Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't hold up
Review: Oh please - this doesn't even compare to "Kitchen Confidential". Sorry Tony, but you were trying too hard. The only time I even glimpsed the Tony of "Kitchen Confidential" was when you were skewering the Food Network. I know you sold out - but jeesh, were you writing a travel book, a cook book, or a political statement? You lost your focus! Gimme the underbelly! Come and cook in my kitchen and then we'll talk.
Rating: 
Summary: My favorite cooking book in ages...
Review: I found this book totally fun... totally unique. I read a bit of this book in a book store before i purchased it and was laughing so hard at someof his discriptions of food, i was crying. On one hand he is recording cultures thru their food on the other searching for what he feels is missing in more modern cultures. How some cultures continue to honor the *throw-away* type food (pigs ears... organs... feet of any kind... strange creatures of all kinds... fruits that smell so bad you cant imagine eating them until you do...)while others dont eat anything more exotic than dark meat chicken (as opposed to white meat chicken)
he cant stand bobby flay or emeral (which is enough for me to feel a kindred spirit to him) yet clearly feels some of his choices are sending him on a similar path... ie...he took his tour looking for these hidden foods but had to take them accompanied by cameras and sometimes had to re-take scenes where he thanked the host several times... it seems to have made him feel less genuine, but he is resigned to it and really funny about it... his style of writing is converstaional. its not hard to read this book fairly quickly. i wish it were longer. his humor runs the gamut between very dry to wildly slapstick slapstick...its hard to know what is coming next... he found what was wrong and missing from alot of cook books....the humanity. with all its laughs... great dishes....dreadful misses.... and of course, palpating cobra hearts!
Rating:
Summary: Not just great food writing, but great writing
Review: One of the things that sets Tony Bourdain apart from the (other?) celeb chefs on the food-themed cable networks is that he's about the only one who will come right out and tell us when something doesn't taste good. All the others grin and rave about whatever gets placed in front of them. But Tony isn't afraid to tell us, "that's the most disgusting thing I've eaten in my entire life." That's why we love him.Of course, unlike most of the TV chefs, Tony puts himself in positions where he has to eat disgusting things. That's the basic theme of this book, and he carries it off really well. Well beyond the "don't eat fish on Mondays" and "watch out for the hollandaise" revelations of "Kitchen Confidential," "A Cook's Tour" isn't just a good book-about-food, it's a very good book in its own right. Tony might not value (or appreciate) the comparison to P.J. O'Rourke's "Holidays in Hell," but as writers who can take awful places and experiences and make them downright funny to read about, these two have a lot in common. I noted in my review of "Kitchen Confidential" that Tony's life was probably a lot more fun to read about than to have lived through (he might not agree with that), and that goes double for this title. Some of what Tony describes here is a little -- or more than a little -- squirm-inducing, while his travelogue of the road to Pailin was downright harrowing. Sensitive readers (as Miss Manners might say) should be aware that there are at least two graphic descriptions of the death of an animal intended for the cookpot -- though as he notes in his excellent section on his dinner with a bunch of vegans, not all killing is "murder," and vegetarianism is a luxury of rich societies. People on the edge of survival literally can't afford to pass on the chicken strutting around their yard in order to await the arrival of expensive and out-of-season veggies. Some critics have accused Tony of hypocrisy (or selling out) for having a TV show on the Food Network tied into this book when in the past he's said some fairly nasty things about celebrity TV chefs. But the filming of the TV program actually plays an interesting role in his book -- with Tony somewhat undermining his own program by revealing how often what's shown on screen differs substantially from his actual experience in a given location. The chapter on "The Road to Pailin" -- a section in which food itself barely plays a role -- especially reveals Tony's chops as a writer. But other chapters, especially those on Southeast Asia, are quite well done too. I really enjoyed reading this, and if Tony chooses to put himself in harm's way again, you can be sure I'll be there to read about it.
Rating:
Summary: Funniest book about food and travel
Review: Bad boy chef Bourdain has produced a true gem here. The man who chopped and dished up a delicious Kitchen Confidential goes one better with this collection of tales of eating and cooking in an amazing array of international locales. It's not just food that makes this book so engaging. It's the travel tales, the glimpses of humanity, the quite perfect humor writing. Bourdain's account of riding shotgun in a Vietnamese sedan manages to top P. J. O'Rourke's side-splitting rules of third world driving. I think I laughed out loud during A Cook's Tour more than any other book, ever! Only downside is Bourdain's overly elaborated love of hashish & tobacco, but the main thrust of this book is the author's world tour of eating for a cable food channel; he manages to infuse more humor into these chapters than there are calories in a Baked Alaska. It's a truly hilarious read. Great gift for either a foodie, an inveterate traveler, or anyone who appreciates good humor.
Rating:
Summary: Eating explored to the max!
Review: I loved every word of this book; I am new to his writing having not read this work Kitchen Confidential so his approah to his craft was surprising and refreshing.
I was particularly impressed with his total love for the craft/art of food preparation and his total enjoyment of the products in their many guises of that craft/art. I must use these terms together because, as he so clearly shows in his book, preparing sheeps head soup in the back garden of a colleague in Mexico is one thing but eating the other-worldly creations of Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in the Napa valley is decidedly something else.
I took Bourdain at face value: when he said after entering a pub in Edinburgh, "I'm never leaving" or in Nha Trang, Vietnam after many good experiences says, "I love it here" or in Russia drinking vodka with black bread and sausage that it was "in many ways a perfect meal" you're left with a profound respect for a person who can love his surroundings and the food of those surroundings so much.
I was impressed with his obvious love for the people, the places and the culinary glue that held it all together: as food lovers we can appreciate these feelings but to find them duplicated and articulated so well by a professional chef makes for a very good and heartwarming read.
If you like food and travel you could not find a better book in which to indulge yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: On the road with an extreme eater!
Review: How does one top the success of Kitchen Confidential? Take the act on tour of course. Climb aboard the Bourdain express for a culinary road show that would have Bing, Bob and Dorothy scratching their heads in disbelief. The places that this man is willing to go and the things that he is willing to eat go above and beyond culinary passion. It's extreme eating. Durian fruit, live heart of a cobra (still beating), embryonic birds, assorted bugs. . . and these are just the appetizer! All these experiences and more are described in a style that will be familiar to Kitchen Confidential readers. Bourdain manages to come across as funny, honest, prickly and even sweetly sentimental (for a smart-[aleck]). It was fun to go on the journey with him. Too bad I can't take him along on my next trip, almost anything I do is going to feel dull in comparison.
Rating:
Summary: Inconsistent
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: on the road and out of the kitchen.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Taking It Back
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: The pig was not the one that should have been slaughtered
Review: I read Kitchen Confidential with an unexpected glee. I loved it, loved Anthony Bourdain, from soup to nuts. Not only was Bourdain personally appealing to me with his sense of humor, his blatant honesty and deep complexities; his writing was from the gut, proud, dirty and utterly truthful. But this piece of tripe (one of Bourdain's admitted food dislikes)was somewhat like watching Silence of the Lambs on an unending cycle. It does nothing for your appetite. Bourdain is a vivid and descriptive writer, but in this book, he is sloppy, clumsy, cliched and digging in hard for shock value. He commits travesties against animals (that are committed somewhere in the world everyday, but without perhaps so penitent an observer) by either watching them be tortured and slaughtered for his own dining pleasure (a pig in Portugal and a lamb in Morocco) or participating in the execution himself (toward the end of the book he kills a turkey for dinner in Mexico and shoots rabbits for stew). The cruelty seems excessive and the gross-out is in the definite extreme. I don't believe for one minute that the man loves food; I believe he needs fodder for his inebriated story-telling to impress the cheffies back home. He is all swagger here, no substance. The brutality is enough to make a meat lover reconsider, which seems to go entirely against the point Bourdain is trying to make. Wait - what is that point? That if we are going to eat meat we should participate in the slaughter? Or that we shouldn't eat meat unless we respect that we've killed a living thing? Or that we should use every single bit of a pig that is slaughtered and that makes up for it? What the hell was his point? Here's what it did to me - made my eyes well up for the poor freaking pig and decide that perhaps I might be happier with overcooked vegetables with the... Vegans. For all his bravado, I sensed there were many things Bourdain didn't really feel comfortable with, and wondered why he didn't just say, uh...no thanks. But then I guess when you sell your soul to Food Network you've got to eat a few still beating cobra hearts. Bourdain thinks he covers the whole sell-out thing, by saying, yeah, I sold out - what of it - but it ruins his first book in the process. In that book he poised himself as the anti-Emeril, but the truth is, now he's playing on the same team, just hiding behind his cool factor, playing the overaged rebel who is still smoking hash, drinking like a frat boy and hoping everybody out there in tvland thinks he's quite the maverick. The love is gone, man. It's been replaced with epic disappointment in a writer/chef I admired.
| 
