I decided today to hit the "Vault" and view a recorded show that has been sadly left to waste with all the flashy new fall programming hitting the airwaves over the past few weeks.
One of my longtime favorite series is Anthony Bourdain's, No Reservations. I was fortunate enough to have the most recent Tuscany episode safely tucked away on the hard drive of my DVR, and felt now was as good a time as ever to consume this appetizing program.
For those of you not familiar with Anthony's Bourdain's body of work, he is a long time New York Chef who made his debut on television with the Food Network and more recently is cavorting around the World with the Travel Channel. He is also a well respected author, writing a number of bestselling books about food and the industry that surrounds the creation of fabulous cuisine.
He is outspoken, funny, and will eat anything. I mean anything - coca leaves, baby seal, warthog rectum, et al. That is what makes his show so interesting, so different. Not to mention that he enjoys dictating out his take on life whilst getting drunk with cigarette in hand, sans guilt.
No Reservations is a journey that is narrated by the semi lucid poetry of Bourdain's psyche spilling out onto the digital canvas that is the television. It leaps forward with each astonishing culinary and cultural experience and we always know everything is out in the open and on the line. He has no qualms with taking risks with his food, his health or his psychical safety and that is what provides us with an organic, realist view of the "off the beaten path" places he visits.
His "Johnny-come-lately" visit to Tuscany captured the essence of everything I enjoy about the series. The episode was sold to us as a vacation of sorts for the star and crew, when in "reality" there was a wacked out director that wanted to turn the episode - which was promising at the outset as far as Anthony was concerned- into an dark homage to Dante's Inferno. Only on this show would such a convoluted storyline actually succeed, and it did succeed.
We got a great feeling for, and could almost taste, the varied meats, cheeses, pastas and culture that embodied the region. Tuscany was amazing and even though we have seen it a million times before. It was just better this time, it really was.
Then it hit me...
I was tricked into watching all the new programming for the last two weeks that the major networks have force fed me, and when I finally realize that what I really enjoy is the quasi-tormented rantings of Chef Druggie, Anthony Bourdain - I find out that was the last episode; the season is over!
Oh well. I guess it will make it that much better when it returns next year. I'll be looking forward to new episodes of No Reservations in 2008.
I too love this show. I just watched 2 episodes yesterday (Brazil, Puerto Rico...
— sofrito