“Clearly, I have the best job in the world,” celebrity chef and
author Anthony Bourdain told an enthusiastic Bryan Series audience in
his lecture Thursday, Feb. 19. “I get to travel around all these places
in the world that I’d only dreamed of going to my whole life, so I can
hardly complain if I find myself waking up in Columbo, Sri Lanka,
feeling not too fresh.”
“No Reservations: An Evening With Anthony Bourdain” was the first series event to take place outside of Greensboro. A sold-out house of 2,700 sometimes raucous fans filled the new Durham Performing Arts Center. Bourdain, who has been called the “bad boy” of cuisine, encouraged the audience to shout questions and comments.
In “No Reservations,” his popular television show on the Travel Channel, Bourdain ventures into hidden corners of the world, interacting with locals and sampling traditional food and drinks.
“I understand well the feeling of dread and resignation that comes when somebody in the developing world says, ‘Ah, Mr. Bourdain, we have something very special for you.’ This usually means there’s live reptile parts or something squiggly coming your way. That’s well and good. When people are giving you their very best on a regular basis, every now and then that very best is going to involve bear bile or lizard head or something.”
Bourdain talked about his journey from a professional chef whose “inside baseball” riff on the restaurant industry written for a New York street newspaper turned into Kitchen Confidential, his best-selling memoir. That, of course, led to “A Cook’s Tour” on the Food Network, and that to the Emmy-nominated “No Reservations.”
He also discussed the possible effect of the financial crisis on the restaurant industry, and on American food culture in general. Maybe, he said, “we will be forced by difficult conditions to cook well again …We’ll have to find ways to be creative.”
