What Was ‘Parts Unknown’?

Why there won't be a "new" Anthony Bourdain.

This is a piece that was originally written last November for a food magazine, but it was killed months later. I’m not making any adjustments to the piece that I filed, though it went through some edits and was updated. It became clear to me it’s a companion to last week’s “The Algorithm of the Mind,” in that it shows a somewhat positive aspect of what social media can do—when we don’t have to rely on someone’s appeal and legibility to gatekeepers, but the ways in which this fracturing also comes with less access to capital and stability creates different issues. Consider it another entry into Bourdain Studies.

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Season two of the CNN show Parts Unknown, hosted by the late Anthony Bourdain, begins in Jerusalem. It was 2013, a year when peace talks between Palestine and Israel brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry fell apart. The show brings viewers to eastern Gaza, where a couple are cooking the Palestinian rice dish maklouba with eggplants, tomatoes, and their own fresh-killed chickens. Bourdain’s signature voiceover notes that it’s an anomaly for a husband and wife to cook together in the region. As the family begins to eat, seated on folding chairs while children run around the yard, one member announces how rude it is to do so while the camera crew stands filming. In less than two minutes, the show grounds Gazan family life in the kitchen, in a rowdy intergenerational home, and in the sacred experience of a shared meal. 

It would prove to be a defining moment in his career. He would go on to discuss this episode on a few occasions, saying to John W. Little of Blogs of War in 2014, “Palestinians in particular seemed delighted that someone—anyone—would care to depict them eating and cooking and doing normal, everyday things—you know, like people do. They are so used to camera crews coming in to just get the usual shots of rock-throwing kids and crying women.” 

The episode would see him win an award from the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and it’s this acceptance speech that many have turned to during the latest regional conflict to get a deeper understanding, a more human understanding, of what they are witnessing through the news, social media, and perhaps friends and family experiencing Israel’s war on Gaza. In the speech, he says, “The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinian people. None more terrible than robbing them of their basic humanity.” 

Using the mundane, everyday tool of food as a route toward complex political and cultural issues is his legacy; in doing so, he essentially invented the food-travel TV show genre. When he passed in 2018, a void was created that has not yet been filled.  

Bourdain has been called many things he never really was: bad boy, cowboy, outlaw, “world-renowned chef.” From the 2000 publication of his breakout nonfiction book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly to A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown, he gave readers and viewers what they believed was an honest, unbiased perspective on the world: to do such a thing made him, in the audience’s rapt eyes, a rare truth-teller who nonetheless had unprecedented access to the world and the support necessary to present his vision in the mainstream. What he did in his rather short but wildly influential career as a writer and television host was to represent these caricatures—to swagger in jeans and a leather jacket as a bad boy cowboy outlaw chef might—for an audience who saw him as a conduit to tables they’d never be invited to sit at and places they might not be allowed to enter. To an audience of millions, he played an Everyman. How could anyone ever replace him?

It’s hard to imagine, for both the irreplicable reasons of his unique life experience up to the publication of Kitchen Confidential when he was 44 years old (not exactly the age of a “bad boy”) and the un-uniqueness of his identity markers allowing him to be broadly understood, trusted, and welcome wherever he went. The gravitas of his age, race, and gender served to balance out his outlaw reputation—earned mainly through having worked in kitchens, used drugs, and gone a long time without paying taxes—use of profanity, and enjoyment of a cold beer on a hot beach. Despite his best efforts, he could not out-run the very fact that he was the well-educated, New Jersey–born son of a music executive father and New York Times editor mother, and chose the cook life because he didn’t like the straight world. He wanted rock and roll; he craved a pirate’s life.

But he couldn’t outrun the fact of his middle-class-ness, and it would eventually be this ability to code-switch between worlds both rough and refined that would propel his success. As NYU food studies professor Krishendu Ray put it in a Gastronomica piece on food TV in 2007 titled “Domesticating Cuisine: Food and Aesthetics on American Television,” “Bourdain can carry on with this ‘junkie Byron’ attitude because he does not carry the burden of class.” 

A similar critique is leveled in a 2017 Film Criticism piece by Doyle Green, where he writes, “Parts Unknown chronicles the degree Bourdain’s global odyssey primarily exists within the extremes of global class society. Bourdain is equally at home slumming it in Third World poverty or carousing in posh destinations like San Sebastian. In the former areas, the poor cannot escape, but Bourdain can enter and leave at will due to his bourgeois privilege. He delivers a dejected sigh and a nod to his own compassion and courage. Conversely, in the latter areas, the rich can revel, only because of their bourgeois privilege. Here, Bourdain represents the oppositional outsider, which ostensibly absolves him of any real complicity in the perpetuation of class inequality.”

No one has broken out in the wake of his death as the new standard-bearer of the food-travel genre, but it’s not for lack of trying. If anything, there has seemingly been a boom in options: chef and cookbook author Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat; Padma Lakshmi’s Hulu series Taste the Nation; chef David Chang’s Ugly Delicious; actor and cookbook author Stanley Tucci’s own CNN excursion Searching for Italy; Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal’s Somebody Feed Phil; and Stephen Satterfield’s High on the Hog.

Most of these shows seek to bring the viewer somewhere new, for reasons both culinary and cultural with a side of politics—though just how big a serving of the latter depends on the predilections of the host; all of them are aimed at the middle class Western viewer. Yet none have been able to match the specific Parts Unknown tenor, which was less about pleasure and enjoyment (these were side effects, if they occurred) and more about a documentary approach: No one teaching you how to make a dish precisely; there was lots of conversation over food where the dishes themselves were besides the point. When Tucci talks to Italian anarchists or Lakshmi holds the hand of a Trump voter in the borderlands of Texas, there’s a forced element to it, a sense that they’re performing a Bourdainian role rather than embodying themselves with any fullness or authenticity.

While Bourdain’s shows, such as the “Jerusalem” episode, will depict domesticity, it’s portrayed as a fact of life rather than the focal point. Perhaps that is the aspect of his work that allowed it to transcend a food television that has mainly sought to educate viewers on how to cook, but not on how food can help us talk to each other and think through complex issues. In this approach, perhaps what Bourdain did, especially with Parts Unknown, which ran from 2013 to 2018, was a “food studies 101 for everyone,” not pure food porn (like the saucy sandwiches of Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives) nor pure instruction (like The Barefoot Contessa and its ilk). New variations on food-travel shows have leaned a bit more toward the food porn and instructional styles, playing with the political as an afterthought (High on the Hog is the clear exception). To go back to Ray’s assessment, Bourdain counters domesticity with mobility and the femininity of the home with a swaggering, globe-trotting masculinity.

Not everyone was or is a fan of Bourdain’s posture; thus, many would prefer it never be replicated successfully. The multidisciplinary artist Tunde Wey took him to task in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2018 for the episode in which Bourdain travels to Wey’s native Lagos, Nigeria, and presents what Wey sees as a white American man’s caricature of the city: “His usual brand of charm, which plays well in an American context, only read as imperial.”

Wey continues, “[Bourdain] fancies himself different, not the circus ringmaster conquering only the most sensational, crunchiest insect or slithering vermin. No, Bourdain is a cultural relativist, according the appropriate deference to those who are different while guiding his viewers a step past their discomfort into a scarier world.”

Indeed, despite receiving the Muslim Public Affairs Council for his episode in Gaza, one might wonder why there is a need for his kind of figure to translate the world through a white, masculine, U.S. perspective? He’s modeling “gonzo tourism” after the journalist Hunter S. Thompson—but have we outgrown a need or interest in this approach? We now live in a world where social media allows us a direct line of sight into the life of, at the time of writing, Gaza-based Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza, where Azaiza is showing destruction, death, and also, yes, the making of maklouba? There is no guide nor translator needed when the host is a local and the camera is in their hands.

But that wasn’t the case when Bourdain burst on the scene in the early part of this century. When No Reservations debuted on the Travel Channel in 2005—a show that was less overtly political than Parts Unknown, yet still went where other hosts didn’t dare to tread in terms of content and location—food media at large was stuck in a mode of consumption targeted mainly at the affluent. It was aspirational and a bit superficial, with the “serious” food stories more likely to be covered in the science of business sections of a newspaper. (Gourmet would be an occasional exception.)

Molly O’Neill, a longtime New York Times writer, chronicled this struggle in a 2003 Columbia Journalism Review piece titled “Food Porn.” In it, O’Neill laments that she had wanted to be a serious journalists and had attempted to use olive oil and fresh basil as a way “to usher readers into social, geographic, and cultural worlds where they otherwise might not go.” This, of course, was not actually the function of her writing or recipes.

“But the people lining up to buy my book didn’t see me as an interpreter of everyday life. They saw me as the high priestess of a world that exists almost exclusively in the imagination, the ambitions, and the nostalgic underpinnings of American culture,” O’Neill continued. “And they were not mistaken.”

O’Neill couldn’t be that guide into the “social, geographic, and cultural worlds” readers would not otherwise go—but Bourdain, despite faults and shortcomings, could, and it’s likely that no one else can follow in his precise footsteps again. It was simply too strange and circuitous a road that he traveled; his particular skill at navigating conversation with whomever he met was borne of his own straddling of the middle and working class, of worlds both prim and pirate. 

Yet what his work has done is change food writing and travel media: While not a perfect form, the influence of Parts Unknown can be found in the fact that readers do want to journey to origins and they do want to know what life is like around the table where the dish is being served, not just how to make the dish themselves. It’s in the fact that a journalist like Azaiza shares not just what we might expect to see amid a people’s destruction, displacement, and genocide, but the moments of joy in sharing food. It’s in the popularity of others, too, who use social media to share the mundane moments of their eating, drinking, and travels as a way of illuminating their lives. Bourdain’s legacy may not be found in the genre of food television that he created, but in a way of using food as a lens that helps us see more of the world. There will no longer be one Everyman to guide viewers around the globe. Instead, there is the possibility of everyone, everywhere.

Tonight, at 7 p.m. EST, we will have the Monday writer’s salon for paid subscribers in the newsletter chat. Come with queries!

This Friday’s paid subscriber post will be The Monthly Menu, where I chronicle the recent eating and cooking I’ve been doing. There are two new recipes in The Desk Cookbook: za’atar home fries and a dill-forward, mayo-free potato salad.

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