“No Reservations” — Shanghai (Season Premiere)
“One should never judge a nasty-smelling piece of tofu by the frighteningly hairy stuff growing all over it.”
Having just read Kitchen Confidential, one has to assume the release of the Catherine Zeta-Jones/Aaron Eckhart romantic comedy No Reservations three days before Anthony Bourdain’s similarly titled travel channel series returned for its third season must have driven the man crazy. If I picked up one thing from his love-letter to chefs, it was that the kitchen is a no-nonsense place filled with degenerates, alcoholics, thieves and general tough-guys — NOT beautiful square jawed hunks and the women who love them. The fact that this movie also happened to steal the title of his show and premiered in such close proximity had to just be a salt-covered rusty fork to the wound.
Luckily, the film’s modest box-office should make it a cinematic footnote, while Travel’s Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations started its third season Monday night and will be delivering new episodes for months. Point: Bourdaian. More after the jump…
As far as travel programming goes, you can’t do much better than this series. The brilliance comes from the focus on food. Sights are fine and good and in some cases breathtaking, but if you really want to know how a people live you need to find out what they eat. Food is everything. An areas food defines itself, but it can’t just be any food. It needs to be the special foods, the hidden foods, or the only-here foods. Amazingly, this translates really well to television (it should, we have an entire network dedicated to the stuff). On television, via your host (in this case writer, traveler, chef and eater Anthony Bourdain) you can see food that looks absolutely amazing and find out that it is as good as it looks. You can see food that looks god-awful and find out that it is, and every gradation in between. We like this. We like not having to be on the other end of the camera. Most Americans (hell, most people) like to think of themselves as adventurous, but deep down everyone is a picky eater. Some more so than others, but everyone knows what they like and what they don’t like. Seeing someone on television who will eat anything (and does so with a straight face) is almost comforting. It’s the act of watching someone else do the leg-work, while we sit at home and pick at our neon-pink sweat and sour pork.
If No Reservations has any problem, its that the show is sometimes too easy to tune out. Bourdain’s narration is dry, monotone and semi-ironic. The photography is typically top-notch. This magical combination tends to cause my mind to wander. Bourdain is a natural performer and I sometimes wonder why they don’t use more sound of him from the locations instead of the flowery voice-overs. The man has a positively hypnotic voice and as he speaks while the visuals focus on food preparations I often find myself thinking of future meals and what I’d like to try cooking or what I need to pick up from the store. Perhaps this isn’t so much a problem with the series as a problem with my own desire to eat.
It’s a shame the series couldn’t start earlier in the summer. I’ve spent that past two months getting by on the bare minimum of television fare, and No Reservations really is perfect summer programming. Unfortunately, from here on out there’s only going to be more and more things to watch as we inch closer and closer to the fall season. Make no mistake, this Travel Channel staple will be in the line-up.
