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Summary: This chef can WRITE!
Review: My husband spent 13 years in the kitchens, so we both fell in love with Bourdain's previous book Kitchen Confidential, which was right on the money. But in Cook's Tour, Bourdain really shows his talent. With stylish prose, intelligent humor, and a surprising element of humanity, Bourdain travels the world looking for good food, but it's his perspective on cultures and climates that really resonates. He takes us places we may never go and, lucky for us, gets the dysentery on our behalf. Picture Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr (Dispatches) writing a Lonely Planet guide. More geared for the traveler than the chef, this book is grittier than Paul Theroux and a heck of a lot more fun than any Frommer's Guide.
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Summary: Bourdain in the "stone age"
Review: _Kitchen Confidential_ was almost as much about the Vietnam War as it was about cooking: "They [the cooks] were like Marines digging in for the siege at Khe Sanh" (32) and "We're gonna fight Dien Bien Phu over and over again every night. I don't care if we lose the war--we're professionals, man" (217) are just two occasions for the cooking as Vietnam War metaphor that pervades the book. In _A Cook's Tour_, Bourdain actually goes to Vietnam and to Cambodia in search of food. I'm uncomfortable from the very start. The first sentence refers to "those not-so-adorable scamps, the Khmer Rouge"--"scamps"!? Are we also going to talk about those "rascals, the Nazis"? Authors of one of the terrific holocausts of the last century...Bourdain's cultural deafness is ever striking; he goes so far as to suggest that the US involvement in Vietnam was part of a lovers' quarrel (he thinks Vietnamese women are beautiful). Bourdain's tone is, of course, ironic, but I, for one, don't think he can get away with irony in such cases. His books are worth reading, but with caution. The metaphors can kill you.
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Summary: Gonzo!!
Review: I love to cook and I love to "globe trot", so the fact that love this book is no surprise. What make this book so good is that even if you don't love those things, the story telling alone makes it worth reading. Bourdain's outlook on life is refreshing as it is entertaining. He holds nothing back and doesn't care. If you want to take a great tour without leaving the comfort of home, this is the road best traveled!
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Summary: the Gonzo Gourmand
Review: Well, Bourdain has admittedly decided to succumb to the television siren, as documented in this entertaining journal of his recent travels. While I was not a great fan of "Kitchen Confidential", having been prepared for his overpowering self confidence by that book, I found this an interesting and more enjoyable read.Bourdain desperately wants to portray himself as the bad boy of chefs; sort of a chef's Mick Jagger, compared with a Paul McCartney, or perhaps a Peter Pan goes bad. He seems to define badness by the extent to which he is willing to engage in self destructive behavior: excessive consumption of alcohol (actually the anecdotes are nauseating just to read about), chain smoking, and blithely consuming food prepared in conditions of questionable hygiene. And that is before you consider what he eats. Bourdain also definitely wants you to know he is macho; he may be a chef, but absolutely nothing effete about him; he goes to great lengths to demonstrate this; in fact it almost seems his life quest. He proves this by what he is willing to eat, e.g.: the still beating heart of a cobra, potentially toxic blowfish, and by distain for vegetarian cuisine, which he here again not only defines as inferior, but by implication effeminine. Hmmm. And, he goes into the dark heart of Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia, getting off on firing semi-automatic weapons, in uncomfortable, sleazy, and decidedly hazardous circumstances. I didn't quite get how this related to his quest for new culinary experiences, but damn he's bad! The descriptions of Vietnam and its cuisine were perhaps the best part of this work. It was interesting to have his descriptions of eating in France refute the suggestion that the French are the world gold standard in cuisine, and his journal of his experiences in Mexico were warm and enticing. I settled on this in the airport when seeking an appropriate diversion during long flights. In this book Bourdain has mellowed a bit in his intense distain for opinions contrary to his; however, be prepared for a self congratulatory celebration of excessive consumption and self destructive habits as an art form.
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Summary: Get behind the scenes
Review: Tony Bourdain capitalized on the tremendous success of "Kitchen Confidential", an insider's look into the restaurant industry, with a devilishly interesting follow-up. The proposal to his publisher was simple enough. Tony would travel around the world in search of the "perfect" meal. A great excuse for him to leave the hot and sweaty world of his kitchens for a year. His search would lead him to exotic locales around the world and allow him to taste the simple (e.g. food of Puebla, Mexico birthplace of many in his kitchen staff), extreme (e.g. boiled fetal duck egg and pulsating Cobra heart), and over-the-top (e.g. 20 course meal at the French Laundry). In the process, he admits he sold his soul to the devil to get this project done as he traveled with two cameramen who would capture his adventures for the TV Food Network. The book is an excellent companion to the television series offering behind-the-scene looks at adventures that obviously got left on the cutting room floor. Since Tony is quite a scamp, there are many anecdotes too violent or too disturbing for the average viewer of Emeril Live. He is also better able to articulate what he was observing and more importantly thinking at the time of his adventure. This is something that is difficult to do on video even with voiceover.
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Summary: "Culinary Holy Grail !' ... I don't think so !
Review: A globial adventure in extreme cuisines...INDEED! Asking the question, "What would be the perfect meal?" Bourdain "Kitchen Confidential," newest book, "A Cooks Tour," is a joke at best. Going from one EXTREME to another made little or no sense at all to me. From Asia to Europe, Africa, and, parts of the U.S.A and god forbide I forget to mention Harry Kissinger and Bourdain's comparison of Cambodia to Vietnam all in the name of CULINARY JOURNALISM ! HELLO, Mr. Doofis, I thought I was going to get a few interesting ideas on "WHAT THE PERFECT MEAL WOULD BE," not an adventure in "AS YOUR STOMACH TURNS !"
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Summary: Truly Amazing!!
Review: Anthony Bourdain does it again with "A Cook's Tour". In this book Anthony recounts his travels all over the world in search of the perfect meal. Beware...this book is at points rather graphic...and if you really don't want to know where your meat comes from, well..... From the dark depths of the Cambodian jungle to Thomas Keller's French Laundry, Bourdain leads the reader on an amazing journey of the palate. He stops at nothing in his quest, eating virtually anything and everything that is placed in front of him, all in the name of culinary journalism. The reader will likely be amazed at what many people eat throughout the world, but will certainly come away with a new respect for food, and an ambition to try things new and bizarre before passing judgment on what many other people would consider "good eating".
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Summary: Around The World in 80 Meals
Review: Anthony Bourdain had written a couple of novels to little acclaim, but it was his memoir, Kitchen Confidential, that made him a famous chef and author. A Cook's Tour is a book about Mr. Bourdain's search for the perfect meal. He sets out to travel to globe hitting points everywhere from San Francisco to Moscow to Cambodia to Mexico to France to Scotland to his hometown of New York City. No food is too scary or repulsive to try and no alcoholic beverage is ever denied. Along his journey, Mr. Bourdain eats food as varied as haggis, sushi, cobra's heart, iguana, stinky cheeses, oysters, doughnuts, hot dogs and sheep testicles. In Kitchen Confidential, Mr. Bourdain ridicules celebrity chefs that appear on the Food Network, but he gives into the television business as the entire is being filmed by the network for a series. Mr. Bourdain has a sharp and sarcastic writing voice and a very sardonic sense of humor. The antidotes from each stop along his journey offer a keen insight into both the country or city's cultural and its day to day eating habits. Mr. Bourdain's details are vivid and one feels as if you are riding shotgun with him on his trip.
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Summary: A Cook's Tour
Review: Chef Tony Bourdain travels the world over in pursuit of the ultimate meal. Tied to a forthcoming 23-part television series on the Food Network.
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Summary: I Am Not Eating That.
Review: It's subtitled, 'In Search of the Perfect Meal', but really, it should be, 'What's the Grossest Thing You Ever Ate?' The point here is not perfection, nor even exotica. The author does explain later...way later...in the book that a perfect meal is in attitude and not the ingredients, which is reasonable, but that still seems unfair to book-buyers who may be expecting it to actually be about food as opposed to raw snake innards. Just so we understand that the author is a manly sort of chef... his idea of a perfect meal seems to be something freshly slaughtered, something that was someone else's pet, or better still, both. Indeed, his attitude towards food is odd; like an anorexic, he seems to have both a fascination and a revulsion for it. Once you get past expecting him to be a foodie and let him be a story-teller, he's rather entertaining, in the manner of a drunken uncle telling tales of his travels... His disappointment at not getting fugu poisoning struck me as droll and I laughed long and hard over that, but that's probably just me.
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