[.ca] A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal (ISBN 006000973X)

From Amazon.co.uk:
A Cook's Tour is the written record of Tony Bourdain's travels around the world in his search for the perfect meal. All too conscious of the state of his 44-year old knees (Crunch! Pop! Snap!) after a working life standing at restaurant stoves, but with the unlooked-for jackpot of Kitchen Confidential as collateral, Mr Bourdain evidently concluded he needed a bit more wind under his wings. The idea of "perfect meal" in this context is to be taken to mean not necessarily the most upscale, chi-chi, three-star dining experience, but the ideal combination of food, atmosphere and company. This would take in fishing villages in Vietnam, bars in Cambodia and Tuareg camps in Morocco (roasted sheep's testicle, as it happens); it would stretch to smoked fish and sauna in the frozen Russian countryside and the French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. It would mean exquisitely refined kaiseki rituals in Japan after yakitori with drunken salarimen. Deep-fried Mars Bars in Glasgow and Gordon Ramsay in London. The still-beating heart of a cobra in Saigon. Drink. Danger. Guns. All with a TV crew in tow for the accompanying series--22 episodes of video gold, we are assured, featuring many don't-try-this-at-home shots of Tony in gastric distress or crawling into yet another storm drain at four in the morning. You are unlikely to lay your hands on a more hectically, strenuously entertaining book for some time. Our hero eats and swashbuckles round the globe with perfect-pitch attitude and liberal use of judiciously placed profanities. Bourdain can write. His timing is great. He is very funny and is under no illusions whatsoever about himself or anyone else. So far, so PJ O'Rourke. But most of all, he is a chef who got himself out of his kitchen and found, all over the world, people who understand that eating well is the foundation of harmonious living. --Robin Davidson

The Perfect Meal or the Perfect Free Lunch...:
Tony confesses at the beginning he sold out, but then takes us along for a great ride. I was interested because I had seen the show, I could tell he wasn't that serious, but was enjoying the opportunity. He has the New York blunt, rye attitude, yet allows us to see the human side of his mistakes and highlights them with his humor. His style may well offend if you are too sensitive sensibilities. Though he reminds me of many career cooks I have known. If you loved the show, it will make you look at it in a whole new light. If you enjoy food and traveling to different cultures it's a book for you. If you enjoy a good read, buy it and watch Tony's quest for the Perfect 'Free' Meal.

Lots of good food:
This is a travelogue about eating. Bourdain decides he wants to sample the best of what's out there, and he travels far and wide to find what he's looking for. He doesn't exactly find THE perfect meal, but he does get to eat a lot of perfect meals and taste some darn good cooking. On the other hand, he also sampled some truly vile stuff, like raw cobra bile, that wiser souls would not allow past their lips. Bourdain's style is rather wild- -if profanity offends you, this book is not for you. Bourdain is an evangelical meat eater. Indeed, a central theme of the book is his relationship to the animals that are slaughtered for his consumption. In the beginning of the book, he attends his first pig slaughter, describing to us such details as pulling the excrement out of the dead pig's anus. Similar stories are told of slaughtering a lamb in Morocco and a turkey in Mexico, culminating in his swallowing a still-beating cobra heart in Vietnam. At several points, he dissolves into a rant about the evils of vegetarianism, and he declares that the worst meal that he ate in the tour was a vegan meal in California. On the issue of to eat or not to eat meat, I am open-minded- -I will eat steaks or vegetarian lasagna with equal gusto. The question for me boils down to whether the cook knew what he or she was doing, has chosen fresh items, and is capable of preparing them appropriately. Everyone needs to make their own choices about what they put into their bodies, and nobody (with the possible exception of your own parents) should have the presumption to tell you what you should or shouldn't eat. Bourdain might have saved his anti-vegetarian rants for a specifically political tome. After all, I'm sure he enjoyed a number of completely vegetarian dishes in Asia, but considered them acceptable because their ethnicity was Asian and not vegan. For a world tour to find the perfect meal, Bourdain picked an odd itinerary. Yes, France, Portugal, Mexico, and Vietnam were all musts. He only had one year, so he couldn't fit in Italy, Thailand, or Argentina. But somehow he found time for Russia, England and...Scotland? He must have had ulterior motives for choosing these locations besides looking for good food. Let's see- -in Russia, every good meal was accompanied by enough vodka to drown a sailor, so it's hard to believe he could remember the meals afterwards accurately enough to write about them. And in Scotland, I'm sure even the deep-fried Mars bars that he tried tasted good with enough beer. And in the end, it's hard to take this guy seriously as food connoisseur because he's a smoker. Face it, Tony, your taste buds are dead. If you want to really taste good food, you've got to give up the smokes.

Inconsistent:
The thing about Portugal--the fattening and killing of the pig to using its bladder as a soccer ball--was wonderfully described. It's almost as if he brought us with him on the trip. But after that nothing really stood out for me, except his bashing (rightfully so, in my opinion) of Jamie Oliver and his memorable iguana eating experience, a hotel mascot no less, in Mexico. One can say, practically, these could have been found as chapters he discarded when he wrote Kitchen Confidential. Do read the book; it's still a good read.

on the road and out of the kitchen.:
I'm new to reading travel books. I read "Blue Highways" in college and Bill Bryson's book about the Appalachian Trail recently. I guess I've been lucky so far...this is a good read in that vein. Neither of my last two finds are Earth shattering, but that's what makes them inspirational and sort of a bit-more-than-commonplace. What I mean is, it inspires you to try new things that you really can do on a realistic scale. I've seen the Food Network show that the book builds upon. You'll read about what your not seeing. That's the beauty. On the TV show you may see Tony grimace through eating igauna for a moment, but in the book you get a great description of just how horrible it was. Or how he had to re-shoot his entrance to a restaurant---after a full course meal with waitress-induced drinks. It's all about taking the cooking show out of the kitchen and getting adventurous. Can you see Emiril(sp?) sleeping in a floor-to-ceiling tiled dive hotel and then helping kill what he eats? Or haggling to buy a whole goat, riding camels over sand dunes all day (i can't see either Emeril or Mario doing that...unless it's on a Supercamel), and finally drinking beer, smoking hash, and eating the goat? Me either. And it's done with a great description of getting the goat and even the mud covered oven it's cooked in. The night sky. The campfire jokes. In a nutshell, if you like cooking shows, like cooking, and like travelling, then give this book a whirl. This would be a great book to take traveling as it will inspire you to dig beyond the well-travelled main streets in search of the authentic experience wherever you are. Sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Tony's NY city-boy point of view only accentuates the more rural experiences in the book. A good read on it's own, it's really fun to watch the episodes after reading about them---or vice versa. The writing style is easily read and satisfying. A taste of what it's like to be in Vietnam or Russia in search of good food. I'd like to go on a trip like this---and with a knowledgable street-wise chef like Tony. I can't afford to yet (maybe never). Reading the book is OK for now. NOTE: Tony's experiences that involve animal slaughter are not handled lightly. Tony takes it very seriously and explains coming to terms with the realization that all meat comes via a death. Slaughters in the book, and there are only two or three, are done not in large slaughter-houses but by every-day people in various countries getting their freshest food the best way they can---live at a market or in their yard. They then have Tony eat in their homes, around their tables.

Taking It Back:
I take it all back. Everything I said about Kitchen Confidential I take back. The scrappy edit, the attitude, the skipping over of history, the half-told tales. I take it all back. If the success of that book meant that Anthony Bourdain was allowed to write this book - well, I take it all back. This time around, Tony (he's Tony, like Tony Soprano) is travelling the world looking for the perfect meal. What that entails (or rather, what that entrails) is eating delicacies indigenous to specific locales: he eats a still-beating cobra's heart and drinks snake bile in Vietnam, he devours the intestines of a pig (and the everything else of a pig) in Portugal, he sucks up fish eyes, he eats a whole roasted lamb with the Tuareg (a nomadic desert community) in the Sahara, he dines with Russian gangsters, he even eats vegetarian food (and you know how much Tony hates vegetarians!). But it's more than that: he eats powdered dried king prawns, chopped toro and fresh chives, he eats tiny coronets of salmon tartare, shallot soup with English cucumber sorbet and dill-weed tuile. Your mouth aches. He eats muc huap (which is steamed squid and ginger), ca thut xot ca chu (tuna braised in tomato and cilantro) and mi canh ca (a sweet-and-sour soup of fish, noodles, tomato, onion, cilantro, pineapple and scallion, together with green crabs overstuffed with roe). You are narcotic with hunger. But there is still more. You warm to Tony more this time around. It feels like the pressure is off. He is no longer performing (or at least not in the same way). We're old friends now, almost. What problems there are (he still skips - the book is wildly episodic and anecdotal - one chapter he is here, one chapter he is there - you get no real sense of WHY he goes to the places he does, what decisions are made concerning the passage from A to B) don't seem to matter quite so much because the episodes themselves are just so damn good.