(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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The New York Times [1]
['Sam Sifton']
Date: 2001-12-16
It certainly does. ''A Cook's Tour'' (which accompanies the television series of the same name, making its debut in January) takes the reader from the far reaches of Vietnam and Japan to France, Portugal, California and even the small Mexican town where some of Bourdain's kitchen staff members were born and raised. Along the way the author fires automatic weapons in Cambodia and swims in frozen lakes in Russia, and still finds time to devour for the camera a live cobra heart in Vietnam, a deep-fried Mars bar in Scotland, sheep's testicles in the Moroccan desert, roasted bone marrow in England and poisonous blowfish in Japan. It's extreme cuisine -- though what makes good TV does not so often make a perfect meal. That cobra heart, for example. (''Telling people about the cobra bile you drank when you were in Vietnam makes a great story,'' Bourdain allows, ''but it's dismaying when the experience was just as unpleasant as it sounds.'')
Happily, the opposite is also true. Sullen and occasionally angry with himself for allowing his literary desires (eating oysters, for instance) to be supplanted by the requirements of his duties as a TV host (eating iguana tamales, for instance), Bourdain at times lapses into conversational riffs that recall the best of ''Kitchen Confidential.'' ''I certainly had nothing to add to the world's knowledge of Morocco,'' he writes about one beautiful meal in Fez, during which, happily stoned on the local hashish, he refused to perform for his audience at home. ''I'm supposed to face the camera and spit out some facile summary of 1,200 years of blood, sweat, colonial occupation, faith, custom and ethnology -- as it relates to a chicken stew -- all in a nice 120-second sound bite? . . . I felt it completely inappropriate.''
Elsewhere, though, Bourdain's enthusiasm is so intense that it practically explodes off the page. ''Memory -- that's a powerful tool in any chef's kit,'' he writes in the midst of a jubilant bit on Thomas Keller's restaurant, the French Laundry, in Yountville, Calif. ''Used skillfully, it can be devastatingly effective. . . . When you're eating a four-star meal in one of the world's best restaurants, and tiny, almost subliminal suggestions keep drawing you back to the grilled cheese sandwiches Mom used to make you on rainy days, your first trip to Baskin-Robbins or the first brasserie meal you had in France, you can't help -- even the most cynical bastards among us -- but be charmed and lulled into a state of blissful submission.''
One wishes for much more of that. When he's writing about restaurants and food he loves (or loves to hate), Bourdain shows himself to be one of the country's best food writers. His opinions are as strong as his language, and his tastes as infectious as his joy. For him a perfect meal is not really about the food (although of course partly it is); it's about the love that created it and the moment in which it's consumed. That's something that probably won't come across very well on television. Score one, at least, for writing.
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/16/books/extreme-cuisine.html
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