Other Bourdain Books - Page 2

You know for a guy who claims to be such a bad ass and to have lived this really wild and interesting life, he sure comes off as such a wannabe poser in every single episode he does. I watched the Boston, Paris, and Rome ones where basically the entire time he talks about wishing he was one of the locals. He isolates whatever he finds charming about the city and then desperately tries to look like he's part of it, compounding the faggotry of it all with his voice overs rhapsodizing about how much he wishes he were a local and part of whatever cachet he admires with that city.

To me he's like that annoying little brother he so dearly wants to be like the older brother that actually does shit.

tony's a good guy (journalistically required disclaimer: he very generously blurbed both of my books). very funny, very gemutlichkeit, very smart. maybe a little too smart. he seems to me to be someone for whom the intellectual life has always come very easy and he doesn't have a lot of regard for it. so he coasts a lot. plus, he's smart enough to know that most celebrities only have a certain narrow window of opportunity in which to peddle their wares, so he is loathe to turn down opportunities that maybe he should. when he's good, he's really really good. when he's not, he's just kind of lazy.
personally, i like the romanticizations he does. 99% of food/travel television is 3-star. he's one guy who really goes after regional cuisine. not all the time, and not always as well as it could be done, but his heart is in the right place. and when he does high-end, i get the feeling that he genuinely is excited about what is going on, not just because it's a fancy place.
(confession time: i've only seen cook's tour a dozen or so times, but i recently watched 3 back-to-back shows on spain that were really terrific.)
i think it's really easy to be a critical observer .... it's much more difficult to be the creator. not an original observation, but necessary, i think, in this case. it's easy to point out what he could have done better ... but Travel has him on a very short leash and he shoots a phenomenal number of episodes. maybe he shouldn't, but there it is.

would you recommend this book?

Hahaha this whole quote is just laughable.

So when you travel you just hate everything and don't find things you like about the place? You don't wish to live some where else? You have to realize the reason's he want's to be one of the "Locals" is because of the food, which I might be wrong is the industry he is in and what the show is about? You also have to realize that he probably doesn't write everything say's and stuff is put in there to make people want to go there. I do not see the wannabe poser thing either? If you ask me most the other chefs are wanna be posers. He does not put off that attention seeking attitude which you think he has.

It depends. If you want to read about people complaining about the mind-numbingly dull work it takes to put out meals at the restaurant, with the occasional human interest story, then it might be for you. Apparently, a large part of the the restaurant runs on the backs of stages.

--Andre

Umm I don't know what food programming you get in LA but 99% of the food shows I see is some obese american with gelled hair forcing 6000 calories into his face inside of 15 seconds then screaming about it. Where are these programs about 3 star food you're seeing? I also don't find him intellectual in the slightest. His quips are a slew of cliches and his sing song style of talking doesn't exactly have the ring of an intellectual to me. I do give him credit for featuring the restaurants in Paris that he did, and for doing what he did in Boston. I don't at all think that he's remiss when it comes to knowing what food is good, I just find his writing, persona, and presentation to be incredibly irritating. Someone who is on TV a lot who I would not mind watching is Ripert. Well spoken, knowledgeable, and respectful of all levels of dining. That would be a good show. Unfortunately not as many people would watch it.

edit:

you're not worth the calories it would take to write a reply.

Yeah, but he takes it to another level when he calls himself out on being a poser. So he oscillates rapidly between being a fake badass and being a hand-wringer about his fake badassery. I do watch his show, but I often alternate between him and Andrew Zimmern to get completely different forms of jackassery. (Zimmern's unabashed do-goodery is obnoxious but kind of refreshing after Bourdain. Also, Zimmern also actually lived the down-and-out junkie life that Bourdain waxes nostalgic about.)

since I don't own a tv, I find the online episodes of Avec Eric quite nice if not infrequent for me.

Yea, Bourdain is so fucking fake. If you're going to be this dangerous badass with a crack addiction, be that. Don't be some huge nerd who in every single way looks incredibly sheltered and desperate to live a life far cooler than he's really living. It's so inauthentic that it's sad.

damn. it looks like there was a whole lot of wheaties-pissing going on in SF breakfast nooks this morning.

Either that or the rightguard was a "wee bit chilly" this morning...

Ok, you bate me so I will bite.

First of all, what is wrong with wishing you were part of a local group where you knew the bartender, and what pubs were best, say in Boston (which is the episode I am going to use as my rebuttal to your post)? Should he just settle for tourist traps like Legal Seafood so he does not get viewed as a poseur which is totally bullshit since he spent much of the episode in ghastly non-SF approved gray sweatshirt advertising a local bar. Not very hip in my opinion.

On that note, he could have done a paint by numbers episode for Boston and featured the prick Todd English or beloved local hero Ming Tsai. He could have also just as easily spent the majority of his time in the gentrified South End which is full of average to very good restaurants. But did he? No. Instead, he focused this episode on South Boston which is very different to the Back Bay/North End/South End areas of Boston that most visitors of Boston flock to. As someone who has been to Boston many times, I was very much looking forward to the episode though never expected for him to shoot the episode he did.

Am I fan of Bourdain and his show? Yup, so I am biased with no doubt though I think you are being overly harsh for no apparent reason other then that you do not like him. I think your argument here though is no valid.