I am having a ferocious man crush on Anthony Bourdain.
Which is weird, because I have almost no inclination to turn my eyes to a TV screen after staring at my computer all day. It’s also against my code: “Television is not to watch—it is to appear on.”
Still, there are nights when I switch on the TV, dumbly hoping for something new and different. Then I settle for a “Law & Order” episode I haven’t seen. Until one night, when I got all the way up to the Travel Channel and stumbled into “No Reservations.”
Why did I keep watching? First, because my wife once worked for a restaurateur who hired Bourdain as head chef. She was the one who was deputized to bring Bourdain the daily list of items that had to be on the menu. He was the one who scowled—and quit after a few weeks. Integrity: I like it in women, and never hope to see it in men.
Bourdain now has salt-and-pepper hair, but he doesn’t seem to have grown up. At all. The show begins with a “viewer discretion” warning. It’s justified; Bourdain produces more bleeped-out obscenities than you hear in a week of Jon Stewart. And while he travels the globe in search of good food, he doesn’t stick with the Zagat crowd. He’s a big fan of street carts, and he’s never met a sweetbread, tongue, heart or brain he didn’t want to gobble. (The “most disgusting” meal he’s ever eaten? Chicken McNuggets.)
He likes his hot sauces “nuclear hot.” And he drinks—on a recent pigout at a late-night sausage stand in Prague, he moaned, “I wish I were drunker.” He digs into a bowl of pho as if it were his last meal.
Foodies may watch for the grub. I’m there for Bourdain’s mouth, which is as stunning as a shot of Everclear. His range is vast, his politics enlightened, his sense that life is short-and-to-be-gulped is omnipresent. And while he is invariably polite to the chefs of the restaurants that feed him, his civility ends there.
Alice Waters? “Pol Pot in a muumuu.”
Paula Deen? “She’s proud of the fact her food is [expletive] bad for you.”
Rachael Ray: “Does she even cook anymore? I don’t know why she bothers.”
Guy Fieri: “I look at him and I just think, ‘Jesus, I’m glad that’s not me.’”
Sandra Lee: “I hate her works on this planet.”
Watching Bourdain riff, I fist-pump more energetically than I do when Ron Paul gets his turn during the Republican presidential debates—not so much for what he says, but for his insistence that he has the right to say whatever he [expletive] pleases.
Still, I do have, as it were, a bone to pick with Bourdain. He gave up a two-pack-a-day habit when his daughter was born in 2007, and he’s still thin. How the [expletive] does he do that?
