I don’t know why anybody would think otherwise? He’s rarely seemed anything but nice and cool to anybody he hangs out with in his shows.
Yeah, Bourdain is someone I’d love to hate (he gets paid millions to travel and eat food on someone else’s dime), but he’s never come off as anything other than pretty honest and down to earth.
When he wrote Kitchen Confidential, he basically said he wrote it hoping some people in the culinary industry would like it and that was that, and didn’t expect much from it. At that time, he was a hardworking chef at a Manhattan restaurant and had some very negative views of celebrity chefs and the like.
When his book became a New York Times bestseller and he got the job offer from the Travel Channel, he later said that he still didn’t like the concept of a celebrity chef but he would openly admit he was a hypocrite by basically becoming a celebrity chef (although with more of a focus on travel and eating than on cooking himself.) He basically admitted when Travel Channel came to him with a pile of money to travel the world and eat, hypocrisy or no he wasn’t turning it down.
But despite being a chef at a Michelin starred restaurant he’s always seemed very interested in “ordinary people food” from around the world, street food and etc. If there’s anything he’s down on, it’s the fact that too much of American street food / ordinary people food has been preempted by fast food places to the detriment of our overall culinary quality.
He’s also extremely liberal, but very open to being friends with very conservative figures and even questions a lot of his beliefs in regard to the Iraq War when he spent a week in Kurdistan. He’s also apparently on somewhat friendly terms with Ted Nugent, and anyone who can say that (liberal or conservative) is pretty tolerant since Ted Nugent is literally a lunatic.
So, for those who want him to die in a fire… did he kill your puppies, or did he portray a persona on television you didn’t care for?
Just trying to get a gauge for what triggers your wrath.
How about one of the strippers coming up and asking, “Is that a nutmeg in your pocket, or are you just happy to be here?”
What, nobody gets that??
Agree!
Anthony Bourdain is the guy I would love to travel with - never a boring moment and no pretentious 5 star hotel crap. He is sort of the type of person I used to hang around while traveling through Europe in my youth - the crazy guy who didn’t mind mingling with the locals and going to off-beat locations, far away from the tourist traps.
I really don’t understand why Anthony Bourdain would deserve this kind of scorn, unless you know him personally and he’s done something horrible to you. To the extent that Bourdain says anything snarky, it’s most often reserved for fellow celebrities (Sarah Jessica Parker, Sandra Lee, Emeril LaGasse, etc.), and, as has been stated, when he did a show with Emeril, he was very generous about him, saying that he’s a really good guy, and all it really came down to was that Bourdain didn’t like Emeril’s TV show, but that was just a matter of taste.
On the contrary, Bourdain has, on television, been an example of how to be a proper guest in someone else’s home or country. He accepts anything he is offered graciously, especially if it is from the hands of a regular person, as opposed to a high-end restaurateur or chef. Bourdain tries to enjoy everything he is offered, and when it turns out he doesn’t like something, he states so in as gentle a way as possible.
Bourdain is an admitted East-Coast Liberal who can get along with all kinds of people, including, for Pete’s Sake, Ted Nugent.
The only time I have seen him obnoxiously denounce bad food was when he went on a tour of the food court at the Mall of America. And that goes to one of his few “crusades,” from my point of view, which include:
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Going around the world, you learn that cheap food doesn’t have to be bad food, and that is something that American consumers should learn to demand.
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Sympathizing with/communing with/understanding your fellow man is tied up with learning to eat what they eat. Entire civilizations have survived and thrived by eating things that aren’t considered food in your experience. But we’re all biologically the same, so it can’t be that culture X is just plain wrong about what they choose to eat. Step outside yourself, eat what the people around you are eating, learn something about being human – I think to a large extent, Bourdain shares this attitude with Andrew Zimmern. (Although, unlike Bourdain, Zimmern won’t drink alcohol. Interesting, both of them are recovering addicts.)
Bourdain once went on a rant when he heard about Woody Harrelson declaring that he spent a week in Thailand and ate the same vegan salad for every meal. His point, so far as I can recall it, were that experiencing a place includes experiencing the food that is being eaten – isolating yourself from sharing the food is also isolating yourself from the people around you – and that being a guest in a place and rejecting your hosts’ food is extremely obnoxious.
He also has expressed disdain for people who try to make moral decisions about other peoples’ food choices, like the banning of foix gras in some cities or the banning of horse meat in the United States.
But, really, Bourdain is never happier than when he has a hot dog in one hand and a beer in the other. And maybe, second, is being fed by someone’s grandmother. How can that be pretentious?
I agree with you that he is a pretentious asshole. So does my wife. I don’t need him to die, but no one currently gets me to grab my remote faster than Bourdain. I loathe him.
What an excellent thought! Do you mind if I quote you on this?
If you want to, but I’m really just paraphrasing what I think Bourdain is saying.
I agree that “pretentious” is really the wrong term, even coming from people who loathe him. He is snarky, sardonic, flippant… and I say without joking that those are his good qualities.
I like the guy. Found No Reservations immensely entertaining and wouldn’t mind meeting him.
This right here; if snarky pisses you off, then yeah, you’d probably hate him. I think he’s fucking hysterical and would love having a beer with the guy. One of my favorite episodes was the Las Vegas visit where he and Michael Ruhlman pull off a seriously funny “Fear and Loathing” schtick.
Hell, I’m a vegetarian and respect him, even with his sneering at veg-people like me and all that. I nearly even bought his Les Halles cookbook just because I adored the writing style so much.
(Speaking of Ruhlman, his Elements of Cooking made me long to make veal broth, just from his seductive description of it. Veal broth. Me, a vegetarian. My otherwise-omnivorous husband rarely eats veal just due to the ethical issues with how we produce it in the US, much less me wanting to work with it in the kitchen? Damn that man… :o )
No, I just wish most “celebrities” would DIAF, along with the people who worship them.
Bourdain became a celebrity after writing a book that people liked and by being an engaging television host. What’s to hate about that? And “worship”? Seriously? This sounds like your deal.
Oh, so you’re just threadshitting because you can. Good to know. Cafe Society must keep you busy.