The Watch - The Anthony Bourdain Special Episode

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Chris and Andy take a look back at Anthony Bourdain’s storied career, inspired by the upcoming release of ‘Tony,’ starring Dominic Sessa as the beloved chef. They discuss their personal relationship to Bourdain (and his shows), his outsized culinary influence across television, and the lasting impact of his work (2:34). Later, they put together a list of their favorite episodes from his time on television (40:14). Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of The Watch and so much more! Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Studio Production: Sarah Reddy and Jamie Yukich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You're richer than you think. I ain't sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at The Writter.com. And joining me in the studio, he writes, he eats, and he is hungry for more. It's Andy Greenwald.

That's nice. So today, Andy, in honor of Matt Johnson's Tony, which is being released on August 7th, sorry, Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain, we decided we would do a retrospective on one of our great shared television passions, which is the work of Anthony Bourdain and extends beyond TV to his written work, to his public speaking, to his influence on culture. I was kind of surprised. I did a search of our archives for The Watch.

So that goes back to 2015. We've talked about him twice. On this show? Yeah. Yeah. So I did that on other podcasts? No, I mean, it's just, I think that you and I were both obviously like many, many,

many other people quite shaken by his death. And I think even at the time, time or sometime in the years afterwards. I remember saying something, I think, on this pod that was like, it's still hard for me to watch his TV. It's hard for me to go back and watch episodes of Parts Unknown or watch no reservations and time does its thing, you know, and I felt like this would be a good opportunity for us to talk about the work and legacy of somebody meant a lot to us and to so many people and

has had an outsized influence, I think, on many things from the bear to journalism, to travel influencing, to things that he probably would not want to be responsible for. Yeah. And you're somebody who had got, you got to interview him several times. You appeared on a posthumous episode of Parts Unknown to discuss his work. So I thought we could open it up by just having like kind of a kind of broader discussion about Bourdain. and then we can get into a couple of things. I put together a 10, I'd say it's a Hall of Fame,

personal Hall of Fame of Anthony Bourdain Television. And we could talk a little bit about some of the episodes. But how are you kind of... And we haven't seen the movie. And we have not seen the movie yet. And it's gotten great reviews. I know Fantasy loved it. Oh, good.

I can't wait to see it. And Matt Johnson is the director who previously had done the... Blackberry and Nirvana, the movie, the band, the show. Yeah. So when you think about it, Bourdain. Yeah. Had you thought about him in a while

when I brought up the idea of doing this episode. This sounds weird for someone who I barely knew, but I think about him all the time. And I think about him all the time both because of, you know, in the kind of rubber-necking way when you have any proximity, even, I mean, I cannot stress this enough, super marginal proximity

to someone that they are gone. But everything that you said in your intro is so relevant just in terms of his voice feels present. as much as it ever did in in the way we eat the way we think the way we opine um what makes us upset what makes us angry and his legacy which has been fascinating and remains complicated is also continually being reasserted or if you can go into i mean there are many restaurants around the world that you can

walk into and there are quotes of his spray painted on the wall and does that restaurant live up to his legacy that is the quote that is spray painted something that's he would have said that maybe he said in 2002 that he would have said in 2017, hard to debate. But, you know, anything, anytime someone falls silent who had spoken so much, like there is a complicated legacy and the debate would rage on for a long time. I think about him a lot because as a, as a fan, and we're going to get into this, but as a fan who read the New Yorker article that started his second career as a public figure. Did you do that like contemporaneously when it happened? Yes. In 19.

99,000. I mean, you will read a fucking New Yorker issue. Especially then, because I thought there was going to be a test. Like I did think that someone,

perhaps a father figure, would be like, did you see what, you know, what John Lee Anderson went to another Republican crisis. John Laird reviewed a puckish biography of a 1940s silent film star.

There weren't silent films in the 40s. See, I'm already, I'm already messing up. Anyway, as someone who has been a fan for a long time, like, but, and we are going to talk about this, what increasingly I was a fan of was his very public evolution. So the fact that he is not here to continually evolve and show us the ways in which people can transform and change and that, and that the project of being open to the world

is both possible, survivable, and deeply impactful in that like, especially in this era where, you know, it seems impossible to forgive. to move on to evolve to change publicly in ways both, you know, big that have global circumstances, but even just like, even small within your life or within your opinions and your taste. That's essential to living. Yes. And he never shied away from that. I mean, there was a messiness to everything that he did that is sadly missed in, as you said,

in our art and in our life. I think that his project over the course of decades was a really interesting one to me because I think it mirrors. one that outside of the social morals of the time of like, you know, how our attitudes about different things changed over his years of productivity.

I think that he mirrored a very recognizable and legible arc of angry young man outsider gifted with the gift of gab in the pen who made his name by saying the food world equivalent of the Beatles suck you know, and was lionized for his kind of edge lordy opinions and his, his like, truth-telling ways.

And then slowly got brought into the establishment, but never lost his voice and also never changed to be what other people wanted him to be. And I think that that was obviously something that, you know, was a major issue for him is like the public-facing persona versus who he was in private, what people wanted from him versus what he wanted to give them in, terms of, you know, like, this is a guy who every time he would walk into a bar, that was going to be everybody in the bar's Anthony Bourdain's story. Yep. And I think that, you know, the challenges that he gave himself by constantly traveling and constantly moving around the world were obviously great stressors to him, but he was always willing to talk through it and he was always willing to work through it. And I don't think it was as under the surface as, you know, you can see it in his work when he's like in an episode of a show is just like, I'm not really feeling this. Yes. And famously,

those episodes could be very good because of that because he was like, I don't want to do a boat trip or I don't want to do I don't want to eat out of this clay pot. Like I want to go back to New York and have a salad. Or as he talked about in like the Sicily episode, he's like, we went fishing and we didn't fucking catch anything and I'm mortified.

And that made it to air. And we should say that like as we're talking, I think we're going to throw to a couple clips from the interview, the podcast that I did with him 11 years ago, shockingly. And, you know, I think he talks about a lot of these subjects, including the fact that, like, the angry young man persona that he put into the world in that New Yorker article was when nobody was listening. And once people started listening, he started to evolve and change in front of our very eyes. And he had to either publicly or privately or subtly disavow some things as he transformed.

Can I, before we get into it, can I just explain the context of that interview too? Because I think it's very interesting for who he is and who he was. Yeah, over the course of the episode, we're going to be sprinkling in little segments from this interview that Andy did. But the reason why I got that interview is in, I guess, 2014 or 2015. And we will talk about the different evolutions of him and his media and the shows that he did and what he was putting into the world. But there was a very interesting period in the middle of the last decade when he was feeling his oats creatively of like, I'm going to write comic books for DC. and I'm going to have a publishing imprint. He worked on Tramey, right?

He did a couple seasons in the writer's room of Tramey with David Simon, and he was in talks to be one of the, not benefactors, but like the public faces of a food hall that was going to bring Singaporean hawker life into Manhattan. It eventually did open after he died and I think just recently closed. He also was like, maybe I just want to see what it's like to be a celebrity for a while, and he made a show for ABC called The Taste that was in the era of The Voice.

and it was a show in which chefs competed to dazzle judges, including him and Nigella Lawson and Ludo Lefebbb from here in L.A., with one spoonful, a perfect bite. And I was definitely in my, like, randier columnist days, intellectually, and obviously. I hate to break it to you, but you kind of are still. No, no, I've mellowed. And I wrote this essay that basically referred to him

as an aging, defanged circus lion, and that this show repudiated every single thing he'd ever taught us to believe that food cannot be reduced to a single bite, that it is nothing if it is not connected to the larger cultural trends that created it. And experience of being, whether it's in a restaurant or somebody's house, yeah.

And this is something I said to him in the interview, eventually, was like, you show, unlike every other food show up to that point, you told us we couldn't do this. You couldn't recreate this at home. You had to get out of it. your kitchen, out of your house, out of your country in order to experience this. It wasn't like easy weeknight, you know, Korean noodles. It was no, you have to fucking go to Korea. And so it was a

rough, like, kill your idols kind of thing. And a few days after it went up, I got, I was going to say like back channeled. This was not all the president's men. But I got a message from someone who worked at 0.0, which was the production company that he was partnered with that made all of his TV shows saying thank you for saying this because they obviously had an interest in him not doing that sort of TV. They wanted to keep making parts unknown. And they also said, we put it in front of him and he read it and he said, he got me. And I was like, holy shit, do you think he'd ever talked to me about it? And they were like, probably, let's check. And so not too long after that, I arrived. What I thought was, you guys know I have a unique relationship with being on time.

he we used to record when I was when you were out here and I was in New York there was a period where we were recording in the brutal building yeah where all the great hits were recorded and I got there and of course Tony had been there he infamously 15 minutes early was on time and he was often early and he was just sitting there waiting and you know to listen back to it now I am shocked that I didn't realize that I was hyperactive of nine-year-old in 2015 and that I spoke in a way that I thought you could only achieve via like Alvin and the Chipmunks technique. But I was also clearly very nervous. But that what was very emotional to listen to and to hear was that like he just showed up. And he showed up and he's just, as always, just 100% himself. And I don't know how many people you and I know in our lives who are always 100% themselves. I think our mutual friend Chuck Closterman is probably the closest we have.

to it in writing and in life and just like in front of people and non-front of people. I feel that way about Bill. Like when people are like, what's Bill like? I'm like, it's pretty close to what you think he's like, you know, like in a good way. That is kind of true. When I asked him, that is how his kids are doing in college and he somehow steered it into rewatching homeland. He was like, God, that's incredible.

You know, it doesn't seem like much when I'm saying it out loud, but like I took shots at him and he was like, okay, let's talk about it. And then he showed up and talked about it. I just think was just a remarkable measure of his kids. character. I'll give you guys, if anybody needs this, I think sometimes people's relationships to these figures are different. I'll just

give you the broadest strokes of a, this is a very inadequate biography. Sure. Anthony Bordaam was born in Manhattan in 1956 on a childhood trip to France where he took the Queen Mary over to France with his family. He had a food awakening

that involved Vichysov but essentially started to understand the wider world and how food made him feel and how food preparation was this expression of love and culture. He dropped out of Vassar in the 70s and moved to Provincetown to begin his culinary journey, which is the period of his life that's documented in Tony, and is a couple of chapters in Kitchen Confidential, which is a book he wrote in 2000. He went to cooking school, eventually became the executive chef at Laos in New York City in 1998. In 2000, he published.

publish Kitchen Confidential and essentially becomes a literary phenomenon as well as a food world titan. Kitchen Confidential was an extrapolation of the famous, infamous article he wrote for The New Yorker, which was based, I think it was called Don't Order Fish on Mondays or something. Something like that. And the origins of that story, I mean, he was a, he had written novels. He had written a couple mystery novels. Bow in the throat. Yes. And gone bamboo.

And I mean, I think when he, this will probably be in the movie Tony, but like he thought of himself as more of an artist. writer type and fell into kitchen because it was work that could support him during like pretty challenging years that involved episodes of addiction and and economic struggling. And when he wrote this article, it was kind of like a fuck it moment. Like I'm just going to put it all out there. And I think the plan was to run it in the New York press, which us and the people who we knew in New York 30, 20 years ago, we'll remember. But not many other. It was like the scrappy maybe right wing competitor of the village voice. I think it swung a bit politically, but it was, like it was like the fourth paper in New York.

If there was the post in the Daily News and the New York Times and the voice, the fifth paper? Press would be the fifth, yeah. So, but from what I remember anecdotally, his mother, Gladys, worked at the New York Times, sent it to David Remnick. And it got into the New Yorker. So there was just a little parental nudging in his 40s. And that article, this is an arrow and an article in the New Yorker could blow up.

And there was a bidding word to turn it into a book. And suddenly everything changed. although maybe, you know, representative of someone of his age, like he didn't quit his day job. Not yet. About two years after Kitchen Convincial comes out, he starts making television and he hosts a cook's tour for the Food Network. In 2005, he premiered no reservations on the Travel Channel,

and he made that for eight years before moving to CNN, where he made parts unknown. His travel channel departure was somewhat acrimonious. I think he was like, they're starting to put me in car ads that I didn't really appear in and things like that. So he makes the move to CNN that was, as they were trying to branch out to different kinds of journalism. And he makes parts unknown for several years. His television evolved to encompass political and social reportage, cinematic experimentation, and homages to his favorite writers from Gray and Green to Hunter S. Thompson to many in between.

Jim Harrison. And, of course, he always focused on food. He died by suicide in June of 2018 while on location in the French Alps with his good friend Eric Repair. who frequently appeared on his shows. I was introduced to Tony's work through his shows. I think I was aware of who he was, and I think I read the like Don't Order Fish on Mondays piece, and I thought it was cool,

but I was really not a foodie in my 20s. You know, like I don't think, I don't, I think, like a lot of people, my age, you probably have a very specific experience eating when you're growing up, and then you have several years from your late teens to your mid-20s where you're like, if I have $5,

it's going towards beer and pizza and not towards, you know, like a bent-o box somewhere. We cannot stress this enough. And I think Bourdain has a huge hand in this in terms of a larger

cultural, generational transformation. We didn't eat in the late 90s into the 2000s. I didn't have water until I was 30. No, I'm with you on that, brother.

But like, I remember, like, our, we had a similar commute into Manhattan to chase our nights and, like,

it would come out of the F-Train at First Avenue and First Avenue and First Street, you know, the infamous Seinfeld Corner. And I think about it now how we walked past Prune, which is like such an important stalwart New York City restaurant, the chef Gabriel Hamilton, who Tony worshipped and thought was like one of the great food writers in addition to being one of the great cooks. And like inside of that restaurant, people were like having martinis that were made the perfect way and like cooking fish the way it's done in France

and like, and we would just storm by there and maybe we would get a slice of pizza at midnight. Yeah. And the fact that I do think that young people, for the most part, in addition to like, you know, quaffing chillable reds, also do spend money on food. Like both in terms of like, ah, lovely tinned fish for home,

but also just like restaurant culture is pop culture in a way that it didn't ever used to be. It's also just fascinating, like all the technological evolutions that came out of, I in no way think that Anthony Bourdain is responsible for the rise of GPS. But the idea of making a comprehensive map of a city that includes shopping, bookstores, restaurants, pubs, but then also, like, you can get an incredible, like, like, kebab here, you know, it all feels like it kind of sprang from some of the work he did on his TV shows.

And so I think that when I first encountered his stuff, which was probably on no reservations, and maybe on because you were such a passionate fan of his stuff, I'm not afraid to say it. Like it is like kind of like a paradigm shifting, like life changing encounter with an artist or a thinker. To be like, no, it can be everything. Like everything you care about and everything you're passionate about and everything that makes you get out of bed in the morning,

you can find a way to do the jigsaw so that it fits into the bucket that you're using at any given point. So whether it's a TV show or a book or whatever it is, and you can bring your love of Queens of the Stone Age and your love of old school steakhouses, but also your love of, you know, like funky, weird flea markets, and that can be an hour of TV, you know,

and that was mind-blowing to me. Like, I don't know what kind of precedent there was for that. Like, I'm sure there are BBC news shows that kind of effed around like that. But, like, Tony seemed so, like, he knew that he was the reason and people bought a ticket. And so if he was interested in Fellini,

it was going to be as much Felini as it was pasta in the Rome episode, you know? And the fact that what he was so able to do so effortlessly based on his own honesty and experience was collapse the walls that even as hopefully open-minded people we carried with us into adulthood. Because it wasn't just that, because I remember reading the New York Times at the same era and on Wednesdays the dining in, dining out section would come out.

And there would be like, you know, William Grimes giving a respect. three-star review to Blue Hill. My father would be like, did you read William Grimes' respectful three-star review of this American Brasbury or whatever? But then also beneath it,

Eric Asimov would be writing 25 and under and he would be reviewing like a pizza place or a noodle place or whatever. So there was this idea that there was high and there was low and you could both be in the New York Times but you would be separate. What Tony did was bulldoze all of that

and say that, you know, there's a time in place for all of these things and the common thread isn't price point, it's passion and honesty in how it's presented. So the noodles have their value in a certain place and the charm of sitting on a plastic stool is that's how they're best experienced just as if you go to Noma, that experience is worth doing. And also the New York

City dirty water hot dog, which he lionized and worshipped his whole life also has its time and its place. And, you know, one of the things that he said in the podcast I did with him was that like the reason why they left Food Network wasn't just that Food Network was definitely on it, what has now been a decade-long artwork toward dumbing everything down. It's that this. that Faran Adria, who was at the time considered the best chef in the world at the best restaurant, El Buoy in Spain, was like, I like you, come film what we do. It's that he was like, oh my God, I guess we can do that now. We're going to gain access to this temple. And Food Network said no. And New York Times media said no. Faran had out of the blue said to me, I'm willing to give you unprecedented access to my restaurant, to my workshop, to my life, to my influences. I came back to New York with this incredible opportunity to document this. this extraordinary chef and this extraordinary moment in time. And the idea landed with a dull thud, both New York Times Television and Food Network.

And neither of them, you know, they were absolutely dead set against. Oh, who is he? He doesn't talk English. He's, it's too smart. We're not interested. Discussions reached the point where I said, look, we'll go do it ourselves. We're reaching our own pocket. Nobody understood that his punk rock sensibility and way of filming things and the access.

What's the audience for that? Yeah. Where is the common viewer's interest in something so exclusive? But his ability to connect the dots was so, so important to how we still process culture. I love the fact that he would do episodes of his show that were maybe of limited reach, you know? Very specific. They would be very specific. And they would just be like, I love the crime novels of George V. Higgins and we'll do an episode in Boston that recreates that feeling.

you know, and you're not going to find 10 places in and around Boston that you want to put on a, on your list of must tries. It's going to be me driving around in an old Buick, like with cigarette smoke in the air. You know, it was like he started to iterate on like what the purpose of his show was, which was not just to introduce you to new cultures and new foodways and restaurants. It was to introduce you to new writers or old writers or films or, or, music. He did an entire episode in the style of and then actually with the work of legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle, who worked with Wong Carwai, among many others. And he was like, I'm going to make an episode that's essentially an excuse to talk about cinematography. Because that's what motivated him. Everything global has to start personal. And that was his

guiding ethos especially as he got more and more clout. So I want to talk about two elements of his television with you because I think you're very familiar with the ZPZ side of it. Can you tell me a little bit about how that place worked and what kind of collaboration they had with Anthony when it came to making the television? Yeah, I mean, I think he, this is, and we will talk about some of the books that have come out about him and, you know,

authorized and otherwise that delve more into actually how it played out. But it is kind of simple in the sense that I think Lydia Snaglia and Christopher Collins, who are a married couple who were filmmakers, reached out to him at the same time, that people were reaching out to him about making television

and he found kindred spirits. And so the way he talks about it, and I imagine they would talk about it as well, is that they built this thing a bespoke media-making vehicle from the ground up together. And he talks about, like when I spoke to him, and I'm sure in many other places,

he flew to Japan for the first episode of a cook store being like, I can't believe someone's going to fly me to Japan. Yeah. And he gets there and all of a sudden the cameras were pointed at him and it had never occurred to him that he would be on camera.

He thought the camera would be over his shoulder looking at the food. And so the roughness of those episodes is amazing, especially as they're trying to cram ambition and incoherence and ignorance into a 22-minute

food network show with commercials. But, you know, look, like Bill said when he first put you in front of a microphone, like he can't coach talent. You know, like there are people who have it or they don't. And there's an authenticity that came across.

And I think what was exciting about that relationship was that it was so, and also ultimately very frustrating and challenging, was that they grew completely together. And yet, and so they were willing to push each other in terms of out of their comfort zone, in terms of out of their aesthetic zone. Like, what can we actually accomplish here? And then in the evolution of the series, the multiple series, because I would also include a brief show he did called The Layover. I really liked.

Which is a lot more of what you were saying. That's more GPS-y. And it's really influenced the way, like, we can hit a city. It's like Instagram now. Like, hit a city, get a pastry from here, get a sandwich from here, get a drink here. And your days sorted. Yeah, do a duck boat ride and then you're good. It's like, what if you had 30 hours to kill in the town?

And he, but so you could see it as an evolution of craft meeting raw ambition. So that by the time they got to CNN, it's like graduating to a car you finally know how to drive. Yeah. And so by the time you get to CNN, all of a sudden, because of their experience in war zones and the access that the brand had, suddenly he could do shows in the parts of the globe that had been absolutely closed off to him to dazzling, if not harrowing effect. Yeah, I mean, a really great exercise, if people are interested in doing it, is to watch that early Cook's Tour trip to Japan and his lack of comfort on camera. And then watch the one in Tokyo from Parts Unknown in season two, where it kind of opens with him. Is that the tentacle porn one?

Yes. But it also opens with him, dressed like a Yakuza chieftain in a hotel bar, like silently regarding a glass of beer. Yeah. And then he like looks up and does like a straight-to-camera monologue about how Japan was like taking acid. And it changed the way he looked at the world to be here. And he still doesn't understand it.

And then the episode that they do, while they go and have like the most astonishing sushi and ramen that, you know, anyone in the world is eating, is mostly about like martial arts and pornography. Which is what he was interested in. Yes. You know, and fetish stuff and like all this like the seedy underbelly of Tokyo. I'm sure there are other ways we're going to talk about this.

But like, it is incredible to watch his entire filmography and not as a travel show, but as a narrative show with one primary character. And the way that his interests, like a lot of those last. seasons, there was a lot of jujitsu because during the second decade of this century when he was married to his second wife, Otavia, and she got super into jujitsu. And then he got really into it. And his physique changes and what he's interested in changes. And then on screen, you're like, man, this guy really likes to talk to people after grappling on mats. And then you talk to people who worked for 0.0. And they're like, you have no idea what a fucking nightmare was because we would only go to places where there was a Renzo Gracie gym.

and we had to be there with him at six in the morning because that's what he wanted to do. And to put a button on the conversation about that collaboration, like it's really hard for a equal partnership to succeed when one of the equal partners becomes the brand and becomes the face of it. And so it became a lot of who's working for who here

in ways that were constructive, I think, from talking to them and ways that were frustrating and challenging and even dangerous, and that came out much later. One of the things that he did that I always adored was essentially, like, his version of what we do here, which is like the kind of network effect of, like, people go on each other shows. And there's like, your pals. Yeah, I mean, that is sincere, like many of the people I work with.

Like, I've known for at least a decade, if not 20 years. But Bordain would do the same. Happy 30th anniversary, by the way, of our friendship. There you go. I think it may be today. I'm not even sure. My God. Is it really? I mean, it's possible.

It was this summer. Bourdain Cinematic Universe where it would be like repair, Michael Rulman, of course, Zimir, who was often his fixer, breaker in Eastern European episodes. His brother came a couple times. Octavia came a couple times. I think Josh Hami appears several times across the multiple shows. Chang showed up. You know, Roy Choi, like, he had his boys and his girls, and he, I think the thing I was,

I always enjoyed about it is like if he was going to do a Tennessee episode and he just liked Allison from the kills they would just hang out like and it was like she was in his circle

he loved her yeah yeah so it was like always really neat to me that he just had people that he was interested in and if if it worked like they would pop up over and over again

in different cities accompanying him this is a complicated side of it which is how do you engage with the posthumous sporting industry yeah I have not engaged

with it personally Like, I haven't read any of the books. You know, I'm going to watch, I'm really excited for Tony. I think it's been the appropriate amount of time to kind of disassociate with his, you know, the shock that I felt when he died, but also, like, to start thinking about him as a fictional character in some ways. Yeah. You know, like, I think that sometimes helps. I think it's also interesting to think about it as the inverse from a conversation we had a week ago when we were talking about the Spider-Man movie and your lack of interest in origin stories. in many ways for incredibly famous people

who have complicated presences and legacy, the more innocent origin story is the purest thing to fictionalize and share. Because it's almost acknowledging the myth-making that was necessary for the perpetual myth. Yeah. This is, all of that is a wordy way of saying,

like, if you're going to make a fictional Tony Bourdain story, this is the one that I think would make the most sense and this alone. Yeah, I think it would be tough if it was like, Lay Howl or something that was a little bit more like more people had seen him do that

and there were more kind of accounts of like well it wasn't exactly like that or whatever and it sounds like Matt and the screener just did a really good job kind of there are certain characters that are amalgamations there are certain you know ideas that are broadly put across in Kitchen Confidential but are not explicitly like play out this way I was curious how much you've engaged with his work since he died I mean have you

revisited episodes of Parts Unknown or or no reservations. Do you rarely? Not really. Rarely. But I think I was also, and I, you know, all the caveats, like he wasn't a friend of mine.

Like, we weren't close. Sure. I met him four times maybe. But I find it really painful and upsetting. I didn't remember him at all. I find it incredibly difficult. I was really scared to listen to that podcast only because I was like, at least I remembered that I met him,

but there was no proof of how it went, you know, or how I used the time, which ended up being like the only time. So I was worried I'd have regret or did I misrepresent him or myself or not. If you think about his time is finite and he gave some to me, it felt like an incredible gift and luxury. Yeah, for sure.

What I have done is read most of the books, you know. What do you think that compulsion is that's different than revisiting the TV? I think there's a number of things about it. I think one is it's an incredible opportunity, I won't say exercise, in combating my own myth-making proclivities, that when I spoke to him 11 years ago, he was in the midst of a reinvention that for whatever reason,

and maybe it's just like the conservative storytelling mind that we all share to a degree, I really needed to believe in. So he talks a lot in the interview about, I have a wife now, I have a daughter now, and that's what grounds me, and coming home to New York is different and having these family holidays

and doing Thanksgiving, like, you know, like it's fucking the TED offensive is like everything to me. And that's changed. You know, I think like a lot of people who've lived on the margins for a long time, I've always had this nose pressed against the glass kind of wonder what it might be like given the opportunity to live a normal life. I mean, for 30 years I was a chef, so I never cooked at home or had any kind of real normal family life.

So now that I'm a father and now that I've just in the last couple of years started doing a vacation and real holidays, with family, I write down my menus and I plan as if I'm, you know, to take at the beach at Normandy. And, you know, I, you know, we're happy family. We're normal. We're going to have a normal, you know, totally awesome, typical Thanksgiving, you know, and you will enjoy all of it. And so there's something a little creepy about it, but it's something I really, really love. And within two years, you know, he had left his family and was in what, you know, it turns out to be a quite tempestuous relationship with Asia Argento.

With Asi Argento. And I think the thing that's really important for me in this, and I'll talk about some of the postion of stuff in a second, is that there is no easy narrative page turn in a human life. And the narrative that I too easily bought into and that everyone did was this former bad boy, this former addict is now perfect. Has found not just, yeah, not just peace, but has found a calling. and is a leader and an inspiration to people about coming out of addiction and about embracing the world and all these things. And people are who they are. And people are deeply flawed and complicated people who are always every version of themselves all at once. So to engage in some of this stuff. And so when he took his life and 0.0 people people reached out to me. And so I got to talk to people, you know, when it was incredibly raw and how much anger there was. Yeah. You know, for their love for him, for their friend, for their, for their friend, for their.

own lives and careers and what they had been spending their time doing. And so in the immediate aftermath, Lori Wolver, who's become a friend who is his assistant and then co-author of his cookbooks and other projects, put together an oral history book called Bourdain that is really exceptional and paints like a really, I think, honest and intentionally subjective portrait through the eyes that people knew him best from throughout his whole life. There is an unauthorized biography by Chris Lemon that I think is not worth engaging with. It's very lurid and very like nose pressed up against the glass of a car crash, which I don't think that it was. And then maybe the most compelling book to come out of it to complicate the legacy is Tom Vitale's

in the weeds. And Tom came on the podcast. This is during COVID-ish when the book came out. And to talk about it. And, you know, he was with him every step of the way during parts unknown and before. And the picture that's painted is really complicated. It's really heartbreaking because what he's describing is someone who became so paralyzed by fame and expectation that he would travel the world. And the first thing he would do when you would get to an exotic place would be, you know, check into a very nice hotel, which, you know, fly first class, check into a hotel good with him so far. And then send someone out for KFC or anything comforted. to create a kind of home bubble before he ventured out further.

And then when he came back to New York, at this point, he was living alone on the Upper East Side, the intentionally least Tony Bourdain neighborhood in New York, and was bordering on agoraphobic because he knew that going out came with all the expectations. And that the ego and the temper and the addictive tendencies were flaring in ways that, because the power dynamic were really, really hard to work out on the fly. and then the relationship completely upended him. And so to read these things is really challenging. I would also say Lori Williver has a memoir called Karen Feeding

that is really worth reading because it is also not just incited to Tony, but insight into her own experience around him. And generally, the psychology of food people, people who are drawn to this pirate ship of a career. Yeah, and I think, you know, Bourdain's career covers a period of time. I, you know, he dies right when the Great Reckoning is kind of happening in terms of... He was getting off some really strong Me Too tweets. I mean that, but like...

And turning on Batali. And I think also the disassembling the idea that cruelty is sort of the pathway to excellence. In terms of coaching and management structure. And mentorship and that, like, you know, I certainly don't really subscribe to that in my life, but I also don't work under the pressure cooker environment. You know, like, I think I've worked in environments where, like, people can be quite, quite angry with each other, but not necessarily, like, nothing on the level of what you hear about in restaurants, you know, and that sort of tension between, like, the restaurant is the one place, or used to be the one place that almost anyone could get a job, you know?

Yes. And almost anyone could maybe make a career out of being an, an, restaurant, but it also then has like a very combustible mix of personalities because it's not like all you guys went to culinary school and you know exactly what you're doing. It's like, well, there might be a guy who's like five years ago I was in jail, but now I'm like the world's best line cook, you know? I mean, we've all seen heat, you know? And who else has seen the heat the people who made the bear, which is also, you know, for its for its successes and its failures, I think as a TV show over five years, wrestles with this exact concept. Yes.

is, is it worth it to be this way? And what are we chasing? And one of the things he said to me, you know, right off the bat in our conversation was, of all the people in the world, chefs are probably the least qualified or prepared to be communicators, to be storytellers, to be on TV, to be self-reflective in any way.

I think it's one of the central ironies of celebrity chefdom that of all the people in the world that we now require communication skills of. We've somehow chosen the least, qualified, the people who probably chose their profession or instinctively moved towards the profession of cooking because they sensed in themselves, bad communication skills and awkwardness with the world, difficulty communicating through conventional means. And yet, he is more than almost anyone responsible for that transition of, like, the thing

that we hate in restaurants of, like, let me tell you about our food. That's on him, too, yeah, in ways both good and bad. I think the thing that I find, and I imagine I'll find heartbreaking in the movie Tony, too, was just how vulnerable he always was and was always showing us. And when you do watch, when I have rewatched episodes, the image and the memory and the hero worship is about a kind of fearless swagger. But when you watch the episodes, you don't see that very often. You see the joking and, you know, in kind of the bluster, but that's a defense mechanism.

and you see his eyes when he walks into some rooms where things aren't the way he thought they were going to be. And it's awkward. And that's very, very endearing. But what's wild to me, especially about the posthumous stuff, is that that becomes the through line. And you kind of wish that in the midst of everything else and the hero worship that I did too,

that he had people or more people or that he could have listened to the people more who were just like, hey, we just love you, man. I prefer, obviously, no reservations and parts unknown. as I'm sure Anthony Bourdain did and people, or CBCZ did. So I was kind of going through seasons of those and I very quickly made up a 10 favorite episodes list.

The thing that was painful for me this time around wasn't watching him. It was watching what the world used to be like. In no way am I trying to rob anybody else of like the experience of getting to go places or like the experience of however they want to enjoy those places. But the stark lack of people walking around with phones taking pictures of shit.

Him being in Barcelona, obviously he gets preferential treatment wherever he goes, but like just even the cityscapes of some of the towns he's going to in Spain and, you know, all over the world where it just seems like there's just less bullshit going on. It still seems foreign and farther away. Yeah, and frankly, to sound like a big,

big old snowflake, like him and Obama in Hanoi having beers and being like, man, we're fucking turning the big boat around and we're like steering towards the big beach of justice and and like resolution and we can walk into the world unafraid and explore things and be open and then reckon with our past

but still kind of move towards the future and I was like holy shit this is pretty melancholy to watch these two dudes do this and the time elapsed between that happening which I think was like roughly 2015 and then 2025 when pictures from it went viral with saying Barack Obama ate noodles with Jeffrey Epstein.

That's a 10-year gap in the degradation of the world. But you were just talking about this very specific portrait that gets painted in these posthumous biographies and oral histories. The other thing that kind of shook me a little bit watching it is that in my favorite episodes, for the most part, there's a moment where he expresses to a group of people or a person how in another life he wishes he could just live here. A lot.

Yeah, he says that a lot. He talked about that specifically about San Sebastian and just being part of the Arzac family. And like how he just was like, I would just live here. I would eat tin seafood and drink sparkling beer and be a stage for these people if I could. And there's my, you know,

I can start with my list in my number one episode. He's walking around to all these people who are, doing a bushery. They're doing a whole hog cook basically. And he just keeps being like this is incredible. Like all you people know how to cook like all you people know how like all these specialties

and stuff. And this is insane. And he's like telling everybody. He's complimenting everybody. But you can feel that he's like how is this real life? You know what I mean? And like I'm just I'm visiting. I'm passing through. But this is Wednesday night for these people.

Yeah. And I I think you can, you know, in his, because he's dead, I think you look at some of those moments more poignantly, and those are uncomfortable moments to encounter. There's also so many great, incredible, singular moments to be captured on these shows. So it's, I can still revisit them, but sometimes it'll just jump out of nowhere. But I think that spirit is really important to capture,

and it's something that he talked about with me about how, like, the more he does and the more he sees, the less he knows. Yes. which is a beautiful and challenging sentiment and when almost no one in the world is comfortable admitting. The world is a whole lot bigger than I thought it was, it a lot stranger and more interesting, and no matter how long I live

or how much time I spend here, I'll never even approach understanding it. That's both intimidating and exciting. Look, I like that feeling. I know nothing. I'll go through my episodes. Do it. My number one, and this is not in any particular order,

although I would say this number one is kind of a special one to me. Number one is Cajun Country, which comes from No Reservations Season 7. For some reason, it's just one of my favorite episodes of television I've ever seen no matter what. This is Tony in New Orleans, after Katrina.

He hangs out with Wendell Pierce, who he knows through Tremay. They have Yakima, which is a kind of soul food, Chinese food, hybrid chalman noodle dish. Immigrant classic. a woman makes like out of the back of a pickup truck. Yeah.

Then he goes off into Cajun country in a drop top Cadillac where he starts to discover like a full on new culinary world outside of New Orleans, but pulling from Cajun food traditions. And he basically hangs out with a group of people who live, you know, up in Cajun country who do two nights of like collective communal dining that. sends him into like food nirvana including it's just great he's the kind of guy who would eat a crawfish bisque yeah in um in louisiana and he just eats the bisk and he's like that's the single best dish i've had since el bui yeah that's fucking awesome yeah like that he can he can read the entire landscape like that so david simon's in this one too love caging country

and he referenced this but spain from no reservation season four is just the the assembly of goats. It's Fernand Adria working in his test kitchen. It's the grill-grilling master from Exibari. I'm sorry if I'm getting some of these names wrong. And the Arzac family who take him around to tapas places. You can just feel how desperately he wants to live there. And just like, you know, soak himself in red wine and tapas.

And it's interesting, too, because a lot of the international trials, we think of it about him opening the doors to these places for us. And yet recently I was reading some things about the evolution of British food in this century, for example. And Tony looms really large in that too because Tony traveled the world and he said Fergus Henderson's restaurant, St. John is the best restaurant for him. Yes. And what Fergus Henderson was doing in London at the beginning of the century was radical and that he was like, this is English food. seasoning his food? Well, hey now.

This is the thing. He was like, I will take a white plate and put a cooked cow's tongue on there with some parsley and be like, that's a meal. Yeah. And, or, you know, he was obsessed with the bone marrow dish. And people who were contemporaries of Fergus Henderson, like, talk about how ordained saying that made it okay within London to be like, this guy's not a crank on the margins, he's our future. And that there was like a weird process of internal legitimization that came from,

him exporting his own opinions and taste. Yeah. There's a couple episodes that I wanted to shout out just because of it's ordain being a homie. Like, it's just really fun to watch him with some people that he loves hanging out.

And these are not places, I mean, these are all great food destinations in their own way, but Quebec with the guys from Joe Beef. Legendary. I mean, the Quebec episode is like... This is Parts Unknown in Season 1. This is an episode where I'm like, I felt the same way about that episode that I did about watching The Dark Wizard, where I'm like, that's awesome that people do that.

But I do not want to take a can of foie gras and put it on top of my putteen-covered French fries, but God bless you. And he goes to a restaurant basically in the woods that is a iteration on like Canadian sugar shack dining essentially. And it's this guy who's making all this stuff with like syrups. and they're having this like extraordinary like I think his his blog post that he wrote about this episode was food fucked in Montreal or something like that yep um so that's a great one charleston from parts unknown season six with sean brock famous waffle house uh visit um and it's just like his his kinship with brock is so evident one of my few memories of being with him is that because of that interview I then got on the zero point zero holiday party invite list oh wow so for a couple years I I got invited to these parties or any kind of party they were doing, like whether it was to promote the release of a show or something. And like, you know, I definitely went to the first one, which is at a very, very, very, not cool,

but very, very fun and iconic Chinese restaurant near Wall Street. Like, not cool at all. They would always have it there because Tony loved that restaurant. And I definitely showed up to the first one having visions of like, we're finally going to like hang out, you know? And the truth is... Like you and George Pelaganos after the evening. Very similar.

to that. But the truth is that I should have known, but I didn't know then. I only knew the legend is that, like, he got there 15 minutes before the party started. He had one Heineken with his wife and daughter with him, with the crew. And then as soon as the party was really kicking off, he was gone.

Irish exit. Because he knew that, like, the party wasn't for him because everything else was about him. But the Sean Brock thing was there was a party they had once at the, God, what's the name of that hotel? It was the, it was like the hotel that like, was it called a nomad?

Probably. Yeah. There was a nomad there. Yeah, and there was a party in the basement there, and Tony was hanging out with Eric Rappere and Sean Brock, and I had my, like, 30 seconds of being like, hello, chefs, you know, everybody loved it. And I met Sean Brock, and Sean Brock then produced a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle.

Sean Brock, by the way, we should say, his own journey, sober now, very happy in life and successful, but at that time he was a bit of a whiskey enthusiast. and he brought out a bottle of this super culty whiskey that only became cultier by being associated with the Bourdain diaspora. And it was like impossible to get and there was a waiting list for years.

And he was just free-pouring shots of it to Eric and to Tony. And I waited probably like 30 seconds. Then I said, thanks for inviting me. And I never tasted it. But I definitely hung out a little too long. I've had it once. I don't think I had the good stuff.

Yeah. Pretty good. I've had it a couple times, actually. good. That was like, what was the thing that I was getting called out for? For years later, watching, oh, the last dance. Yeah. Watching the last dance two and a half years later and getting on Mike to say, it was pretty good. Along with Charleston, I also really love the U.S. Desert one, which is from No Reservation Season 7. This is one that's basically Tony banging around Joshua Tree with Queens of the Stone Age. And going to like weird, you know, desert freak flea markets,

but also like, you know, old man steakhouses. And it culminates with Queens of the Stone Age making music for the episode that we're watching. And then them doing a potluck dinner together, Anthony Bourdain makes them spaghetti. But they're doing like a cabbage slaw and a cornbread and like whatever specialties. All the guys in Queens of Stone Age can cook except for Josh who's making the music. And it's just this picture of like this, there are some places that he goes that you're like, I can't wait to go there. there are some places he goes where they're never going to invite me to rancho delaluna where there's like a tree full of empty patron bottles

yeah the rewatchable reaches in a lot of surprising places but this was a really rad one and obviously music is a huge part of this show in boarding's life leone uh which is his kind of return to the original bruce madeline of french cooking he goes to france with ballude and they kind of do this french French classics pilgrimage. I think Bill Buford takes them around to some restaurants for a while. I've never been to Leon, but I would love to.

And it's an incredible episode. I thought you were going to mention it. I don't know if Repairs is in that one, but we should shout out the way that the friendship with Repair, which was like incredibly odd-coupley. Yeah. Because Eric Repair is this, like, beautiful, Buddhist monkish, like a high priest of like the most refined three Michelin Star French seafood dining.

But they just absolutely loved each other and got along. and Eric Repair is such a good sport. Yeah. So that there's the episode where he brings repair to Sichuan province just to basically just blow him out.

And it's very good television. You can't really talk about Bourdain's TV without mentioning the Beirut episode from No Reservation's season two, which takes place as a conflict is breaking out and is kind of a turning point for his willingness

to be in uncomfortable places and also to be uncompromised. and what he's depicting. This is, you know, a conflict breaks out between Lebanon and Israel at the time, like when they're shooting this and they basically have to abandon their show, but they do still stay, you know,

they air what would have been, 99% of food travel shows would have been like, well, scrap that. I mean, 99% of shows just wouldn't have gone to Beirut, but such an important piece of television. As a counterweight to that one, I would recommend the Parts Unknown episode about Iran.

It's incredibly thoughtful, incredibly beautiful, and nuanced portrait of a country that was in the news then and is very much in the news now. And specifically noteworthy because in it, he's host, Tony's hosted by Jason Roseanne and who's a Washington Post journalist based there and his wife. And shortly after the episode was filmed in 2014, they were imprisoned by the regime. And in that posthumous episode, Bordane's legacy that you mentioned that where they interview me, they also, and I can't believe this. because we are not equal in this. They interviewed Jason and his wife, talking about what that visit meant for the country, for them personally, and then what happened after,

and how, like, there was a humanity at work behind the scenes and between the episodes. Sure. That it was really meaningful. A couple more episodes. Vietnam was a huge place for him. The Hanoi episode that we talked about with Obama and Parts Unknown in Season 8, but also the Saigon episode from No Reservation Season 5,

And that one indulges in more of his like Graham Green fascination and being an outsider in a world that he finds intoxicating. His great undone project that he talked about on the record for a long time was that he planned to move to Vietnam for a year and not be making television and just live there. And maybe a book would come out of it or maybe some spiritual something. Yeah. He never found the time to do it, which I think was a great regret. And in the interview with me, he talked about how he read those Graham Green before having a time. child, he read them as romantic and heroic. And then he started to read them as lonely and sad, which is in a way like maybe more revealing than he intended.

Sure. I didn't have this in the original list, but I wanted to throw in a personal favorite, which is season five of No Reservations is when he takes Carlos who replaced him at Laos. I love this one. Puebla episode. Back to Mexico. Hell yeah. And there is a scene where he and Carlos and their guide get up at like four in the morning.

to go get breakfast at that place. And it looks like the greatest meal I've ever seen. And I have to be honest with you, I have tried over multiple visits in Mexico City to go there. Yeah. But I love being in Mexico City so much that my behaviors the night before preclude a 6 a.m. Visit to the best breakfast place of all time. Also, can I say, of all the like the truisms,

the like he just flowing out of him things that are like, let me blow your mind and tell you things you don't expect. Like truth, you know, the truth teller, the radical that he was at the beginning of his career. Some no longer hold water. Like I think even he said, you can order fish on Mondays from good restaurants where you might want to order fish on other days too.

They're not going to serve it. But he was right about two things. Always. One, brunch sucks. And two, all the best French cooks in America come from Pueblo, Mexico. Or that generally, all our food is cooked by immigrants from other places who do unsung,

heroic, brilliant, delicious work. And he was a champion of that. Absolutely. And one of the, one of the, my favorite parts unknown episodes is actually Houston, which this is one of our share favorites. Of his ability to take a place like, frankly, like I've been to Houston a couple of times for like, All-Star weekend or whatever. And I'd never, I, to my own great detriment, never explored. You know, I went to the Rothko Museum, but that was about it. And his portrait of Houston where it's like, no, the best fun America is in this strip mall. Yep. And then also I'm going to hang out with Slim Thug.

Yeah. It's like what I mean when I'm like, it can be everything and everything that you like can be part of your work. It is, this was made, I believe, what year was season eight?

I mean, that was near the end. It was a later episode. We talked about a, on the podcast, for sure. It gives me more hope for this country than almost anything made sense.

Yeah. It is such a beautiful episode of television. I think about it constantly about, you know, and we haven't even, we didn't even, really talk about this, just like the ways that he told stories in nonfiction that are applicable to what we want in scripted television. But to take a city and show it to us and use it as a microcosm

for not sugar-coding the problems of the country, but as a test case for what can go right and what can and should be celebrated if only we look. Like Houston does not, I mean, it has transformed itself and people's opinions of it have changed. But you're right. People are like, oh, I mean, that that giant freeway with 8 million people in it where I can't find anything but then our museum is here. It's humid as fuck and has gas refineries, yeah. No, this is an entire universe

and it's the best of America in a place that most people casually and like callously assume the worst. So those are my 10. We can put up a little list in the show notes maybe or I can put it up on Instagram but it was pretty cool to go back through. I also missed like there's no Japan episodes.

There are no I often loved his trips to various parts of New York City or to Los Angeles or Chicago and like really hitting the big ones. But yeah, that's a personal, personal faves list. When he was like defending making the taste by being like, look, what can I say? I get to live in the chateau for two months. And every morning a driver picks me up and takes me to a studio where Nijella Lawson makes me an English muffin. I'm like, you're talking me into it. Sometimes we do, that was a one for him.

You know what I mean? I was really struck by listening back and hearing at the very end of our talk, him talking about how the period of time that has now been fictionalized in Tony is still present for him. And that it actually, God knows what he would have thought of this movie. The complicated picture of him suggests that the ego would have been pleased, but the more insecure parts would have been furious about the omissions. or the sanitization or whatever. But I think the one thing he probably would have felt

was that they were right to choose this moment because I think that was the spark. Yeah. And it probably better to let him talk about it than us. But what a fun exercise. Yeah, thanks for listening. We'll be back next Monday. Let's go out by hearing from Anthony Bordam.

Those are not distant memories shown up with a cold griddle and that stench of unchanged steam table water. The past informs the present and makes it more absurd and delicious.