Bourdain in Senegal

“A rebuke to those who’d paint a whole continent as a monolith of despair, or Islam as something to be feared.” This was Tony Bourdain in Senegal, in the fall of 2015.o be feared.” This was Tony Bourdain in Senegal, in the fall of 2015.

Senegal.

In Tony Bourdain’s words, “A rebuke to those who’d paint a whole continent as a monolith of despair, or Islam as something to be feared, Senegal turns simple-minded assumptions and prejudice on their heads at every turn.”

More than a few people who followed Bourdain on his travels over the years — including some of those in this group, quite possibly — may have been surprised by how taken Bourdain was with the West African country of Senegal, which he visited just once in his many years on the road, in the fall of 2015.

The essay he penned for the social media platform Medium, the day before Senegal premiered on CNN’s Parts Unknown in May 2016, left little doubt, however.

Bourdain had set foot in Africa before, a vast continent with more than 50 countries, in Congo for Parts Unknown’s debut season, followed in short order by Morocco, South Africa, and Tanzania in 2014, Madagascar in 2015, and Ethiopia a year later.

He would go on to visit Nigeria and—famously, in his final season of Parts Unknown, which aired posthumously in 2018—Kenya with Kamau Bell.

Years earlier, for Travel Channel’s No Reservations, Bourdain wound his way through Ghana, Namibia, and Liberia, ending with Mozambique in No Reservations’ last season, titled — somewhat portentously — The Final Tour.

Senegal, though, was different, as he made clear in his essay for Medium.

“So let this episode in Senegal, an African nation which is over 90% Muslim, serve as both rebuke and example. It is a country that proudly elected as their first president after independence a Christian — because they felt, in their best judgment, that regardless of his faith, he was the best person for the job.

“It is a country that defies stereotypes and expectations at every turn. Emerging from French colonial times as a functioning multi-cultural, multi-lingual, extraordinarily tolerant society, it has managed to avoid coups, tribal wars, dictatorships and most of the ills that afflicted so many of its neighbours. It remains an absolutely enchanting place to visit, with delicious food, absolutely extraordinarily beautiful music, and a relatively free and easy attitude towards intermarriage, mixed race, intertribal relationships and foreign visitors. It has a powerful and proud tradition of hospitality that endures to this day.”

This was in 2015.

Remarkably, the same is still true today, nearly 10 years later, despite everything that’s happened in the outside world in the years since.

And is still happening, as Bourdain himself would have been quick to point out.

The fascinating thing to me, as a frequent visitor of that vast continent, is that all 54 countries are different. That may seem like a trite thing to say, condescending even, but then you must understand that most — virtually all — Africans see themselves that way, as the residents and citizens of strikingly different countries, with separate cultures and separate languages. I have heard it said that while South Africa — possibly the most westernized of African countries, certainly in the big cities of Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, has 11 official languages, in fact, the country of 64 million people is thought by some to be home to 86 different native languages. To homogenize the entire continent in a single word — Africa — is the height of condescension, but that’s what colonial thinking does to one.

Tony Bourdain got that.

That’s why he was openly welcomed wherever he went on the continent — that, and his love for good music in all its forms. And African cultures have indelibly close ties to music in all its forms. The Sahara Desert and the Sahel hinterlands — possibly a vast, seemingly empty wasteland to you and me — are home to some of the most respected, well-attended music festivals on the planet. And here’s the fun part. Those music festivals are about 95% local and only 5%, if that, touristy.

Bourdain got that, too.

And so, in Senegal, he sits down and breaks bread with Senegal’s native-born Youssou N’Dour, not just sharing quality time with N’Dour but thanks to CNN’s Parts Unknown and Zero Point Zero Production’s cameras allowing us, the viewers, to share quality time not just with a remarkable singer and musician but a poet-philosopher, a political activist, an active humanist, who is Christian, secular and Muslim all rolled into one.

A truly remarkable person. Peter Gabriel is a frequent musical collaborator of N’Dour’s, and he’s not alone among Western musicians of note. Gabriel will tell you he’s the pupil and N’Dour the mentor, not the other way around.

It’s worth noting, too, that N’Dour performed his anthemic 7 Seconds, featured in all its gorgeous fullness in the Senegal episode, in 2005’s Live 8 concert in an extended duet with Dido, who was born in Kensington, London and hails from a background as different from N’Dour’s as is humanly possible.

Think on this: Live 8 — sobering and deeply moving to look back at today, given the fractious state of world affairs today— was performed live, and I’m not making this up, from London, Paris, Rome, Philadelphia, Barrie (Ontario, Canada, my home country), Chiba (Japan), Johannesburg, Moscow, Cornwall and Edinburgh. Think about that: good music brings the world together for a common cause.

Tony Bourdain got that, too.

“So what’s the future?” he asks N’Dour, about midway through what, with the benefit of 10 years’ hindsight, is one of my favourite Bourdain sets.

The two met in Dakar’s Bazoof restaurant over plates of mafe, a Senegalese stew of beef thickened with ground peanuts. To hear Bourdain tell it, “There are similar preparations throughout West Africa, but the Senegalese version is particularly great. Sear the beef; cook the onion, garlic, peppers, and carrots; deglaze with ground peanuts and broth, bringing up all that good stuff from the pan; then simmer until tender and awesome. Serve hot over rice.”

“The future?” N’Dour replies, perhaps surprised by the question.

Bourdain: “Yes, the future. Twenty years from now, where will Senegal be?”

N’Dour: “What I hope is, in 20 years, Senegal is going to be the place for great and big contributions of what we call Islam.”

Bourdain: “Do you think there's any danger of the kind of radical Islam that we see taking hold in many places in Africa?”

N’Dour: “All these people who are using the religion, the Muslim religion, to do bad things — I think Senegal sets (a good) example. This country I love, my country has many different models of the religion. This country, you know — you are here. I'm doing my local bissap “ — a drink made from a hibiscus flower known as the Roselle; the sepals of the hibiscus, when infused in hot water, leave a pink, red, magenta or dark shade of water — “and you are here, with your beer, in a country that is 95 percent Muslim.”

Bourdain: “Right.”

N’Dour: “And I think this example can help all the world.”

Bourdain: “I hope so. Inshallah.”

By the end, Bourdain is profoundly moved by this country of 18 million. Shaken to his core. What better way to close this, then, than with his own words,.

“Senegal is one of the best arguments for travel I can think of. Because the more we see of the world, actually meet who we are talking about — or think we are talking about — the more we take a walk, however briefly, in other people’s shoes, see how other people live, people who are supposedly so different than us, and find ourselves — as so often and so inevitably happens — recipients of random acts of hospitality and kindness from total strangers, then the better we shall be.

“And the happier. Knowledge — exposure — to ‘the other’ is not a contaminant.

“It enriches us. It makes — or should make us — more humble.

“Senegal. It’s someplace that everyone, given the chance, should go.”

Inshallah.

Supplementary reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/senegal/senegal-women-equality/

https://explorepartsunknown.com/senegal/senegal-episode-facts/

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

CNN

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Bourdain in Madagascar

“He was a poet of life.” Filmmaker Dareen Aronofsky on Anthony Bourdain, after the two visited Madagascar and then Bhutan for CNN’s Parts Unknown.

Over the years, Anthony Bourdain allowed a great many extraordinary landscapes — his words — only to have them fade into a blur outside his windows. “I’ve looked, maybe seen, maybe noticed, then gone,” he intones in his opening voiceover for Madagascar, the fifth-season episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown that first aired in May 2015.

“We all carry different experiences inside us. We see things differently, don’t we?”

Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island by area, left an indelible impression on Bourdain’s psyche, and the result is plain to see in Parts Unknown. The journey which Bourdain undertook with avant-garde filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and others) caught him in an unusually pensive, reflective mood, even by his standards. The break-up of his first marriage affected him deeply, and Madagascar, an island of almost unparalleled beauty — and scene of almost apocalyptic environmental ruin — will remind long-time Bourdain followers of his 2011 visit to Haiti for No Reservations, which he undertook during a cholera outbreak shortly after an earthquake killed 3,000 people in a single day, and with a hurricane looming on the horizon. A moment toward the end of Madagascar, in which Bourdain and Aronofsky are surrounded by hungry children while sampling a smorgasbord of local food delicacies, has uncomfortable parallels with a similar moment in that No Reservations episode in Haiti, where Bourdain broke bread and talked social injustice with Sean Penn, who was running a local aid project at the time.

“Madagascar,” Bourdain continues in his opening monologue, “exotic, unspoiled paradise, or microcosm for the end of times?”

Real life is no Disney cartoon. This much we knew, of course, but this Madagascar really breaks it down.

Over the years, there have been any number of reasons to watch Parts Unknown, even a decade after its making, but Madagascar is unique in that it provides viewers a glimpse into the process of making one of these episodes — a look, if you will, of how the sausage is made.

That’s in no small part because Bourdain wanted the episode to reflect Aronofsky’s signature style of filmmaking — surrealism, rooted in social consciousness. Visually striking but also emotionally involving. Entertaining and reflective by turns.

In an essay Bourdain penned for CNN’s Field Notes at the time, he shared some of the deepest thoughts of his entire 12-season odyssey with Parts Unknown.

“Travel is not always comfortable,” he wrote, “even when the scenery is at its most beautiful. Look out the window, get too close, and the reality of the situation — the world you will soon be leaving behind — intrudes.

“On Parts Unknown … we make choices all of the time. Choices about what I will show you of what I saw and experienced during my limited time in a destination, and choices about what I won’t. It’s my show. I decide where we go. I decide what we do when we get there. And I decide what we show you when we edit down 60 to 80 hours of footage to 42 minutes.

“That is a manipulative process. And not, inherently anyway, a bad one. I want you, the viewer, to feel the way about a place the way I want you to feel. I want you to look at it and see it from my point of view, if at all possible. Or at least consider other points of view.

“But it is, almost always, one point of view—or one lens through which you see: mine.”

At the time time, people often asked Bourdain what it would be like to accompany him on a film shoot.

“Now you will see. We look at Madagascar, in many ways, through Darren’s fresh set of eyes. It’s a useful reminder, worth having, that what you see on the show is not the only angle. That we are looking at the world out my window, but that there are other windows — that maybe I’ve omitted or shaded something, if only to present myself in a more flattering light.”

Aronofsky approached Bourdain interestingly, not the other way around.

Bourdain was “thrilled, honoured and delighted” — again, his words — to draw the attention of an acclaimed filmmaker whose work he admired, but he had one proviso.

“My only request was that he shoot some footage—with whatever device he wanted to use. And that, at some point, he give us his version of at least a portion of the show for which we have already seen my version.

“So, in Act 6, you will get an example of what may or may not be missing from the shows we make. An ugly, uncomfortable reminder that it’s not just pretty pictures and neat, hopeful sum-ups. It does not, I’m pretty sure, portray me in the best light. Or any of us, for that matter. But there it is. I thought it was important.”

When Bourdain passed on 8 June 2018 — years ago now, though it still feels like yesterday — Aronofsky was among those CNN approached to pen a eulogy of sorts. The two would later travel together to the mountain kingdom of Bhutan for a Parts Unknown episode.

Aronofsky’s words, written just four days after Bourdain’s passing, resonate to this day.

“I was asked to share some thoughts on my time with Tony in Madagascar and Bhutan,” he began. “I’ve been staring at a blank page for days. His death is incomprehensible. I don’t know how to process him being gone.

“I do remember how easily words flowed from him. He made it seem so effortless. He was a poet of life. So I’ll let that inspire whatever flows now.”

And, at the end:

“You turned a light on what it means to be a human right now, right here on planet Earth.

“Thank you for letting me tag along and witness a master storyteller shape the unexpected into the relatable and unforgettable.

“I will never forget how passionate you were about life and this world. You loved love, cinema, food, artists, people, idiosyncrasies, pain, relief, martial arts, chefs, music, the Lower East Side. You loved the whole damn world (even the parts you despised). And the whole world loved you.”

Bourdain was seemingly incapable of producing an underwhelming hour of television, even with the passing of time, but Madagascar, for me, is on a whole other level. Now seems as good a time as any to revisit it.

Supplementary reading:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/bhutan/anthony-bourdain-darren-aronofsky/

    https://www.foodrepublic.com/2015/05/18/what-its-like-to-film-anthony-bourdains-parts-unknown-in-madagascar/

CNN

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Bourdain in Scotland

“They say Glaswegians have more fun at a funeral than people in Edinburgh have at a wedding.” Awe’ n bile yer heid. This was Anthony Bourdain on a bonnie day in Scotland, in May 2015.

A vegetarian boarding school?

“That’s unthinkable to me,” Anthony Bourdain says, barely able to conceal his shock, just past the halfway mark of the 5th-season Parts Unknown episode Scotland.

Americans abroad. Scots have suffered their share of American incursions, from a characteristically gauche Trump golf course and country club on environmentally sensitive land, a development project that naturally raised the ire of many of the local clans — still does — to the steady parade of American visitors with surnames like McDonald, MacDonald and Macdonald eager to get to the bottom of their ancestral roots.

There’s no such danger there with Bourdain — his surname bears more of a French feel, you know, the other, l’autre, one of them, and the funny thing about the French is that, traditionally and historically, they found more succour in Scotland than in hostile England, from France’s Catholic connections to France’s support of the ill-fated Mary Stuart, aka Mary, Queen of Scots — eventually done in, wouldn’t you know, by the English Queen Elizabeth I, beheaded in fact, an act so egregious it provoked a long line of noisy protest films from Mel Gibson (Braveheart!), Sean Connery, and others.

And therein lies a tale that continues to this day — a Scottish yearning, in some quarters anyway, for independence from Westminster and an embrace of Scottish cuisine over the English kind, all for one and one for all, once and for all, and all that

Bourdain samples the brew at a Glasgow pub (EST 1510) before heading to a country estate in the Scottish Highlands to shoot a stag and experience first-hand where venison comes from, all the while ruminating about an independence vote that was turned down by 55% of Scottish voters. At the time.

Now, after decades of misrule from a Tory government in London — think Republicans, but better spoken and with a keener grasp of the English language, not to mention better manners — there’s talk of another vote, and this time it isn’t just the 16-year-olds who’ll bite (yes, the age of eligibility to vote was dropped in Scotland, in part to encourage more young people to be involved in politics, and in part because if you ask virtually any 16-year-old on the planet, ‘Do you want more freedom,’ you don’t need a poll by Angus Reid to tell you the result.

What has all this got to do with food, you might ask, and the answer is that this is CNN, the self-styled “most trusted name in news,” and not the Food Network, a difference that Bourdain embraced when he originally signed on to do a show that allowed him to trek across the globe on somebody else’s dime.

And while Scotland won't top too many foodies’ lists of their favourite Parts Unknown episodes, good eating is never too far away from Bourdain’s mind.

"Last night, in Glasgow, I had enough with the deeper issues," Bourdain says at the 19-minute mark.

“Now, I want to go no deeper than the bottom of a bubbling cauldron of hot grease. It's out there. It's calling to me. I want it now. A happy place from my past where once I frolicked young and carefree in the field of related arts. The University Cafe, where I learned at the foot of the masters the Tao of hot fat and crispy batter.

“Yes, they do a deep-fried Mars bar here and deep-fried pizza. Been there, done that. But Carlo here and his twin brother have been keeping the Verragio family tradition alive since 1918, and it ain't about no Mars bar.

"I order the fish and chips and some haggis. Haddock battered and floating, a drift in a sea of mysterious life-giving oil. The accumulated flavours of many magical things as it bobs like Noah's Ark, bringing life in all its infinite variety. Deep-fried haggis, my personal favourite. Sinister sheep parts in tube form, in this case. And if you don't like chopped-up liver and lungs and all that good stuff, believe me, the curry sauce sets you right. The combination of French fries, or “chips” in the local dialect, with curry sauce and cheese is perhaps a bro too far, Guy Fieri in a kilt, but, what the hey.

“I'm pretty sure God is against this.”

But back to the vegetarian boarding school.

“Heading north out of Glasgow, Scotland quickly becomes something else. A savagely beautiful, harsh, but absolutely mesmerizing landscape that seems to have changed not at all for thousands, even millions of years. And across Loch Maree, and only accessible by boat, one of the great isolated estates: Letterewe. It's the favourite retreat of my friend, Adrian Gill, more widely known as A.A. Gill. He's the much feared and widely followed restaurant critic for the London Sunday Times, a regular columnist for a spectrum of magazines, author, traveller, and one of the finest essayists of our time.”

Gill, it turns out, went to said boarding school, despite now living within a stone’s throw of a country estate where venison rules the roost.

“My parents sent me to a vegetarian boarding school, and for nine years, the year after I left, I was a vegetarian,” he tells Bourdain.

“Nine years,” Bourdain says ruefully. “That's unthinkable to me.”

“Then I decided not to be,” Gill responds. “I made the decision that if I was going to eat meat again. Then I had to be prepared to do the whole business.”

Bourdain: “Right. You’ve got to be accountable.”

Accountability. That was Bourdain’s stock-in-trade.

The last word, as seems only fitting, hails from the visiting American with the French name.

“I came to Scotland this time to shoot an animal in the heart, to take part, to be fully culpable in a practice nearly as old as these hills. You walk this country stalking an animal across the rocks and wet heather. You feel little has changed from how your distant ancestors must have searched for their food, with a rifle, with a spear, with a club. I drag my knuckles up a hill and, like my ape-like predecessors, return tired, happy, and covered in blood.

“Everything changes. Nothing changes at all.”

Strange as it seems, it makes perfect sense.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/writerontherun/retracing-anthony-bourdain-in-scotland-3b9031c978f0

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

CNN

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Bourdain in Shanghai

“What are our expectations? Which of the things we desire are within reach? If not now, when? And will there be some left for me?” Ten years ago, Anthony Bourdain asked existential questions of the rising economic power that is Shanghai in Parts Unknown’s 4th season opener.

When Anthony Bourdain raised the curtain on Parts Unknown’s fourth season of culinary globetrotting by holding his life’s lens to Shanghai, financial capital of China’s merging of the Old World and New in September 2014, 10 years ago, give or take, the die was cast. Regular CNN News viewers and Bourdain acolytes alike knew what to expect — or at least thought they did.

Hardly anyone would have expected that the season opener’s look at modern China would open, not with Bourdain’s by-now familiar voiceover, acerbic and laden with a sharp, cutting wit, but with a single, spoken musical note, a mezzo-soprano — nǚ gāoyīn — rising into an almost ethereal realm while Bourdain, wearing a coloured pocket square or foulard, made his way through the densely packed nighttime streets of what is now arguably the 21st century’s seat of economic power. Not New York, Bourdain’s hometown. Or London. Or Hong Kong. Shanghai. “This is not, you might have noticed, normal for me,” Bourdain would later admit in his field notes — not in the program itself — for CNN.

Right from the beginning, viewers would have noticed the change. This was going to be a different Bourdain. More reflective. Confident but gracious.
“What are our expectations? Which of the things we desire are within reach? If not now, when? And will there be some left for me?”

Comfortable in the company of outrageous wealth — everyone appreciates a dinner companion who can hold a conversation with style and wit, even those with enough money that they don’t have to care what anyone else thinks — and yet still close to his working-class roots. Here, today, more than five years after his sudden passing, newcomers to the Tao of Bourdain, of which I’m one, are singing his praises on Reddit, Instagram and the other present-day town halls of social media.

“There is a method to my madness,” Bourdain wrote — words that would not make it into the actual show. “These tiny notes of colour are our first venture into actual production design — a calculated effort to give the episode a specific look.”

Shanghai would not be TV. It was cinema. One can only imagine what the business suits inside CNN’s executive offices thought when they first saw Shanghai in its final cut. One doesn’t have to imagine what people in Shanghai, or what the increasingly inscrutable government seat in power in China thought, yesterday or today. By this time, everyone, anyone with a working TV and access to the Internet — which includes virtually all 26.32 million people (2019) of China’s most wired, most socially, economically and politically influential city — knew who Bourdain was.

Back to the episode itself.

Bourdain was a rock star by this point, but he understood, as well as anyone did or could have, that it is about the band, not the frontman.

“I have long been besotted with the works of Chinese director Wong Kar-wai and his frequent cinematographer Christopher Doyle,” Bourdain continued in his Field Notes. “Their films In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express are gorgeous meditations on longing and desire and missed connections. They are spectacularly shot — and a while back I noticed how tiny elements of colour in the foreground of the frames are often connected to similar colours in the background, giving scenes a lush, unified atmosphere that feels natural and undesigned.

“So we tried — as best and as cheaply as possible — to do that. You will notice scenes tied together by colours.

“Cameraman Mo Fallon and cameraman/editor Nick Bridgen did, I think, truly epic work on this one.”

The familiar Parts Unknown signatures are there. The food, for one. Starting with FuChun XiaoLong, where, joined by Professor Zhou Lin, dean of Shanghai Jiao Tong University at the time, Bourdain talked about Chinese economic growth and global geopolitics over steamed soup dumplings and fried pork chops with brown sauce.

Bourdain’s odyssey continued from there to Chun Restaurant, a restaurant with “no menu and no waiting list,” as he described it, “and you only get served if the chef and proprietor knows and/or likes the look of you.”

As the website Eat Like Bourdain posted this past January, the food was served hot and ready: you bao xia (wok-fried whole shrimp with ginger, garlic, salt, and soy), hong shao rou (braised pork belly with cinnamon, sugar, and anise), yan du xian (clay pot soup with bean curd stock, pork belly, tofu, and bamboo), and snail, duck, and fish dishes with rich sweet and soy sauces.

The coup de grace: French oysters in champagne at Shanghai’s Roosevelt Sky Bar as the special guest of Roosevelt China Investments president and CEO Tim Tse, followed by an elegant sitdown meal at Bund 27 and House of Roosevelt with a gathering of some of Shanghai’s more successful and politically connected citizens, among them architect and designer Zeva Wang and real estate developer Daniel Yung.

Crossing over to the other side of the street — literally, as well as figuratively — Bourdain shared a dish of ziran paigu (cumin-rubbed ribs) with hacker-turned-entrepreneur Thomas Yao at Di Shui Dong restaurant. The two talked about freedom on the Internet and the future of technology, dangerous topics to discuss in public, then as now.

Bourdain again:

“I mentioned longing and desire. And in many ways, that’s what this episode is about. China is experiencing an explosive period of change and growth as millions of people are joining the middle class. Millions and millions of people who want and will soon demand the cars, TV screens, apartments, gasoline, access to information, and mobility most of us take for granted.

“China — Shanghai in particular — is a very different-looking place every time I go. And I believe that the world as a whole, largely because of what’s happening in China, will be a very different-looking place. If you live in New York, as I do, and think you live in the most modern, sophisticated city in the world — or even at its centre — Shanghai can come as a rude surprise. In spite of its nominally communist system, it is the most go-go, unfettered, money- and status-mad, materialistic place on Earth. Its skyline alone is confirmation that money talks loudest. In no other city could you build the world’s largest, tallest ominously curved phallus —stick it right up into the clouds like a giant F**K YOU! to the world — and not have trouble with the NIMBYs.”

Oh dear. No one wants trouble with the NIMBYs. Except, of course, when they do.

The thing about Shanghai is, they no longer care. They don’t have to.

Bourdain ended Shanghai as he began it:

“What are our expectations? Which of the things we desire are within reach? If not now, when? And will there be some left for me?”

Nǐhǎo.

CNN

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Bourdain in Russia

“With the [sic] possible Russian invasion of Ukraine all over the news,” locations photographer David Scott Holloway posted on Reddit two years ago, “I’ve found myself thinking a lot about when we travelled there for Parts Unknown.” Today, ten years after that episode first aired, Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Russia’ is as trenchant — and poignant — as if it had aired yesterday.

Where to begin?

As with so many things to do with Anthony Bourdain’s restless, eyes-open wanderings and soulful ruminations in his Parts Unknown verite docuseries for CNN, you can’t go too far wrong by beginning with Bourdain himself. In truth, Bourdain sowed the creative, philosophical and geographical ground for Russia years earlier, in 2002, during his nascent A Cook’s Tour program for the Food Network. That is when Bourdain first broke bread — or rather downed a vodka or two (or three or four) — with his soon-to-be friend, sidekick and semi-frequent travel companion Iazamir “Zamir” Gotta.

As an older, more self-reflective Bill and Ted of the travel-TV set, Bourdain and the Moscow-born Gotta, just a year apart in age at the time (Bourdain was born in 1956, Zamir in 1957), were philosophical peas in a pod, so to speak. Where Bourdain was caustic and observant and not a little cynical — ideal attributes for a life as a chef in a restaurant kitchen — Gotta was, and remains, somewhat of an innocent abroad, cheerful, ebullient and soulful by turns.

It was their shared sense of humour, one acerbic and always looking to burst the proverbial balloon with a sharp, well-timed verbal barb and the other making it up as he goes, zany and full of life, coupled with their shared humanity and deep-rooted respect for the hopes and dreams of decent, ordinary, everyday working people — that made Bourdain and Gotta such an agreeable pair in Parts Unknown.

Zamir first appeared in a pair of A Cook’s Tour episodes, aptly titled The Cook Who Came in from the Cold and So Much Vodka, So Little Time, but it was in No Reservations, years later on Travel Channel, that they truly made their mark with the TV-viewing audience, with seven episodes over an eight-year period, in visits to Uzbekistan, Russia (specifically, St. Petersburg, aka Petrograd, or to Soviet enthusiasts, Leningrad), Romania — arguably one of the zaniest, most outrageous hours of TV that Bourdain and his long-suffering cameraman/producer/director Tom Vitale ever made together — Ukraine (yes, that Ukraine) and, interestingly, the U.S. heartland: the Rust Belt, Kansas City and Brooklyn, NY, unofficially the heart of Bourdain’s native NYC.

Russia, for Parts Unknown, would prove to be fortuitously timed, happening as it did just weeks before the Sochi Olympics and not long before Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Vladimir Putin’s bid to rewrite the history of the Crimean War — 1853-1856, updated for the 21st century.

Russia opens in a field of snow amid a stand of birch trees — “Beautiful, right?” Zamir says off-camera, “We can already indulge ourselves into something special. Such a beautiful day! … Ah, what a place.”

He’s being both literal and ironic, of course, irony being one of the hallmarks of Russian literature — and as a writer myself, I can honestly say that Russian literature is just about at the very top of the field, up there with Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare.

Bourdain famously hated the cold, and the making of Russia coincided with one of the most bitter winters in Russian memory at the time. Bourdain famously said that an ill-advised shoot in Lapland in mid-winter just about killed him; it’s not hard to imagine that, years later, sunning himself in Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s retreat in Jamaica, Bourdain took one long look at the beach and thought to himself, I could get used to this.

It isn’t long before Bourdain tells viewers what he really thinks of Russia’s fearless leader — still is today, ten years later — “All hail the Maximum Leader. Now, let’s dance!” — but it doesn’t bear repeating here. Bourdain had an inimitable way of describing his irritation at certain people in the public eye, and he is unsparing in his assessment of Maximum Leader. It’s the kind of descriptive way with words that made Bourdain famous, and really should be seen for oneself (Parts Unknown episodes are available for streaming on the (HBO) MAX streaming site, co-owned by CNN owners Warner Bros. Discovery, and are available for purchase on Apple’s Apple TV (formerly iTunes) site).

“It's February 2014, and the Sochi Olympics are just coming up when I arrive in Moscow,” Bourdain says in the opening. “It's a different Moscow every time I come here. The '80s style, go-go capitalist conspicuous consumption see-who-can-spend-the-most-money disco-techno thing that I encountered when I first came here back in 2001 — it's still going strong.

“In fact, these days, Moscow has one of the highest concentrations of billionaires in the world. But as never before, it's imperial Russia now, a one-man rule.

All power emanates, every decision must consider, this guy.”

Russia is full of characters with murky pasts and shadowy connections, Bourdain continues. “But one of them I've called a friend for more than a decade.”

“Tony, wow,” Gotta replies, humbled and awed. And genuine.

And that’s what really works throughout Parts Unknown, not just in Russia but in all the episodes. This is genuine.

“I guess I’m switching to vodka, Zamir.” Bourdain tells him. Switching? When travelling in Russia in the dead of winter, when was he ever off vodka?

“Listen, as a born Muscovite, I'm trying to be a good patron,” Gotta tells him. “So I really want you to tell me, frankly, a week from now, ‘Zamir, now I understand why stereotypes sometimes send a bad message about Russia.’

Bourdain: “I have an open mind. Everything's great. Russians have everything they want.”

Zamir: “Listen, why don't we just taste the vodka.”

Discussions of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Viktor Yushchenko and a sit-down dinner over pelmeni,   a modern riff on borscht, at Moscow’s Yornik restaurant (now closed), with former deputy prime minister (under Boris Yeltsin) Boris Nemstov, a prominent dissident and vocal critic of the Maximum Leader, who would not be long of this world after that dinner with Bourdain. A coincidence? Probably just that — Maximum Leader’s issues with Nemstov ran much deeper than one chance meeting for the TV cameras for US TV. CNN is not a thing in Russia, after all — there, it’s all about Rossiya 1, Channel One, NTV and Russia Today.

A quick scan of Reddit shows that Russia remains one of the five favourite programs for many of Bourdain’s followers

One of the more remarkable things about Bourdain’s body of work in Parts Unknown is just how many episodes count as “five favourite episodes” for someone. There truly was something special in every hour Bourdain, Vitale and Zero Point Zero Production made for CNN, something to appeal to at someone somewhere on a deep, fundamental level. And not just in the US, either. Parts Unknown’s appeal was worldwide.

How to end?

Not with Bourdain this time, though Bourdain does end Russia on a particularly powerful and trenchant note — how could he not?

On the Parts Unknown companion website ExplorePartsUnknown.com, taken offline for several weeks until just the past few days, possibly because it was hacked — that’s what the AI-generated browser blockers said at the time, anyway — there’s a telling, warm reminiscence of behind-the-scenes filming with Russian photographer and film-maker Darya Tarasova. (Also worth a look is the work of veteran set- and locations photographer David Scott Holloway, who has shared links to his Bourdain work, some featured here, on Reddit, and through his website at https://davidscottholloway.com).

The Q&A, conducted and written by Nathan Thornburgh (https://explorepartsunknown.com/russia/behind-the-camera-darya-tarasova/), sheds light on some charming moments that explain, as well as anything in the actual episode, Bourdain's unique relationship with Zamir.

“There was a funny moment in Moscow,” Tarasova recalled. “Tony and Zamir had a kind of skiing competition, because we were filming the episode ahead of the Olympic Games in Sochi. They decided to have fun with the Olympic theme. Anthony was wearing a big jacket that had ‘USA’ on it, and Zamir had his own jacket that said ‘Russia.’ So we had Russia versus the USA. Zamir kept shouting, ‘I will break you!’ He was there to win.

“Zamir knows how to ski, but he wasn’t very proficient when he was trying to go down this hill. And Tony wasn’t in great shape either, but he won the race.

“Zamir just fell down in the middle of the hill and then rolled to Tony’s feet.”

Then there’s the moment with the 122-mm D-30 Howitzer cannon, fired to commemorate the occasion of the October 1917 revolution that ushered in decades of rule — or misrule, depending on your point of view — of Soviet Communism.

Bourdain is invited to load a shell into the Howitzer, and — stand back, everybody… — Bang! It goes off.

Bourdain is happily handed the empty shell, all 21kg of it, once it’s ejected from the Howitzer.

“Enemy is destructed!” Zamir tells him. “Congratulations, you are the hero of Russia now.”

Bourdain: “Sweet.”

Zamir: “You can't take it on the plane, though. They won't understand.”

Bourdain: ”Not even carry on?”

CNN

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