“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:
