I still need Anthony Bourdain to teleport me away from my armchair

I’ve been a fan of the man since his Kitchen Confidential and Medium Raw—books that brought you front and back of restaurants and brooked no PR nonsense about the food the author was eating.

Whenever I could, I followed his TV shows No Reservations and Parts Unknown (YouTube). My daughter Ida Fernandez, another certified fan, related laughingly how in one episode of The Layover filmed in a Southeast Asian city (Singapore, I think), he walked with a clear plastic bag of juice of some kind and commented how he felt like he was carrying a container of urine! All said in that ironic tone of his.

Ida looked up to his opinions about food and places and caught the travel bug from him, he who once exhorted the youth, “If you’re 22, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel—as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them—wherever you go.”

When Anthony Bourdain left this world by hanging himself on June 8, 2018, it’s an understatement when I say Ida and I were devastated. (His death came on the heels of Kate Spade’s suicide. Kate was a designer whom Ida idolized also. Daughter saved up her hard-earned money as an overseas teacher so she could afford Kate’s accessories.)

Losing Bourdain felt like losing a personable brother-sidekick-life guru. If I were to tell that to his face and request a selfie with him, he would pooh pooh the impression and roughly show me the exit.

Losing Bourdain felt like losing a personable brother-sidekick-life guru

And now Bourdain is alive again in my small world with the publication of his World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (New York: Ecco, 2021), available at Fully Booked. His assistant and able lieutenant, Laurie Woolever, shares secondary co-author credit.

In her introduction, Woolever said early in the project, she and Bourdain asked themselves first if the world needed another travel guide. In the era of COVID-19, with all its travel restrictions and protocols for physical distancing, our answer is a hearty and loud “Yes!” We need this particular guide to help us teleport ourselves from our reading armchairs and beds, let the imagination roam wildly and allow the taste buds to be stimulated from its bland, familiar diet.

Woolever, Bourdain’s co-author in Appetites and herself a food and travel writer for the New York Times and Food & Wine, among others, continued, “Maybe the world could use another travel guide, full of Tony’s acid wit and thoughtful observations and a few sly revelations of the mysterious contours of his battered heart, stitched together from all the brilliant and hilarious things he’d said and written about the world as he saw it.”

He was supposed to write the bulk of the essays, but his death changed the book’s format. Bourdain’s words, culled from his books, blog, interviews, TV shows, etc., are set in bold midnight blue. The reader cannot miss them.

Newly released Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever book

Woolever lassoed other contributors with varying degrees of closeness to Bourdain, including the Philippines’ (and Pampanga’s best) Claude Tayag, artist and foodie, who wrote the history of and a paean to his province’s sisig.

She also spoke about the “Bourdain effect”: “Once a low-key restaurant or bar or sausage kiosk was featured in the show, its number of customers often skyrocketed, with Bourdain-inspired pilgrims showing up in droves to try the things that Tony had on camera.”

Later, she realized that “it is a hard and lonely thing to co-author a book about the wonders of world travel when your writing partner, that very traveler, is no longer traveling the world.”

Still, I fell for the cities, boroughs, islands, countries head-on, beginning (not following the alphabetical arrangement of places visited in the table of contents) with Los Angeles, where Ida resides now, and its K-Town (Koreatown), born of immigrants and the LA race riots. It teems with uncompromising cooking (meaning, not tailored to suit the Western palate) from Thai, Filipino, Samoan, Mexican, Central American and Bangladeshi settlers.

Bourdain on sisig: ‘A crispy, chewy, spicy, savory, and altogether damn wonderful mélange of textures that just sings…Oh, sweet symphony of pig parts, oh yes’

If you are followers of the Netflix series The Kominsky Method, there are several scenes set in the LA institution called Musso & Frank, what Bourdain described as “a perfectly preserved old-school Hollywood restaurant, where professional adult bartenders know how to mix a perfect cocktail, because it’s their job, not because they have a steampunk fetish or stumbled across Dad’s old moustache wax in the basement.”

Michael Douglas, who plays acting coach Kominsky, likes to order Jack Daniels, which he chases down with Dr. Pepper while Alan Arkin, playing his manager, has his Absolut Martini, all of which are served by an elderly waiter in a tux and who suffers from tremors.

Musso & Frank suddenly is up there on my bucket list, with hopes that Ida and her husband will host me for a shot of Dr. Pepper on the rocks.

Bourdain, a New Yorker, used to badmouth LA with words like “It sucks out here. They don’t know anything. It’s the end of the world. It’s corrupting. It’s la-la land, lotus land.”

But after repeated layovers, he admitted, “I love it out here. I love the palm trees, the strip malls, the Pacific Ocean, the whole quirky, straight-out-of-a-million-movies thing.”

He has only positive words for Jollibee, not for a rival fast-food chain which he warned his only child, a daughter, of being implicated in the disappearance of little children.

He wrote, “…the Filipino chain Jollibee is the wackiest, jolliest place on earth. There are over 900 of these things, all over the 7,000-plus Philippine Islands, and a whole lot more internationally, wherever there are homesick Filipinos.”

Like Tayag, Bourdain reserved only the most sensual language when describing the dish sisig which he won’t share with anyone: “A crispy, chewy, spicy, savory, and altogether damn wonderful mélange of textures that just sings. Everything I like, on a smoking hot sizzle platter. Oh, sweet symphony of pig parts, oh yes.”

It does make you wonder how a man so deeply and passionately in love with life would go the way he did. But it is one of the bittersweet mysteries that even Ida and I will take to our graves with a soft utterance of “Thank you, Anthony.”

Bourdain would have turned 65 on June 25.

Credit: Stupid1519/YouTube