Anthony Bourdain’s Holiday Special: No Reservations
Picture via Travel Channel
I missed the original broadcast of this show Monday night, (clearly I need to be reading more men.style.com) but thanks to cable televisions need to fill hours upon hours of air time on a relatively feeble budget budget, I was able to record the show last night. I’m glad I did. The show was awesome for several reason, all of which I’ll detail after the jump…
The basic premise is that Tony decides to cook a typical holiday meal for his brother’s family at their house in upstate New York. The difference between this and your average episode of Rachel Ray? Well, for starters there is a lot more swearing.
First, the special was clearly shot toward the end of the summer as illustrated by the copious amounts of sun and greenery present in every outdoor shot. I like this because the series has never shied away from staging comedic set-pieces and this whole special is really little more than an excuse to get an hour of children swearing, inappropriate digressions and violence onto the Travel Channel.
Throughout the whole show Queens of the Stone Age sported some awesome holiday sweaters (pictured!) and played original material from the house’s front walkway and its basement. Best of all, aside from a general introduction of the band, they’re just kind of present but with no explanation as to why.
All of this is fairly typical anti-tradition and it’s all pretty fun to watch (especially the look on the decorator’s face when the little boy in the bow-tie keep dropping F-bombs), though most interesting were the elements from a typical No Reservations episode that were weaved into this odd-narrative. The two most interesting were a visit to a free range farm/restaurant where we could see animals enjoying their lives and eating really well before being slaughtered and sautéed. For me it had the opposite effect as that episode of This American Life from last season that showed the hog farms and effectively made me a vegetarian for the summer. This made me crave meat like never before.
Also fascinating was a look a how fois gras is made — not just the information that it is literally the fattened liver of a force fed duck, but actually seeing how this process is done. What I like about Bourdain is that he has a very clear set of gastronomical ethics, specifically that humans should eat meat. It is because of this that the trip to the duck farm wasn’t intended to shock or disgust, but to convince all of us that force feeding a duck is not only ethical, but that the ducks might actually like it. I have no idea if what I saw was true or not, but damn if it didn’t make me crave a big, fatty duck liver.
All of this was capped with some awesome cooking footage (tip: separate the turkey legs from the breast so as to not dry out the breast!), a side-trip to go curling, eggnog drinking, more QOTSA, and ultimately a knife fight.
Do yourself a favor and check it out. It’ll certainly rerun for the next couple weeks on Travel. Check your grid!
Tags: No Reservations, Travel
