A Cook’s Tour, by Anthony Bourdain (2001)

A Cook’s Tour chronicles Anthony Bourdain’s global adventures during the filming of his first television show. Each chapter focuses on a different leg of the journey taking us from Portugal to Vietnam and describing the food and people Bourdain encounters along the way.

It’s the style of writing that shines, as usual, with Bourdain’s work. He describes food such that you can smell it off the pages and his sense of character and culture provides whimsical and chaotic context to what should be a simple subject matter. Notably, and almost shockingly, Bourdain add to this chaos with the frequent use of sexual and violent descriptors in his writing, helping to unlock the primal instincts of the reader.

Bourdain makes us believe him to be a modern day pirate, pillaging the world the stories and flavours alongside a cast of degenerate societal offcuts – and it’s an absolute pleasure to join in as a reader! Bourdain’s works make you feel like you’re on an adventure yourself, you sweat thought the dangers of Cambodia, overwhelm yourself with the Vietnam traffic and relax deeper then you thought was possible when you occasionally find yourself dining with him at a Michelin restaurant.

Unlike his other works this, book presents a much clearer structure and even laces alongside the main stories a b-track that focuses in on the television making experience. Ultimately though each chapter holds up so well on its own that they could be read in isolation.

Unlike his other books though, the insights in A Cook’s Tour is slightly different. In Medium Raw Bourdain deep dives into the food itself, in Kitchen Confidential he uncovers the secrets of how restaurant food is made, but in A Cook’s Tour he is making sense of different places and people. His discomfort in Morocco and Cambodia are clear and apparent, and he reveals a deep respect for local practices and tradition throughout Europe.

However, frustratingly, he frequently mentions the new culinary frontiers of the Western world without ever travelling to explore them in detail. He mentions Australia and Melbourne so frequently in passing that I was disappointed he never wrote about his experiences there!

Overall A Cook’s Tour was more of what I loved about Bourdain, adventure, danger, food, people and beautiful prose.