Apparently Bourdain is a pompous ass in person, and this comes out a bit in his writing. Reading this book made me want to drink wine, smoke cigarettes and consume lots of French provincial cooking. Oh, and go to Vietnam. Alas, living vicariously through Anthony Bourdain does not necessarily make for a pleasant reading experience. ( )

I can’t help but imagine everything being read in Anthony Bourdain’s voice from the shows my dad would have on in the background when I was little. This makes for an enjoyable, but very very very long and slow read. Definitely made me hungry for both travel and food. ( )

Certainly entertaining, with Bourdain's trademark attitude. At times, though, Bourdain comes across as a hypocrite. (He tries to use the old "people are starving in Africa" line to justify his own extravagances.) This is not a good look. As he himself admits, he has "sold his soul" to the television devil.

> I had, you see, sold my soul to the devil. ‘We’ll follow you around,’ said the nice man from the television production company. ‘No lighting equipment, no boom mikes, no script. It’ll be very unobtrusive. Just be yourself.’ … I’ve had a lot of fun trashing Emeril and Bobby and the Food Network’s stable of stars over the last few years. God, I hated their shows. Now I’ve gone over to the dark side, too. Watching Emeril bellowing catchphrases at his wildly barking seal-like studio audience, I find myself feeling empathy for the guy. Because I know, I think, how it happened. One sells one’s soul in increments, slowly, over time. … But when you hear me carping about how lonely and sick and frightened I am, holed up in some Cambodian backwater, know that there’s a television crew a few doors down the hall. That changes things.

> Today, while lesser mortals cower around their veggie plates in hemp sandals, cringing at the thought of contamination by animal product, St. John’s devotees – and there are a lot of them – flock to his plain, undecorated dining room to revel in roasted marrow, rolled spleen, grilled ox heart, braised belly, and fried pig’s tails. It was a very ballsy position to take back in the early nineties – and it’s an even ballsier proposition today, when the Evil Axis Powers of Health Nazis, Vegetarian Taliban, European Union bureaucrats, antismoking crystal worshipers, PETA fundamentalists, fast-food theme-restaurant moguls, and their sympathizers are consolidating their fearful hold on popular dining habits and practices.

> The enemy wants your cheese. They want you never again to risk the possibility of pleasure with a reeking, unpasteurized Stilton, an artisanal wine, an oyster on the half shell. They have designs on stock. Stock! (Bones, you know – can’t have that.) The backbone of everything good! They want your sausage. And your balls, too. In short, they want you to feel that same level of discomfort approaching a plate of food that so many used to feel about sex. … Do I overstate the case? Go to Wisconsin. Spend an hour in an airport or a food court in the Midwest; watch the pale, doughy masses of pasty-faced, Pringle-fattened, morbidly obese teenagers. Then tell me I’m worried about nothing. These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn’t really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.

> It was difficult for me to be polite (though I was outnumbered). I’d recently returned from Cambodia, where a chicken can be the difference between life and death. These people in their comfortable suburban digs were carping about cruelty to animals but suggesting that everyone in the world, from suburban Yuppie to starving Cambodian cyclo driver, start buying organic vegetables and expensive soy substitutes. To look down on entire cultures that’ve based everything on the gathering of fish and rice seemed arrogant in the extreme.

> And the hypocrisy of it all pissed me off. Just being able to talk about this issue in reasonably grammatical language is a privilege, subsidized in a yin/yang sort of a way, somewhere, by somebody taking it in the neck. Being able to read these words, no matter how stupid, offensive, or wrongheaded, is a privilege, your reading skills the end product of a level of education most of the world will never enjoy. Our whole lives – our homes, the shoes we wear, the cars we drive, the food we eat – are all built on a mountain of skulls. Meat, say the PETA folks, is ‘murder.’ And yes, the wide world of meat eating can seem like a panorama of cruelty at times. But is meat ‘murder’? Fuck no. … Hide in your fine homes and eat vegetables, I was thinking. Put a Greenpeace or NAACP bumper sticker on your Beemer if it makes you feel better (so you can drive your kids to their all-white schools). Save the rainforest – by all means – so maybe you can visit it someday, on an ecotour, wearing comfortable shoes made by twelve-year-olds in forced labor. Save a whale while millions are still sold into slavery, starved, fucked to death, shot, tortured, forgotten. When you see cute little kids crying in rubble next to Sally Struthers somewhere, be sure to send a few dollars. ( )

My Goodreads account is not keeping up with my books currently reading. I started this on Saturday (December 9th) and finished it yesterday.

Anthony Bourdain is always a good read to me. I really loved his first memoir, Kitchen Confidential. I think due to what is going on in the U.S. right now, I have been reading a lot of cooking memoirs the past few weeks. There is something wonderful about reading about other cultures and their love of food. And I have tried to recreate some menus (did not attempt any in this book though for obvious reasons).

Off the bat you get that Bourdain loves food. He loves meeting/talking to other food obsessed people. Starring in a television show that is taking him around the globe to eat food seemed like a win-win. Some scenes were rather hard to read about (the one describing how ducks are stuffed to make foie gras---no thank you), others are humorous, and at times you get a feeling of sadness depending on what Bourdain is going on about in a particular chapter.

I have to say that the book itself jumps around a lot. I don't know if this is the order he filmed or what. We go to Russia, Tokyo, Scotland, France, England, Saigon, and other countries with Bourdain and his camera crew along with local men/women who show Bourdain how to eat/prepare their favorite dishes.

I would say don't read this if you have a weak stomach though. You read about a pig being slaughtered, a goat, and about Bourdain hunting rabbits (seriously).

I think my favorite chapters has to be about Bourdain waxing enthusiastically about Gordon Ramsey and Hubert Keller. I really wish I could eat at The French Laundry cause it sounds wonderful.

I didn't rate this five stars since the book jumped around a lot and I didn't know what angle Bourdain was going for in the final execution of this book. Was it to share his love of food? His realizing there is no such thing as a perfect meal, rather it's the memory that you go chasing when thinking of your favorite food? Or was it to showcase other cultures and how they got really screwed by other countries (Vietnam and Cambodia). ( )

Bourdain writes just as he delivers his monologues on his TV shows, no BS, gets straight to the point, says what he feels in his gut. The book is a series of vignettes, bouncing around the world in sixteen chapters, but some places like Vietnam he revisits. It may be a cook's tour, but food is really just his path to the culture and history of a place. He's a travel writer in his own right, bringing his own particular experience and his unique optic to new places. However surly and rebellious he may come off, he really models what a good traveller should be: friendly, humble, curious, respectful, and honest, especially about himself. The book isn't revelatory, but it is fun to experience these places and cultures as Tony does, with a heart wide open and a mind similarly disposed. ( )