Anthony Bourdain used to do A Cook’s Tour on the Food Network. Now he does No Reservations on Discovery’s Travel channel. On the new show, he makes frequent cracks about the Food Network and its stars, especially Rachel Ray. Is there a story behind Bourdain’s switching networks? Was there a bad breakup? Or is it just Bourdain’s naturally curmudgeonly ascerbic sense of humour?
Bourdain has always said exactly what’s on his mind, without holding back. I’ve seen him make all kinds of pointed barbs at Emeril and Bobby Flay, but I haven’t seen much of his new show, so I don’t know what he’s said about my Rachael. Still, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Food Network didn’t want to keep him around for not being a team player.
Rachael Ray is not a cook, and she misspells her own name. I’m entirely with Bourdain on this one.
Misspells her own name?
I’m not a fan of her cutesy need to abbreviate extra virgin olive oil as “E-V-O-O” and then go on to explain the acronym more than once in the same show. Also, her first cookbook lacked an index in the back, so you couldn’t look up recipes by category like if you were wondering what chicken recipes the book had. That’s because she also split the book into chapters like “takeout at home” and “international meals” (not the exact words), so if you wanted to make a Chinese cuisine recipe, you had to guess which of those chapters it might be in. Very unprofessional to not provide an index, and at least she rectified that mistake in later books.
My bubbe spelled her name Rachael, and I guarantee it was not a misspelling.
My mother was killed by a bubbe. Thanks a lot.
Does an author usually have control over that? I can’t imagine an author sitting down and writing an index.
No, usually not. A publisher won’t include an index if they don’t think it’s warranted or worth the extra cost of indexing.
Just off the top of my head, I have yet to see a decent cookbook of more than a pocket-book length that doesn’t have one. Her method of arranging chapters and listing the table of contents made an index something that would have been especially helpful, and though it does sound like it might be on the publisher’s end, I’m disappointed she didn’t (apparently) insist on one.
So no one has the dope on Bourdain’s leaving the Food Network?
Rachael Ray pisses me off because she only tips about 3-4% most of the time on $40 a Day. For someone who can’t go five minutes without mentioning how she grew up in the restaurant business, she sure doesn’t know how to treat waitstaff.
I never heard what happened with Bourdain and Food Network, but I know eventually they buried A Cook’s Tour reruns at 3AM.
To be fair, Bourdain’s cracks can usually be interpreted as good-natured teasing. Once, for example, he was getting his ears cleaned in a public park/tea garden in China and he mentioned that just one angry Rachael Ray fan could put him out of business by jarring his head.
And his comments about the Food Network being cheap aren’t too different from the way a lot of television personalities poke fun at their employers or other professional associates.
But it seems to happen often enough that I wondered whether there was more to it.
It’s odd, though, that he mentions Rachael Ray so often. It’s like a go-to source of easy shots for him.
3-4%? Every time I’ve watched the show, the tip is 15% to the penny. I seem to remember her stating that’s the show policy (and also explaining that when she’s eating out on her own, she usually tips more.)
I’ve never seen her say that, and I’ve actually paused the TiVo and done the math a couple of times to entertain friends. She lumps the tax and tip together, so unless the sales tax rate in most of the country is about 2%, she’s tipping low.
Most of the episodes I’ve seen are a few years old at this point, so maybe she’s changed her policy. I don’t know; I haven’t watched in quite awhile.
Sorry for the hijack!
Ha! I watched the DC episode where she went to Teasim and advised that the best thing about these type of fast casual places is that you don’t have to tip them, even though Teaism has a tip jar and prints out a tip line on its receipts. I was banking on her advice thinking “Oh, so I don’t have to tip”, but now that you’re saying she’s a chronic undertipper, I’m not so sure.
Still the closest thing Teasim has to servers are the bussers, so I’m still not sure if I should be tipping.
I don’t have the scoop about a specific beef he may have with The Food Network, either, but I agree with his crack that TFN has “cooking shows that aren’t about cooking” nowadays. I’m a bit weary of shows about how Cheetos are made, or Iron Chef reruns, or listening to Rachael Ray’s irritating Betty Rubble-like giggle. All the shows I Tivo anymore are from KQED, like Daisy Martinez, Rick Bayliss or Jacques Pepin. And I still love Tony Bourdain, and I’m happy he’s still filming a traveling/cooking series. I hope he produces more.
Last night his Travel Channel show was about Mexican and Tex-Mex, but not so much the food as about stupid fences and different cultures. A pretty good social commentary with some food thrown in. A restaurant in Manhattan staffed almost entirely by cooks from Puebla, one of their families back home that built a restaurant from money sent home. Lots of witty barbs thrown at the closed minded. An hour well spent, it was really the first episode I’ve watched in almost it’s entirety, but I’ll watch again based on what I saw.
I love his show and appreciate his acerbic wit when aimed at morons who literally ask to be made fun of (rachel, emeril, etc.), or who, based on his relationships with the Food Network, he may a legitiame beef with, but I don’t find it necessary to insult people for no reason- recently he passed a horse on the street or something and made a Sarah Jessica Parker joke- wtf is up with that? It he had a real clash with her or something, fine, I can see that, but if he just randomly decided to insult someone just for a laugh, he should be above that.
Wasn’t that in the clip show/behind the scenes show? It seemed to me he was showing how desperate he was and commented on how gratuitous his crack about Parker was.
That would be because Sarah Jessica Parker looks astonishingly like a horse.