the spice trade. Its cloves, cardamom, pepper, nutmeg, mace, ginger, cinnamon, chilies, and curry — the envy of the world. These spices built empires,” Bourdain recalls in his episode voiceover.

And, later: ”Jaffna crab curry might be — for me, anyway—the holy grail of Sri Lankan cuisine. Spicy, fiery—in a cuisine known for being spicy and fiery. During the war years, it was hard to get crabs like this, and it still is today, the majority being exported to other parts of the country and abroad.”

Memories are precious. Sri Lanka was never going to grab the attention of Parts Unknown viewers the way the Eric Ripert episodes did, or the US-based episodes — the Bronx, New Mexico, Charleston SC, West Virginia, New Orleans, etc.,— where Bourdain honed his craft. There’s something oddly compelling about Sri Lanka, though, the way it embraces both the pains and miseries of a world in conflict with the hopes and dreams of a better life, a world in peace where good food — and good company — count for everything.

In my research for this essay, I came across a telling testimonial by India-based food writer Vidya Balachander, herself featured in the episode, written in July, 2018. “Last year, on a moody, overcast May afternoon, I waited with anticipation to meet and interview Anthony Bourdain. A few weeks earlier, Tom Vitale and Jeff Allen, the director and producer of the Emmy Award-winning CNN show, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, had reached out to me about an episode they were planning to film in Sri Lanka…”

I’ve attached a link to Balachander’s testimonial here, if for no other reason than it lends an insight into Bourdain — written mere weeks after Bourdain’s passing — that even dedicated Bourdainophiles might not otherwise have found.

Balachander: “In preparation for that evening, I wondered what I could possibly ask Tony that he hadnʼt been asked before. One of the most interviewed celebrities of our age, he had been quizzed about everything, from his views on American politics (“Our president is a ****ing joke,” he said, in all seriousness, after my tape had stopped rolling) to the craziest things he had eaten (a question he had grown tired of answering, I was told).”

It seems only fitting, then, to end in Bourdain’s own words.

“Things have changed. The war is over, and if the underlying problems are far from solved or even being adequately addressed, at least you can now SEE the Tamil people, SEE Jaffna. And people, finally, are feeling freer to talk.

“So, this episode is a correction—not a balance; not a free and fair or comprehensive overview. It asks simple questions: WHO are the Tamils? Where do they live? And what do they do now?”

Save a prayer. That’s as good a start as any.

Supplementary reading:

https://scroll.in/magazine/882179/what-a-meeting-with-anthony-bourdain-taught-an-indian-food-writer-in-sri-lanka

https://explorepartsunknown.com/sri-lanka/bourdains-field-note-sri-lanka/

https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-sri-lanka/#:~:text=Nana's%20King%20Beach%20Side%20Food,-Revisiting%20a%20more&text=At%20Nana's%20beachside%20bar%2C%20Tony,served%20with%20traditional%20roti%20flatbreads.

Supplementary viewing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uxc9eFcZyM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOFa6Hwv3Po

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Bourdain in Lagos, Nigeria

“Nigeria is a difficult place to shoot and an even more difficult place to live. But it is also an incredibly inspiring place, with perhaps the hardest-working, most enterprising, most optimistic population I’ve ever encountered.” — Tony Bourdain in Lagos, Nigeria in Parts Unknown, in October 2016.

Tony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode on Lagos, Nigeria — Africa’s largest city, with 15.9 million people (as of 2023) — premiered just one week after his light-hearted sojourn with Eric Ripert in the French Alps, and it’s hard to imagine a sharper, more stark contrast. Lagos was frenzied and frenetic where French Alps was quiet and cheerful, the difference between relaxation in the fresh, rarified air of high mountain scenery and the smog-choked desperation of an overcrowded big city, where side hustles are the only way to make a living for most, and the economic disparity between rich and poor is a conversation talking point in its own right.

The food is different, too — but that didn’t stop Bourdain from crafting a compelling, surprisingly upbeat hour of TV, fuelled by his sheer force of personality whenever the overcrowding and desperation around him threatened to overwhelm.

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country, with a population of 230 million, and Lagos is practically a country in its own right, the most populated urban region in Africa and one of the fastest-growing megacities in the world.

In keeping with much of Africa — and the emerging world, for that matter — the demographic breakdown leans toward the young side: nearly a third of those people, 32.4 percent by one survey, are under the age of 18. What about their future? What kind of a life awaits them? Lagos may be the financial heartbeat of West Africa, but what does that mean when the financial disparity between rich and poor, old and young, is so great? It’s a question that confronts many of the world’s democracies today, and a question Bourdain wrestled with daily. (Thorny issues like that don’t matter so much in autocratic dictatorships where simply asking that question will get you disappeared.)

It’s hard to watch Lagos and remain in a sunny mood, no matter how much energy Bourdain puts into it — and if you know anything about Bourdain, that’s a hell of a lot. Bourdain is the indigenous film-making capital of the entire African continent, nicknamed Nollywood, and its music scene is the most vibrant in West Africa, which, if you know music, is saying something. The food is more tailored to street food, in keeping with a lifestyle that means eating while on the run, grabbing what one can from sidewalk street stalls, and Bourdain is the ideal companion for that. He’s a connoisseur but no snob when it comes to food.

A quick side note: Lagos was directed and produced by longtime Bourdain cameraman Morgan Fallon in grainy 16mm stock with a deliberately jittery, handheld look and a nervous, almost frantic style, in keeping with Bourdain’s lean toward a more experimental type of filmmaking in his later Parts Unknown episodes: God only knows how it must have appeared to CNN corporate bean counters on first viewing.

Lagos catches Bourdain in neither a soulful, reflective mood nor his angry, testy social commentator mode; things are happening around him too quickly for that. Watching Lagos just the other night, I couldn’t help wondering how Fallon and his camera crew kept up; this is one outing where it’s hard enough to follow Bourdain on the screen, let alone the guys dragging heavy camera equipment behind him; Fallon is the rock star of the piece, if behind the scenes.

This is not one of Bourdainophiles’ favourite episodes — a quick scan of Reddit reviews from the time lean more toward the What the hell? end of the reaction scale than the light-hearted joy and comfort of companionship that fans responded with to the Eric Ripert episodes, keeping in mind — again — that Lagos aired just seven days after French Alps.

One thing one can say about Lagos is, that in Bourdain’s hands, it’s never boring.

“It’s mad, it’s bad, it’s delicious, it’s confusing, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bourdain said in his voiceover … and he was just getting started. Them’s fightin’ words coming from a dude who, as Eater assistant editor and culture writer Chris Fuhrmeister posted at the time on Eater's webpage, had been around the world, there and back, many times, who made nearly 300 hours of travel television in 15 years.

Lagos is also the only episode, that I’m aware of anyway, where Bourdain says, on-camera: “I’m lazy.” (Context: he was called out at the time for pouring beer without tipping his glass.)

Ah yes, the food. Lagosian cuisine, as it’s known, revolves around fresh fish, beef, spicy soups, and pounded yams. Lots and lots of pounded yams.

The particulars range from traditional Hausa dishes like masa griddlecakes to spicy (aka hot) pepper soups and home-cooked stews (think Jollof rice stewed with goat meat, fish stock, melon seeds and many, many chilis; “It burns,” Bourdain says, “It burns real good!”) with musician activists companions like Femi Kuti and Yeni Kuti, Edoato Agbeniyi and Yomi Messou, food blogger Iquo Ukoh, and journalist Kadaria Ahmed.

The music backbeat is hip, local and authentic — none of this lazy, AI-generated garbage you hear in so many Netflix docuseries. The original soundtrack recording, real music and not regurgitated pop. ranges from Afrobeat to psychedlic rock, in keeping with the episode’s jittery, nervous acid burn, from The Funkees (Point of No Return) and Bio (Chant to Mother Earth) to Fela Kuti (Zombie) and Ofo and the Black Company (Egwu Aja, Allah Wakbarr).

“Nigeria is a difficult place to shoot and an even more difficult place to live,” Bourdain wrote in his Field Notes for CNN. “But it is also an incredibly inspiring place, with perhaps the hardest-working, most enterprising, most optimistic population I’ve ever encountered.”

And there it is — as good a reason as any to revisit Lagos. Or watch for the first time, as the case may be.

Supplementary reading:

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

https://eatlikebourdain.com/?s=Lagos

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/parts-unknown-cinematographer-reflects-exploring-bourdain-1134475/

Supplementary viewing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDWp695LzTU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZSOUX6s3nI

CNN

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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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