Chef at Home

Archive for the ‘Anthony Bourdain’ Category

The early, pre-production stage of No Reservations, where we decide what our next locations will be, is a complex and deliberate process.

Actually…no. It’s not.

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I’m not kidding about the color in Brittany. Everything is blue. It’s a cinematographer’s wet dream, a palette of dark blues, light blues and blue grays that forces everyone to unconsciously dress to match the surroundings. Against a background of ocean and sky, I look around at my crew and realize that all of us are appropriately and exclusively garbed in near matching shades of navy and gunmetal. You don’t think about it. When you wake up in Brittany, somehow, the color orange never occurs to you. Heading out the door in yellow or bright green or even brown would feel disrespectful of the elements.

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The azure waters of the Caribbean lie flat and barely moving outside my window. Somewhere, a reggae band is tuning up. Elsewhere on the property, Eric Ripert, Jose Andres, Grant Achatz, Dean Fearing and David Chang are preparing delicious things to eat.
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There are two semicircular rings between my eyes where the skin is broken, the result of a telescopic sight recoiling off my skull, and my right shoulder is a yellow/brown/purplish color from the impact of the stock.
I’ve been blowing the heads off snowmen after a hearty breakfast of pheasant, moose, eggs and Crown Royal and this, I guess is what happens. Frosty’s Revenge as it were. But I’ve got no regrets about all the maiming and decapitating. I’m pretty sure they would have killed me if they could.

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There seems to be some understandable confusion with the announcement of our upcoming “web series”, ALTERNATE UNIVERSE. Reactions varying between “WTF!!??” and ” This time he’s jumped the shark for sure.” While shark jumping is always a danger–particularly since me and my partners take a perverse delight in flirting with just that with every new outrage (The family friendly Sardinia show being an example of a profoundly risky rub up against ‘off-brand,’ late-era Fonzarelli), these dark, nasty, frequently foul TWO MINUTE LONG web extras are not a replacement for NO RESERVATIONS. They are not a pilot for some new, family friendly, watered down follow on. They are instead brief, often violent, alt versions of NO RES–representing things we could never have done on the actual show-or the way things should have gone on the show–or animated acknowledgments of what already went terribly wrong on the show. Or, for example, my take on the network’s “Travel Bug” promo campaign–about which I was, shall we say…dubious.

They’ll appear on the fan site–for those who wish to click on them. I wrote the damn things–so there’s nobody to blame but me if they’re not as quick, nasty–and funny as I think they are. And I want to thank Andrew Zimmern and Samantha Brown in advance–for their extraordinarily good humored participation in one particularly lurid episode. I hope we don’t freak out their fan base.

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Saturday night at the 61st Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards, my long suffering friends and colleagues Todd Leibler and Zach Zamboni-who, for the last few years have sacrificed anything resembling normal lives to follow me around the world pointing cameras in my general direction-scored a major upset victory by bringing home the award for cinematography in the non-fiction category. Todd, who has garnered a not entirely undeserved worldwide reputation for stumbling into things, bounded up to that stage with astounding speed and grace-suddenly, a veritable Nijinsky, sure footedly making what was easily one of the smoothest, nicest, most coherent and entertaining acceptance speeches of the night. Zach, who hardly got a word in, managed to look very dashing in his tuxedo. The two of them spent the rest of the evening basking happily in the admiring praise of other directors of photography, camera operators and cinematographers, few of whom have likely had to make do with a bag of risotto on a skateboard as a camera platform. It was the greatest thing I’ve seen in a very long time and I am over the moon with happiness for them. Of the three Emmys we were nominated for-this was the one I wanted to win badly. All you have to do is compare the looks of season one-with those of recent seasons to see how hard these guys work, how monstrously talented they are-and how much they’ve been able to do with so very little.
Congratulations, my friends-with whom I’ve spent far more time over the years than with my family. And thank you.

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I slipped my thumb ring off my finger and into the Bosphorus the other day. It was the last of many steps in an ongoing, inevitable and long overdue process of de-Fierification. Call it an embracing of my inner Cosby. My sous-chef Steven gave me that ring a long time ago. Back in the day, we, all of us in the crew at the Supper Club got them, on the eve of a James Beard dinner event. A phalanx of famous, better known and (frankly, better all-around) chefs and their assistants were joining us in the kitchen the next night and we wanted something appropriately white trashy to set us apart, distinguish us as the home team. Like the skull and knife logo, I drew on our jackets for the occasion, the rings signified a sort of underdog unit pride.

We may have kind of sucked-but we worked hard, dammit-and if nothing else, habitually cranked out a helluva lot more dinners than anybody on the visiting team. By the time I dropped the thing in the water, the ring had outlived its usefulness. It went the way of my earring, joining-in one sense or another-my Dead Boys T-shirt, my telescoping billyclub and my crack pipe in some Davey Jones locker of once cherished but now abandoned objects. I think Steven will forgive me.

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* The Following Material Is for Parents of Small Children Only and Otherwise Incomprehensible if Not Offensive to Others

Picking on the Food Network has become too easy. It’s low hanging fruit.
So … this week, at least, I thought I’d look at another network. One I actually watch. And these days, when I’m home, the majority of my TV watching time is spent sitting on the living room floor watching Nick Jr. and Noggin. I take an interest in my child’s viewing habits. For all my earlier promises to myself that I’d limit her TV watching time to like–half an hour a day–that has been a hard policy to enforce. Denying a 2 year old when her lip starts to tremble and her face crumples, a look of utter betrayal in her eyes as she implores me: “Da Da? I want Backyardigans!” has proven to be too much for me.
It’s edumacational anyways, right?

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The camera people are walking on cocaine. Six tons of it. Thousands of kilos of un-cut pure rock. The air is thick with clouds of the stuff as men with machetes are hacking the kilo packages open, scattering it, spraying and spilling the stuff everywhere in white clouds. It looks like Tony Montana’s desktop, multiplied by many thousands. My shoes alone are caked with enough to keep an aging supermodel happy for weeks and the Director General of Panamanian security forces advises me to wash them carefully before flying home as the sniffer doggies at the airport are going to find me intriguing to say the least. I would also roundly fail a urine test he says. Just by standing here. In a few moments I will set all of it on fire. About this, I have mixed emotions, as an earlier version of myself would have found this …painful to watch.

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Thailand.

I think that of the shows being aired this summer, this is the best we’ve done so far. And it’s gonna be hard to top.
What I see in this Thailand show is the best producing, best photography and best editing in a single episode in quite some time . All the things the shooters have been working at–all the new equipment innovations, strategies and tactics–everything we’ve learned seemed to come to fruition on this one. Add to this mix an editor who saw the footage and understood right away not just what the road team had hoped for and what we’d been inspired by while in Thailand, but the possibilities for some really innovative visual storytelling.

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