RISE TO THE TOP
Anthony Bourdain has become TV’s most powerful — and unlikely — foreign correspondent, Shinan Govani writes,
Not quite a journalist, only once a chef, Anthony Bourdain returned last week to the airwaves — like an apparition conjured up in Hunter S. Thompson’s workshop. Or, indeed, like someone who graduated from the Kerouac Institute of Advanced Wanderlust.
“I am, at best, an essayist and enthusiast” is how the host, these days, of CNN’s wildly popular Parts Unknown has described his shtick.
“I hope to show what people are like at the table, at home, in their businesses, at play. And when and if, later, you read about or see the place I’ve been on the news, you’ll have a better idea of who, exactly, lives there.”
He’s so much more, though, than “the Indiana Jones of the food world,” as he’s also been called.
Pleasantly gruff, with a chatty barstool persona, the extra-tall, Clarks boots-wearing globetrotter — who estimates he’s been on the road about 250 days a year for the past decade — is increasingly something else.
Somewhere along the way, Bourdain became TV’s most powerful, if unlikely, foreign correspondent. In a time of shrinking foreign bureaus, and international coverage often only emoji-deep, he plays the outsized role once occupied by the Peter Jennings and Arthur Kents, the conduit in a space once ruled by Christiane Amanpour.
Using food as a way in — musing on everything from burrata to biryani — Bourdain has reported from everywhere, from the rubble of Congo to the blood orange-strewn Sicily.
Season 7 of his show has him ambling all corners — from Manila to Senegal to Buenos Aires — and while doing so, he goes, as always, way beyond food and way behind the headlines. Bourdain manages it with an assemblage of “vivid narrative reporting, stunning visuals, palpable empathy and a relentlessly open mind,” as Fast Company once put it.
The ascendancy of Bourdain is a story well-chronicled by now: from heroin-addicted chef to punk-rock foodie voyeur. Today, weeks from his 60th birthday, it’s worth recalling, however, that the “big break” came via his Kitchen Confidential: Adventures from the Culinary Underbelly — a macho-spiritual memoir published in 2000 that rang with zinging indictments, ricocheted with passion and read like haute cuisine meets Fight Club.
That led to several more books (adding to the crime novels he’s written previously), his own imprint at Harper-Collins, several more shows (most notably, No Reservations), roving one-man tours (his latest, called “The Hunger,” hits Toronto’s Sony Centre in November), better-late-than-never fatherhood (he was introduced to his martial-arts-fighter bride, and mother of his child, by culinary god Eric Ripert) and, of course, his current shoehorn as a “face” of CNN.
Parts Unknown, as some have mused, is the very model for an industry shift toward a more docu-style cable-news landscape.
Bourdain’s tipping point, at least for me — the moment he shape-shifted into a post-chef role — is when he went to Tehran some seasons back. In an episode that gloriously captured the complicated vibe of Iran — taking us into a country that’s been closed to prying eyes since those Argo days — he travelled high and low.
In one segment — where he happens upon a bunch of Iranian teenagers wearing Ralph Lauren shirts, rebuilding American muscle cars — Bourdain was gobsmacked by the lineup of Camaros, Mustangs, Firebirds. “Where did you get these things?” he exclaimed.
Though facing some of the more stark realities of the country, he later sized up that particular journey as “extraordinary, heartbreaking, confusing, inspiring and very, very different than the Iran I had expected.” For the viewer, the episode captured something rarely aced on the small screen: a state of grace.
More recently, Bourdain did an episode from an on-the-cusp Cuba. And because of his outsized role now, his arrival in Havana served as a diplomatic opening act of sorts for President Barack Obama’s own visit soon after.
One has to go back to perhaps Julia Child — the cooking-show pioneer — to find someone with as much pop mojo as Bourdain.
But where Child changed America forever by making us see food not just as sustenance, but as a staple of pleasure, this guy now is our crypto-tour guide to the world.
Where Child helped us discover the joy within, Bourdain is committed to us looking outside-in.