Another mainstay of the show was Bourdain's fellow celebrity chef Eric Ripert. Ripert first appeared on A Cook's Tour and would continue to make appearances on his shows until Bourdain's death. The rapport between the two made for compelling television, but their friendship went far deeper than that. Ripert was one of Bourdain's closest friends, and it was Ripert who found Bourdain after his death from suicide.
Ripert was devastated by the loss. One of the great storytellers of our time who connected with so many. I wish him peace. My love and prayers are with his family, friends and loved ones. Bourdain would sometimes find himself in dangerous locales, but perhaps the most frightening was when he ended up in the middle of a war zone in Lebanon.
In , war broke out between the militant group Hezbollah and Israel, just days after the No Reservations team landed in Beirut.
As bombs threatened to decimate the city, Bourdain and the crew were forced to evacuate by boat. The episode would end up being nominated for an Emmy award, but it almost didn't air. Still unsatisfied with how the city was portrayed, Bourdain returned to Lebanon four years later for another episode.
To do what Bourdain did took not only an incredible sense of adventure, but also an iron stomach. He ate some pretty crazy foods for the show, but somehow managed to get sick only three times. He swallowed down everything from a warthog anus that had been cooked without a thorough cleaning in Namibia to fermented shark in Iceland.
Those two dishes topped the list of foods Bourdain said he would never eat again — along with airplane food. According to Bourdain, the secret to not getting sick on the road is to eat what the locals eat. You eat in crowded local joints, and chances are you're going to be OK. It might be sound advice, but you can't really blame members of the crew for not wanting to eat raw seal eyeball. Bourdain said it's "not bad," but we'll take his word for it.
One of the most endearing aspects of No Reservations was Bourdain's frank personality. The sincerity he brought to the screen helped viewers relate to him, and Bourdain recognized this.
While most of reality TV is anything but, Bourdain didn't believe in faking anything on the show. Over the years, he worked to eliminate what he called "painful fakery. Anthony Bourdain swore off filming in Sicily after a disastrous episode sent him into a flying rage.
Bourdain has always committed to authenticity in his shows, so when a fisherman staged a cuttlefish and octopus expedition with dead seafood, Bourdain snapped. He thought he and the crew would be going to catch live seafood, but instead discovered that the fisherman accompanying them had thrown dead animals into the water for them to "catch.
Bourdain told Forbes that he was so angry at the duplicity that he began "pounding negronis" and was drunk in the episode's next scene. Bourdain was so intoxicated that he didn't even remember it, which turned out to be a good thing as the same fisherman had one more trick up his sleeve.
He said he would be bringing them to his "traditional" restaurant which turned out to be anything but authentic. But it wasn't funny to me down there where those dead octopi were splashing down behind my head I'm still pissed about it.
Filming more than a dozen episodes each season of a show that requires you to travel the globe can be taxing. Bourdain would often be out of the country for days out of the year. While filming No Reservations, he also filmed two seasons of The Layover , another travel show with a much shorter timeline.
While Bourdain and the crew would spend several days in each location for No Reservations , on The Layover they would only have hours to build a story around each destination. And that's after shooting No Reservations.
The punishing schedule was necessary for the shows, but there was another reason Bourdain wanted to keep busy. No Reservations was more than just a travel show. Bourdain also used it as a political platform. In the much-hyped Cuba episode Season 6 , the show opens with a speech by JFK, and never slows down its in-depth documentation of the oft-befuddling Cuban way of life.
While this political-leaning treatment of the areas Bourdain visits may turn some viewers off I can see the internet commenters now: "Stick to food, Tony!
Parts Unknown takes the sometimes sweltering clip of NR and slows it down to a crawl. It dips inside the topic at hand, and feels it out fluidly, and with depth. No Reservations , wasn't without faults. Often, the attitude was a little too breezy, grasping at serious topics, but either falling short or biting off more than it could chew. Conversely, Parts Unknown doesn't worry about incorporating madcap themes or high-concept ideals, and lets the culture and the people do the legwork.
Never droning, or boring, it's a more nuanced and ultimately more rewarding look into the subjects at hand. Bourdain took a sizable portion of his No Reservations staff with him, and in combination with the increased resources available from CNN, and the dude's ever-escalating levels of fame and influence, they were finally able to make the show they always wanted to make. Despite the serious overtones of many episodes, Bourdain is able to play into his larger-than-life persona.
Take, for instance, my personal favorite episode of Parts Unknown, "Tokyo" Season 2. This is Bourdain drinking, eating, conversing, and feeling his way through the seedy, sometimes creepy, epilepsy-inducing world of Tokyo night culture.
It's classic gonzo-Bourdain -- his personality has never shone more clearly on television than in this succinct, slightly off-putting hour. He's boozing, his shirt is untucked in typical Tony swagger, and he's swearing like a sailor in a traffic jam. He's everything you've ever wanted him to be. Bourdain's shtick has always rested soundly in the intersection of food and culture. Maybe I'm being overly romantic about this, but that would be nice. I could do the same book in Italy, for that matter.
You know, I like the feeling of waking up in the morning in an unfamiliar place. Over time, you get to know the butcher and you master the art of ordering breakfast for yourself. That's always a deeply satisfying thing, even if it's only two weeks.
I don't know. I've never known what it is like to live a normal life. I worked as a chef for all that time and overnight transitioned into whatever it is I'm doing now. But you do want to give "normal" a shot? To the extent that I even understand what that is, sure [laughs].
I travel more than days out of the year, and that's got to change. I'll give you a pathetic example: my in-laws are in town. They are from the north of Italy and for them, there are two types of food: food — properly cooked Italian food — and Chinese food. Everything else is suspect.
My wife is on an all-protein diet, which means grilled and seared meats, so I never get to cook the things that give me pleasure cooking. I ferociously look forward to the in-laws coming because that changes.
I get so excited. I run off to the market, buy tons of meat, get stinky cheeses, shop for wines. I squeeze the vegetables, buy a shitload of them. I'm like a provincial French housewife.
It's deeply satisfying for me, waking up and making eggs for my daughter and cooking for a family. Again, it's about puttering around the house.
It's awesome. I like cooking for the crew, as well, which doesn't happen too often. The Tuscany show this season is basically us checking into a villa to make a show about us checking into a villa. Provence was the same thing. I like that. A question related to the ceaseless traveling and working: you do a lot of press I get a lot of press. All that Paula Deen shit came off of one tweet and one interview. That was it. In the run-up to new seasons, I have to go out there, but it's not that much.
You're a perfect example. I got back Tuesday night. Then I'm back on the road. I'm not out there on junkets and shit. I try to avoid the network PR people like cancer. It hurts my brain to listen to them. My question is, you're inevitably going to be asked the same questions over and over again. It's part of the game, but do you ever feel dishonest or odd about that process? The book tour is where this comes in. It's such a rare gift, such a show of confidence, for a publisher to send you out there for a fifteen-city tour.
You should be fucking grateful when that happens. And when you're on tour, you do five to six interviews a day for twenty days. That's when you really plumb the depths of self-loathing. It's hard to take issue with people asking the same questions, because they can hardly not.
On the morning shows, they get the briefing page and say, "Our next guest is the man who told us not to eat fish on Monday! It's when you find yourself answering the questions the same way that you hate yourself.
You understand why stand-up comics kill themselves either quickly or slowly. There's something destructive about getting good at that. Instead of groaning and saying, "Oh, that question again," you pause a bit and look up at the ceiling and make it look like you're answering this question for the first fucking time. You really feel like you just prostituted — that you gave up a little piece of yourself. But it's only polite to do it. You see actors do it at junkets, sitting in front of that little screen for hours and talking about how awesome it was to work with Megan Fox for the fiftieth fucking time and they're goofy now.
That's rude to me. It doesn't suck, because it means that someone is interested, but it gets silly. Do you ever feel pressure to live up to the perception that you're a badass or whatever you want to call it? No, I'm clearly not. For fuck's sake, look at me! I'm a snowy-haired, middle-aged motherfucker with a daughter. But many people do think that. Come on. Fine, that's great. I'm grateful. I really am. But I feel zero obligation. I was forty-four when Kitchen Confidential dropped, and it was already too late then [laughs].
The comments that I love are the ones that say I'm trying to stay relevant, especially when it comes to the music I put in the shows. What the fuck does that even mean? If I'm listening to good music or doing a Queens of the Stone Age show, does that make me relevant? It certainly doesn't. It might demonstrate that I have very good taste in music, but it does not make me relevant or cooler.
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