8 June — Bourdain Remembered

Anthony Bourdain crossed all boundaries. His métier was food, but he was accomplished and informed in  so many other things: politics and history, culture and travel, music and film. Eight years to the day after he passed, his admirers remain young and old, hip and square, adventurous and mild-mannered, armchair travellers and global explorers alike. He remains one of the few public figures to be remembered for inspiring others simply by being himself.

June 8, 2018. It’s not an anniversary anyone here will recall with fondness but there it is. It is what it is. One of the saving graces of the day though, and it’s a big one, is that it affords us an opportunity to pause and reflect, to consider Anthony Bourdain’s effect not just on the culture of the times but on what he meant to so many people, globally, across the world, in countless countries and countless communities, each with its own identifying cultures, customs, languages — and food.

Food, here, is the key. Food is what sustains each and every person on the planet, and Bourdain understood that. He often said the solution to any conflict is to sit down and break bread together, and see the world from the other’s perspective. He gave so much of himself to the world that, in the end, perhaps he gave too much.

I’m no foodie. I didn’t come to Parts Unknown as any kind of expert on fine cuisine, or street food for that matter. As TV viewing goes, I had the Food Network rated somewhere below Discovery Investigation and Animal Planet. And below CNN, for that matter. For it was on CNN that I first stumbled over Bourdain. I had done much travelling in Africa at the time, and had a low opinion of travel shows.

When I saw that CNN was pitching this new travel show, and I saw that this Anthony Bourdain character was going to take on the Congo — DRC, to those conversant with global news headlines — I thought I’d give it a try. The year was 2013. June 9, 2013, to be exact. I didn’t quite know what I’d find, but I did think that watching some Rick Steeves wannabe take on the Congo River, the setting for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the seminal morality play about the effects of colonialism on deepest, darkest Africa in the late 19th century, would be good for a few laughs.

Travel shows are bland and unimaginative and, let’s face it, boring as hell, and Rick Steeves has the formula down cold. That’s why he is the walking, talking equivalent of a guide book — Lonely Planet, for the older crowd. The biggest aim of any travel show is to avoid offending the advertisers. Travel shows have little, if anything,  to do with actual travel. They’re there to make money for travel agencies and package tour operators, and for the TV networks that get by on selling ads.

“Well,” one imagines Tony Bourdain saying at the time. “Fuck that.”

I could not have been more wrong, as it turned out. Bourdain’s Congo episode was tight, sharp, evocative, frightening, revealing, gorgeously filmed — self-aware without being self-conscious — and beautifully written. That, I was to learn, was Bourdain’s trademark signature. He was a writer. And a traveller in the truest sense of the word. He didn’t do a food show, or a travel show. His raison d’être was to draw a map of the human heart. And if it didn’t kill him exactly, it certainly played a part.

Congo was my introduction not just to Bourdain but to Zach Zamboni, Morgan Fallon, Erik Osterholm, and Tom Vitale, who drove himself the edge of a nervous breakdown in following Bourdain through thick and thin — literally — for the better part of two decades. Vitale’s arresting, stirring book In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain features an entire chapter on the making of the Congo episode.

For me, the click moment — the moment that made me a Bourdainophile for life — was the sudden realization that Bourdain got it. As a working journalist, or at least ex-journo, I know Africa about as well as I think any outsider this side of Bob Geldof can get to know, for me, the world’s most fascinating, mercurial continent — not Africa as one country but Africa as a continent with 54 countries, each one with its own culture, customs and cuisine.

First with his Congo outing for Parts Unknown and then going back in time to 2012 and re-watching his outing to Mozambique for in No Reservations for the Travel Channel — Mozambique not being an easy country to get a handle on, particularly for a mass audience — I was struck by the authenticity, Bourdain’s ability to feel rather than simply observe, and his uncanny ability to share that feeling with an audience watching from halfway round the world.

I was struck by his grasp of history and eye for emotional detail and, critically, his empathy for people other than himself and his own inner circle. Truth is, he was harder on himself than he ever was with the people he met along the way.

Had Bourdain lived on in perpetuity — unreasonable, as well as impossible — it’s not hard to imagine him “doing” all 54 countries in Africa, and each outing would have been as unique and different from the other as Antarctica was from Sri Lanka. (It’s also not hard to imagine Tom Vitale going full-on Jack Nicholson in The Shining by the time it was over, but that’s a thought for another day. Read about it in In the Weeds.)

There are likely to be many eulogies and comments on this anniversary about what Bourdain meant to the world. If I could suggest just one essay to read, for your own pleasure and edification, right now I would single out Patrick Radden O’Keefe’s essay for The New Yorker, “Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast,” written in February 2017, little more than a year before Bourdain’s passing. (It’s 52 pages long, so don’t expect to read it on your smartphone while waiting in line at a Starbucks, no matter how the line is.)

“In a fit of self-exile,” Radden wrote in what now seems eerie prophecy foretold, “Bourdain flew to France and made his way, alone, to the oyster village that he had visited as a child. He had rented a big villa, with the intention of doing some writing. Bourdain cherishes the trope of the misanthropic émigré. ‘To me, The Quiet American was a happy book, because Fowler ends up in Vietnam, smoking opium with a beautiful Vietnamese girl who may not have loved him.’ …

“But in France he found that he couldn’t write. His body was itchy and swollen from the rash, and he had a throbbing pain in his head. Because he looked hideous, he left the villa only after dark, like a vampire. Finally, Bourdain sought out a French doctor, who gave him a battery of painkillers and anti-inflammatories. After impulsively swallowing a week’s supply, Bourdain realized that he had not eaten in thirty-six hours.

“He drove to a café in a nearby town, Arcachon, and ordered spaghetti and a bottle of Chianti. He was halfway through the wine when he realized that he was sweating through his clothes. Then he blacked out …

“When he woke up, Bourdain was lying with his feet in the café and his head in the street. A waiter was rifling through his pockets, in search of a driver’s license, as if to identify a corpse.

“Bourdain’s father had died suddenly, at fifty-seven, from a stroke, and Bourdain often thinks about dying; more than once, he told me that, if he got “a bad chest X-ray,” he would happily renew his acquaintance with heroin. Taking meds and booze on an empty stomach was just a foolish mistake, but it left him shaken. He stood up, reassured the startled onlookers, drove back to the villa, and immediately wrote a long e-mail to Nancy Putkoski [Bourdain’s ex-wife at the time].

“When I asked him what he wrote, Bourdain paused and said, ‘The sort of thing you write if you, you know, thought you were going to die. ‘I’m fucking sorry. I’m sure I’ve acted like I wasn’t.’ We’ve had very little contact—you know, civil, but very, very little. ‘I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help. It won’t fix it, there’s no making amends. But it’s not like I don’t remember. It’s not like I don’t know what I’ve done.’’”

And there it is.

Anthony Bourdain, June 25, 1956, to June 8, 2018.

RIP.

Supplementary reading:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/anthony-bourdains-moveable-feast

CNN

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Bourdain in Southern Italy (with Francis Ford Coppola)

The unipasta topped with fresh sea urchin at Ricciolandia restaurant in Torre Canne, washed down with a Peroni, is “truly one of the greatest things on Earth,” Anthony Bourdain says in his Parts Unknown sojourn through Puglia and southern Italy, ‘the Heel of the Boot’ — only to be outdone by the homemade priecchiette served with a tomato and red pepper sauce at Nonna Maria’s in Lecce. Oh, yes, and a conversation with Apocalypse Now filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, too. Coppola’s family is from the area. Pass the fine wine.

It’s hard to single out a more divisive episode of Tony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown than Southern Italy: The Heel of the Boot — just check out those comments on Reddit — which closed the series’ landmark 10th season on 26 Nov 2017. It was Parts Unknown’s ’s 80th episode overall. Only two seasons would remain, and as we all know now, one of those seasons was interrupted after barely getting started. Other divisive episodes include Rome and, in Parts Unknown’s 11th season, Hong Kong, and they all had one thing in common.

Today, when looking back over Bourdain’s considerable body of work in Parts Unknown and No Reservations, it’s probably best to focus on the episodes themselves — the locales, the food, the cinematography (cameraman Zach Zamboni, the visual stylist behind so many of Parts Unknown finest outings, and prominently so on Heel of the Boot), the background music (Mike Ruffino, again), and the things Bourdain said — his observations, witticisms, deeply held beliefs, and his philosophical ruminations on a society’s place in time and history, from the local lore to its trial and tribulations, and, most importantly, hopes and dreams for a better future.

It’s best to leave other distractions — and in Rome, Heel of the Boot, and Hong Kong, there is one very big distraction — to the viewer’s gut feeling and personal opinion. Nobody really knows what happened in  the end, or why, and gossip is easy enough to find — in “tell-all” tabloid TV shows, allegedly “all-encompassing” documentary films with Bugs Bunny-like titles, and bad books penned by freelance writers  looking to turn a quick buck on sudden scandal — that it makes more sense to focus on the shows themselves.

So.

Heel of the Boot opens with Bourdain sitting down to some fine wine and a large, sumptuous meal with the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. The conversation is lively — how could it not be — and the auteur behind The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, One from the Heart and other generational films has a lot to say about life, philosophy, and Southern Italy, everything from the unique light — that special shade of blue one finds in southern Italy by the sea, like nowhere else — and the people who more or less live away from the harsh glare of conspicuous consumerism and the rat race of northern cities Italian cities like Milano, Roma, Torino, Firenze, “far from the madding crowd,” as the 18th-century poet Thomas Hardy put it.

Coppola has not missed too many meals since his Godfather days — clearly — but that’s perfectly apt for an artist who has gone all in on locally sourcing his own food and pursuing the family business in winemaking, both in Italy and in California’s Napa Valley. (The Coppola family brand of wine is rightly renowned, and possibly tariff-free, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re imbibing on; these days, who the hell knows what is going on with these tariffs, especially where food and wine are concerned. Today it’s one thing, tomorrow morning it could be something completely different.

Coppola is larger than life, and the creative artist behind The Godfather trilogy of films is in fine fettle when looking back on Shakespearean-level family chronicles: Italian Alzheimer’s, he says, is where you forget everything but the grudge. Bourdain laughs; he hasn’t heard that one before, and he finds it genuinely funny. It’s good to see him looking so relaxed and at ease, but that’s what good company and good food can do for one.

Coppola goes over old family history — “Someone got the sister pregnant and they killed him, and then they became [phonetic] briganti, and so they were one step ahead of the law … they settled down and became labourers in olive fields. “That’s really the origins of the Coppola family. … Because the south was so oppressed by the north, it stayed the same.

“They haven’t had a thousand years of cheap jip tourism. You come and you can walk out in the street and you’re in a real Italian town where (even though) the people don’t anything about you they’ll invite you to their house for dinner here quite innocently. How long that will last, I don’t know.”

This is how Bourdain found himself, he admitted in his Field Notes at the time, after a year of thinking of doing a show in Puglia and Basilicata, on the proverbial ‘heel of Italy’s boot,’ with Zamboni and his long-time producer-director colleague Tom Vitale. (Earlier, I made a snide reference to bad books looking to cash in on sudden scandal; Vitale’s 2022 book In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain is decidedly not that; it is quite simply, bar none, the finest book about Bourdain ever conceived — candid, well-written, all-encompassing, and honest to a fault.)

“Sometimes you don’t know what the show you are making is really about until it’s done,” Bourdain wrote at the time, “until all that raw footage has been whittled down in a dark room—shaped, pulled apart, reshaped. The writing, which I do during the editing process, steers, corrects, and reacts to every cut. What we might have intended when we set out with our cameras, heads filled with possible themes and the best intentions, recedes as other forces, new realities, reveal themselves. What lies beneath bubbles to the surface.”

Which — neither here nor there, I suppose — is exactly how Terrence Malick, one of my favourite filmmakers, makes his films.

Bourdain again: “[This] is how I found myself a year later—with our biggest crew, the heaviest, most expensive camera equipment we’d ever used, and an inflated ambition to make one of the most beautiful shows we’d ever done—in a quiet garden in the hilltop town of Bernalda, talking to one of the greatest filmmakers in history.

“He treated me to (this) spectacular lunch at the home he’d converted into a boutique hotel, and we talked at first about the region and his family’s history there. I had long ago been told that Francis didn’t like talking about The Godfather, his biggest success and a film with which he will always be associated. So I didn’t. But at one point, as you’ll see, I talked to him about the fact that the big manor house he’d bought and turned into a hotel had once belonged to the heads of the local fascist party—the onetime oppressors and overlords of his people—back when his ancestors still toiled in the fields. Did he feel, I asked, any satisfaction, any sense of vengeance or historical correction in coming back and buying this property?”

Spoiler warning: I was half expecting a car bomb to go off in the background at this point. Doesn’t happen.

Now you know.

The lampascioni and braciole di cotenna don’t look too bad, either.

Supplementary reading:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/1dxazta/bourdain_and_francis_ford_coppola/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/ib22sj/unpopular_opinion_southern_italy_is_one_of_the/

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

https://explorepartsunknown.com/southern-italy/where-to-eat-and-drink-in-puglia/

Supplementary viewing:

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

CNN

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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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