Bourdain in Singapore

“Jam-packed between the carefully feng shui’d architecture, skyscrapers, and office blocks, are rich, deep, very old, and deliciously funky remnants of the old world. Chinese, Indian, Malay. And a culture that still cherishes the joys of a simple, good thing.” — Tony Bourdain on Singapore, back in the day. Maybe, just maybe, Singapore has some lessons for us today.

“Spotless. Efficient. Safe. Protected. Controlled.” It’s hard — impossible, even — to revisit Tony Bourdain’s 10th season-opener of Parts Unknown, with its focus on the booming city-state of Singapore, and not be struck today — in April, 2025 — by the conversation that underpins the entire program: Namely, if you could give up privacy, personal freedoms and a free press for a system of government that promises peace, prosperity, good schools, decent housing for everyone, a booming economy, some of the most astounding architecture on the planet, a benevolent if authoritarian form of government, and good food, would you?

Bourdain’s answer in September 2017, when Singapore first aired on CNN, was a definitive no — “not for me.”

But.

In that ever curious, all encompassing way of his, his roving eye and his attention for social detail that marked his finest hours in TV program-making, Bourdain paints a compelling picture of a utopian city-state — “just 227 square miles, a little more than half the size of LA … run like a multinational company,” where street crime is unheard of, people seem happy — outwardly, anyway — and dissatisfaction is just a Rolling Stones song. Basically, Singapore works, both in theory and in practice. “Disneyland with the death penalty,” Bourdain quips at one point, and in that inscrutable way of his, it’s hard to tell if he’s joking or reciting a simple statement of fact.

In his Field Notes for CNN at the time, Bourdain reminded us that Singapore is a remarkable city for food, food so varied and sumptuous — “delicious,” he says in the program, more than once — that it kept him coming back, time and time again.

On her Eat Like Bourdain website, food writer Valerie Stimac Bailey lists no fewer than 32 “places where Tony ate,” culled from four separate visits over his 15 years of world wanderings, beginning with A Cook’s Tour in 2002 and culminating, for what would be his last time, with Parts Unknown in 2017.

Think about that. Thirty-two places, spread over 15 years, all different, all in one city — the debut episode of The Layover, the fourth-season opener of No Reservations, the episode that kicked off Parts Unknown’s 10th season, everything and everywhere from the Imperial Herbal Restaurant overlooking the Singapore River (fish soup in ginseng broth, braised codfish and fresh lily bulb topped with rice fermented in white wine sauce) to Guan Hoe Soon in the Victoria Food Court, one of the longest-standing restaurants in Singapore, where he discusses the meaning of things with chef Damian D’Silva over a plate of ikan asam nana, a Laotian dish of sour fish curry and pineapple.

Only in Singapore, Bourdain noted at the time, does one find the singular, exquisite mix of Chinese, Indian, and Malay dubbed ‘indigenous fusion’ by local chefs. thornyOver several meals in homes and at hawker stalls, the conversation turns to Singapore’s government; here residents seem to have traded civil liberties for a booming economy. At one point in the program, Bourdain pauses and asks a thorny question: “I mean, is free speech overrated?”

If you’re a recovering journalist, as I am, that’s the kind of question inclined to prompt an existential crisis. Free speech is one of the basic underpinnings of social democracy, dating back to Ancient Greece, and who knows how much longer before then? Early humankind didn’t emerge from the caves just because Moonwatcher had it going on and the other cave dwellers left it up to him to do all the talking, and make all the decisions. Whoever held the tiki around the fire was given permission to say whatever he or she wanted, and the others were inclined to listen. The following morning, a free press told everyone else what was said and decided in that get-together.

Singapore has its contradictions, which in Bourdain’s mind made it that much more fascinating. Enigmatic. Interesting.

Here he is, on those very contradictions:

“For a state in which an ounce of weed can put you in the jug for up to 10 years and the same weight of dope can mean death, where chewing gum is indeed illegal, a surprising number of vices are allowed here. Drinking age is 18. Prostitution is legal, with sex workers getting regular medical checkups. There are casinos and strip clubs. The government seems to understand that, along with a certain amount of repression, safety valves are required. Get drunk, get laid, and you are less likely to be difficult. Perhaps that’s the thinking. Or maybe it’s just business.”

Bourdain had no idea how prescient he was being when, in the summer of 2017, just six months after a new president swore the oath of office in on the Washington Mall in the US, he talked about the rise of populism throughout Western democracies, and how antithetical to Singapore’s ideal of globalism populism is. To wit:

• “To many, Singapore is the land of opportunity. People come here from all over the world to get a good job, to find a better life.”

• “Singapore has fully embraced globalization, and that’s proved, in their case, very rewarding.”

• “By some measures, Singapore is a welfare state, taking care of the less fortunate. But at its heart, it’s a cold-blooded meritocracy. You follow the rules—and there are many—work hard, and you’ll have a good life. That’s the message.”

• “Unlike most of the wealthy, developed world, there’s universal health care and little to no homelessness.”

• “By ensuring that its citizens are safe, housed, healthy, and for the most part economically successful, the Singaporean government has been effective at keeping the masses placated enough—willing to accept curbs on their freedoms and civil liberties.”

But don’t overlook the food. Never underestimate the importance of the food.

Bourdain: “It’s funny. I recognize every place here by the food.”

“I come here mostly to eat, because that’s what they do here. And they arguably do it better—with more diverse, affordable food options per square foot than just about anywhere on Earth.”

And much of that food is delicious, like the man said.

In the hands of episode producer-director Erik Osterholm, who worked on some of Parts Unknown’s most distinctive outings — Morocco, Congo, Bahia Brazil, Punjab India, Paraguay, Iran, Hawaii, New Mexico, Senegal, Antarctica; that’s quite the mix tape — Bourdain’s voice seeps into the subconscious and mind’s eye alike.

All Parts Unknown episodes have a distinctive voice and style — there’s not a single dud in the entire bunch — but Osterholm’s eye is particularly unique, it seems to me. His episodes are both gorgeous to look at and to listen to — man, that background music, when you think of the crap that passes for background music in most docuseries (hello, Netflix, that means you), the background music in so much of Parts Unknown is wow, just, wow — and you can’t help but come away from them thinking. That’s very unusual for TV these days, let alone a food and travel show.

One can never go far wrong, when talking about Parts Unknown, to end with Bourdain in his own words. Osterholm knew this. Tom Vitale knew this. And, lord knows, Bourdain knew it.

“One could be forgiven for thinking it’s a giant, ultramodern shopping mall. An interconnected, fully wired, air-conditioned nanny state. Where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. And those things are … kind of true, especially if you read the papers or the carefully monitored internet. You look around the litter-less streets, where everything seems to work just fine, and you think — or you could be forgiven for thinking — ‘Gee, maybe a one-party system is just what we need.’ You look at all the social problems and ethnic strife, street crime, drugs that Singapore has managed to avoid and you could think, ‘Is this the life we want?’ It ain’t my system, it’s not the world I want, but damn — it has its appeal.”

Cue the spring of 2025.

Supplementary reading:

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

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

https://www.jimhamill.com/anthony-bourdain-singapore.html

https://explorepartsunknown.com/singapore/recipe-pork-satay-with-pineapple-sauce/

Supplementary viewing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQB1S5sZQ0

CNN

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Bourdain in Porto

“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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzeo1BalAs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7EN2zL3vz0&t=426s

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Bourdain in Laos

Quiet, pensive, harrowing and eerily beautiful by turns, Anthony Bourdain’s May 2017 sojourn to Laos for CNN’s Parts Unknown was never going to roil the headlines the way his visits to neighbouring Vietnam did. And yet …

Quiet, pensive, harrowing and eerily beautiful by turns, Tony Bourdain’s May 2017 sojourn in Laos for CNN’s Parts Unknown was never going to roil the headlines the way his visits to neighbouring Vietnam did. And yet. There’s something undeniably haunting about this elegiac and strangely compelling tour of a forgotten “Long Ago” kingdom that, if the notes from history are to be believed, recorded more bombs dropped on it than the US dropped on occupied Europe and imperial Japan during the entirety of the Second World War.

And all this on a jungle nation with a population of barely 7 million people. It was all part of US President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s “Secret War” — an undeclared war at that — to disrupt Viet Cong supply lines to North Vietnamese regulars fighting in Vietnam’s south in the early 1970s.

The thing about these bombs, dropped from on high by wave after wave of B-52 bombers, is the tiny bomblets they scattered from the initial blockbuster explosions in countless directions, grenade-size bomblets — they look like baseballs! — scattered into jungle clearings and rice paddies, bomblets which remain to this day, all these years later.

At the time of Parts Unknown’s airing in 2017 these bomblets were still killing and maiming one person a day, many of them children playing in the fields with what looked to them like shiny round toys.

The episode opens and closes with long, quiet, shimmering dream sequences — no voiceover — as one might imagine a Buddhist music video to play out on the path to enlightenment.

Bourdain himself is not the caustic canard he usually is in these more politically driven episodes; instead Laos finds him in a reflective, soul-food mood. He does more listening than talking this time, and it’s clear from even a cursory glance that he’s deeply moved by what he sees.

Bourdain often talked about how Vietnam held a special place in his heart, dating back to A Cook’s Tour and No Reservations, and yet it’s neighbouring Laos, taking time to eat and drink with the Hmong people and listen to their story, that seems to have left the most indelible impression on him.

And others, evidently, judging from some of the viewer comments on Reddit.

“Yes!” one viewer posted. “Such a beautiful ending; possibly my favourite of his work.”

Burning candles, floating down a river… Lit lanterns, flying in the tropical night air. Peripheral quietness, sleepy rhythms and dreamlike transitions: this was Laos, as envisioned by Bourdain, director-producer Tom Vitale and cameramen Zach Zamboni and Todd Liebler.

“Laos appears, when looking at it from the seat of a motorbike, like an enchanted land,” Bourdain wrote in his CNN Field Notes at the time. “A heavily forested nation of mountains, karsts, and valleys that are often covered in mist in the early morning. The food is terrific; you see and taste ethnic Lao influences in parts of both neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand. The people are lovely.

“It is, however, a difficult place to get people to speak freely. … Most Americans aren’t aware of Laos — much less the secret war there — or the scale of the problems left behind. And this is sad and wrong.”

Food plays a role in the hour. How could it not? This is Anthony Bourdain, after all.

Bourdain is accompanied on part of his journey by Michelin-starred chef James Syhabout, founder of Oakland, Calif.’s Commis restaurant in Oakland, Calif, whose parents fled Laos for the US around the time Nixon and his cronies were insisting there was nothing untoward going on in the forgotten kingdom.   

Bourdain samples khao soI and khao piak sen, Lao noodle soup, wends his way through the imperial cuisine at the Ban Lao hotel, samples the alcohol on tap at Mekong Khem Kong restaurant, and indulges in his passion for street food with meat and fish skewers from open-air food stalls on the banks of the Mekong River.

A traditional Laotian table, according to Bourdain’s erstwhile guide Syhabout, revolves around a soup, a stew, sticky rice, a salad, and Beerlao, Lao beer, for the uninitiated. Comfort food, awk, is made from red curry paste (lemongrass, galangal or ginger, garlic cloves, Thai chillies, and shallots, sliced), a stew made from chicken, in small bites, hot peppers, green beans, shimeji and white mushrooms, kaffir lime leaves, chicken or vegetable stock, fish sauce, oyster sauce, and dill, chopped.

There’s only one real way to see Laos, Bourdain says, midway through the program.

“Motorbike: the only way to see this part of the world. The thick, unmoving air. The smell past rice paddies. Water buffalo. What feels like another century. Laos is the kind of place that can easily capture your heart and not let you go.”

It certainly caught his heart. And once caught, it didn’t let go.

Supplementary reading:

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

https://explorepartsunknown.com/laos/the-fight-to-demine-laos/

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Bourdain in Rome

Il Duce v. Il Douché. The year 2016 found Anthony Bourdain in Rome for CNN’s Parts Unknown, and as luck and misfortune would have it, 2016 would turn out to be an inauspicious year, both for Bourdain and for the world. Bourdain’s home country was about to elect a new leader. And history was about to repeat.

I watched the infamous Parts Unknown episode Rome for the first time just a couple of nights ago. I was dreading it. I had put it off for, well, ever since I first immersed myself in the Tao of Bourdain, many years ago now, during a long-haul overnight flight down the length of Africa from northern Europe, looking for something on my iPad to watch. I had recorded an episode of Parts Unknown at random, having known Bourdain by name and reputation only. I had done some work with CNN that year, and it was impossible at the time to have anything to do with CNN and not know the name Bourdain. In a few short years he emerged to become an indelible presence at the network, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Parts Unknown had become the news network’s most watched, most talked-about program. By far.

Even now, all these years after his passing on June 8, 2018, the name Bourdain carries special import at the now beleaguered news channel.

I don’t know what I expected to see in Rome, but not that exactly.

The spectre of Asia Argento — that’s the one and only time I’ll mention her by name here — permeates every single frame and hangs over the hour like an all-enveloping fog, and the resulting effect is, well, weird and oddly discombobulating.

As sidekicks go, it’s hard to see how this person — the actress daughter of horror schlockmeister Dario Argento, a filmmaker who, for my taste and perhaps this is just me, made some of the ugliest, nastiest, most heartless and pointless films ever made — warranted so much attention when so many of Parts Unknown’s other sidekicks evolved over the years to provide Bourdainophiles with some of their fondest and most warmly recalled memories of the man and who he was. Eric Ripert, Zamir Gotta, Darren Aronofsky, the list goes on — sidekicks who were, by turns, witty, warm, perceptive, loquacious, receptive, thoughtful, introspective, given to listening, and giving of other people. She was none of those. Bourdain spends time in the episode with the enfant terrible filmmaker and fellow New Yorker Abel Ferrara — perhaps you know him from such neo-noir film works as Bad Lieutenant (1992), Ms .45 (1981) and King of New York (1990), chronicles of violent crime in urban settings, but with spiritual overtones — who considered the Eternal City his second home. Frankly, I could have used more of him and less of her, but that is not the episode Bourdain set out to make. (The whole sorry chapter of Rome gets thorough treatment in both Tom Vitale’s personal tell-all In the Weeds and Laurie Woolever’s definitive Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography; Woolever was Bourdain’s longtime personal assistant and Vitale directed  and produced the episode in question. In the many, many lists of Bourdain followers’ favourite episodes, Rome rarely rates a mention, and it’s easy to see why.

Food, the raison d’être of Bourdain’s TV persona — in the beginning, anyway — gets short shrift here. In a 22-page account of Bourdain’s three visits to Rome, for A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations and Parts Unknown posted on the all-encompassing foody site Eat Like Bourdain, food in the Eternal City gets scant mention, other than brief references to Osteria dal 1931 (“By Bourdain’s standards, it’s a light meal of antipasti (with) prosciutto and artichoke, followed by an entree of cheese and basil ravioli”) and Trattoria Morgana, where he dines on ragù fettuccini and Roman snails with filmmaker Ferrara and Ferrara’s family.

Together they share a lively conversation about the clash of cultures between Italian and American dining, the joys — and perils — of raising a family, and the life ritual growing old with grace and wisdom.

As I say, I could have used more of Ferrara and less of, well, her.

For me, the biggest surprise of the hour, a reminder — once again, yet again — of how, if anything, Bourdain’s Parts Unknown’s programs have become even more relevant over time, Rome holds a lens to the dark underbelly of fascism and the ruinous rule of dictator Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini and its warnings for us today. Think of it as Il Duce vs. Il Douché.

After leading Italy into a catastrophic war that saw much of Italy razed and flattened, Mussolini was summarily executed by partisans in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra in northern Italy in April 1945; his body was taken to Milan and hanged by the feet from a metal girder in a suburban square, the Piazzale Loreto, after angry crowds beat the body with sticks.

In its most powerful — and eerily prescient — moments, at the beginning and again at the very end, Rome finds Bourdain in a pensive mood, warning against the perils posed by fascism in our own times.

Rome was filmed in the spring of 2016 and aired later that year, after today’s US president The similarities between Il Duce and Il Douché are uncanny; the latter has consciously styled himself after the former, and made no bones about it. In virtually every posed photograph, with few exceptions, he strikes a Mussolini-esque pose.

Bourdain felt strongly about this, as strongly as he felt about anything in the world of politics — anywhere.

“As so many have found throughout history, it’s easy to fall in love with Rome. She is seductively beautiful. She has endured and survived many things. … You fall into a trance here. You think, no matter what, this beautiful dream will last forever, and then suddenly, s**t gets real. Before World War I Benito Mussolini was considered a bully and a crackpot, a short-tempered, ever-pontificating soapbox orator from the small town of Predappio. In time, though, the country was divided and in crisis, It saw itself as besieged by enemies within and without. It needed someone who said he could make Italy great again. He was a man on a horse saying, ‘Follow me.’ And they did.When fascists marched on Rome, the prime minister resigned and Benito Mussolini was appointed leader by the king.

“It can happen [pause] anywhere.

“It happened here.”

Supplementary reading:

https://medium.com/parts-unknown/mamma-roma-2362271634cc

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

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

CNN

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Bourdain in Buenos Aires

“This is the kingdom of doubt.” That was Anthony Bourdain’s assessment of psychotherapy in the Buenos Aires episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown that first aired in November 2016, just two years before his untimely passing. It remains one of his finest hours of television in a lifelong journey of personal discovery that took him from Bhutan to Vietnam.

Hindsight has a funny way of working. What you see at the time is often not how you remember it years later.

Tony Bourdain’s sojourn to Buenos Aires, his second and final ‘grand tour’ with cameras in tow, originally aired on CNN in November 2016, but the various streamers and rights holders to Parts Unknown over the years have made such a dog’s breakfast, pun intended, of scheduling the program over the years — not helped by an ill-advised move by CNN to temporarily pull the episode entirely following Bourdain’s untimely passing in 2018 — that it’s hard to pin down exactly when and where the episode was first seen. Or even available today. (CNN, as industry insiders know, is owned by the chaotic, constantly morphing media company known, depending on the hour of the day and which way the wind’s blowing, as Time-Warner, HBO, HBO MAX, Time-Discovery, Warner Discovery, Discovery Communications, Warner Bros., Warner Bros. Discovery, or just plain old MAX; by the time you read this it may well have changed its name again, to perhaps the People’s Most Generously Excellent Entertainment Kompany of NYC, or PM-GEEK-NYC for short. Who the hell knows?)

Truth is, the Buenos Aires episode is available, and can be found, with a little sleuthing. I found it on Apple iTunes, but that’s in Canada, which, as we know, Mango Loco now regards as the US’s 51st state; your iTunes may not be the same as my iTunes. (Apple is not immune to this corporate game of name-changing, especially now that it’s in the hands of CEO Tim Apple; iTunes no longer exists, depending on your postal code and/or zip code; it’s now called Apple TV, or Apple Music, or Gimme Your Money, or something like that.)

The Parts Unknown Buenos Aires episode is worth tracking down, chiefly for scenes scattered intermittently throughout the end of the hour, in which Bourdain sits down with a psychotherapist. Argentina, home of noted headshrinkers Sylvia Bermann, José Bleger and Néstor Braunstein, has its own Wikipedia page titled ‘Argentine psychiatrists,’ which tells you all you need to know about hearts and minds in the country known for its gauchos, steak — arguably the best in the world — and such noteworthies as Jorge Luis Borges, Eva Perón, Che Guevara, and Lionel Messi.

“I communicate for a living,” he says, lying back on the proverbial couch, “but I'm terrible with communicating with people I care about. I'm good with my daughter. An eight-year-old is about my level of communication skills, so that works out. But beyond, that I'm really terrible."

It’s those moments when Bourdain is being analyzed — it’s hard to tell whether he’s aiming for laughs or genuinely baring his soul or, more likely, a combination of both — that turn the hour into a kind of personal Rorschach test, in which viewers — you and me — see what we choose to see.

Not everyone can handle it.

Certainly, no two fellow Bourdainophiles, knowing how Bourdain’s life story ended, will see it in the same way.

I personally find the episode, even now, to be alternatively maddening, poignant, frustrating, telling, profound, unspeakably sad and deeply moving — and, when least expected, and this is very Bourdain, laugh-out-loud funny.

Bourdain, at one point in the episode, when pressed on what he thinks of Argentina vegetables, admits that he’s quite taken by the chicken.

Yes, kids, in a red-meat society, chicken is a vegetable.

Bourdain confesses that he’s never really been comfortable around people, even though his TV work is based on exactly that, and that it’s hard for him to open up.

He admits the only person who truly gets him, and that he in turn got absolutely, is his daughter Ariane, just eight at the time. What adult, grown man finds his deepest life connection with an eight-year-old, he wonders.

Old souls are like that, though. It’s a heartbreaking admission, but also speaks volumes about the two of them. Leaving a kid behind without her dad is arguably the hardest thing to reconcile about his entire life’s story arc, and how it ended.

“I tell stories for a living. I write books. I make television. A reasonable person does not believe that you are so interesting that people will watch you on television. I think this is evidence of a narcissistic personality disorder to start with ”

I’d be remiss here if I didn’t mention the extraordinary work of episode director Tom Vitale in this episode and, throughout the course of the entire series, cinematographers extraordinaire — though, like most cinematographers I know and have met, they’d probably be just as comfortable being called cameramen — Morgan Fallon, Todd Liebler and Zach Zamboni.

The Buenos Aires episode is a tough watch, no question.

It’s also, in hindsight, one of the most telling, revealing, meaningful — and important — hours of television he ever made.

“This is the kingdom of doubt,” he said of Argentina’s dance — the last tango — with psychotherapy.

After days of self-reflection, he finds himself tapping his inner Gabriel Garcia Marquez — 100 years of solitude, compressed into 61 years of worldly observation.

"I've had this dream again that I've had for as long as I can remember. I'm stuck in a vast old Victorian hotel with endless rooms and hallways trying to check out, but I can't. I spend a lot of time in hotels, but this one is menacing because I just can't leave it. And then there's another part to this dream, always, where I'm trying to go home but I can't quite remember where that is.”

He turns to psychoanalyst.

“What do you think? I mean, is there hope for me?”

Oh, yes. Always. His spirit — who he was — lives on forever.

Hail and farewell.

Supplementary reading:

https://medium.com/parts-unknown/last-tango-18c764acd3b4

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/9zggos/parts_unknown_buenos_aires/

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

https://explorepartsunknown.com/directors-cut/when-something-was-good-he-would-tell-you/

CNN

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