As a reverse foodie—a rudie, a gastronomically ungluedie, a don’t-bother-cooking-for-that-dudie—I’m not precisely a goal viewer for the eating-and-traveling reveals. I’m completely satisfied sitting behind my stacked-up cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, studying Frederick Seidel. However once in a while I’m touched; a picture or a second from one in every of these reveals will transfer me. Just like the sequence in Season 6, Episode 8, of Anthony Bourdain: Elements Unknown by which Bourdain (God relaxation his troubled soul) sits down with Sean Brock at a Waffle Home in Charleston, South Carolina.
To set the scene: Bourdain has by no means been to a Waffle Home earlier than. Brock, against this, a southern chef in a baseball cap, is a lifelong connoisseur not simply of the meals—that golden-griddled, all-forgiving meals; that everlasting breakfast, mystically charged with the democratic yellow glow of Waffle Home neon—however of the open-all-hours, come-all-ye-faithful, come-all-ye-fucked-up Waffle Home vibe. “This was motion to me,” he tells Bourdain. “I’d see these individuals cooking at a tempo, and cooking for individuals who had been fully uncontrolled, however nonetheless offering hospitality.” For his visitor, he has devised “a tasting-menu expertise,” one delirious grease-load after one other, and because the meals hits them, the 2 males lose their minds. They droop and give up and dissolve right into a single namelessly buzzing poetic orality: “Patty soften! Augh … Mmmm … Come on … That’s not insanely scrumptious? … That’s not insanely scrumptious? Ooohhh … God rattling.”
Why is that this so lovely? As a result of the atmosphere and the cultural context—the pure, beneficiant, flavorous, spiritually flowing Waffle Home–ness of the second—are enfolded within the response: the faces that Brock and Bourdain make, and the noises popping out of those faces, as they categorical (and share) the intensely and in any other case invisibly subjective expertise of tasting one thing. It’s the primal spark, I believe, of the eating-and-traveling present.
White-guy-goes-a-wandering, white-guy-goes-a-gourmandizing—that’s the rubric. Particularly, proper now, late-career Hollywood white man. Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everyone Loves Raymond, has Someone Feed Phil on Netflix. Eugene Levy has The Reluctant Traveler on Apple TV+. Stanley Tucci has Stanley Tucci: Trying to find Italy on Discovery+. Good work if you may get it. And the style has been formalized: drone pictures of fjords, mesas, and Mumbai avenue markets; glistening porno meals close-ups; tinkly twinkly music; voice-overs saying issues like “The Venetians are a thrifty individuals.” These are the frequent parts, episode after episode proposing itself as a sort of anemic picaresque by which the host/hero visits an odd place the place no misadventures happen, no intercourse is had, and everybody may be very obliging and laughs slightly too readily—hahaha!—and provides him good items of pork and yummy desserts.
Every of those guys has his shtick. Rosenthal is childlike and immoderately gleeful, all the time doing little dances on the street and laughing earlier than he takes a chew of one thing. And he, too, has his Waffle Home second: It occurs to him, it claims him, at Bait Maryam, a Levantine restaurant in Dubai. Chef Salam Dakkak, her face illumined by some sort of beatific culinary compassion, prepares for Phil, together with her arms, a dish of kibbeh nayyeh: uncooked meat, floor with bulgur and spiced with cumin, cloves, marjoram, and cinnamon. Phil builds himself a mouthful with bread and a slice of onion, giggles, shoves it in, and he’s gone. Overcome by sensory resonance. The Tigger power is abruptly stilled, changed by a silently welling solemnity. It’s a stirring sight: Phil as low-rent Proust, unable to search out the phrases. “I’ve to inform you one thing,” he says finally. “It’s so wild to really feel an emotion within the meals.”
Levy is deadpan, anhedonic, a prisoner of his personal eyebrows: A few of his observations appear to be a problem to the very idea of interestingness. (Breakfasting on a balcony in Saint-Tropez: “The meals is exceptionally good and, you recognize, the view is beautiful. I imply, you may see why that is such a preferred place in Europe. It’s completely beautiful. Actually.”) Tucci in Italy is mysterious, saturnine. Bald as a saint. Strolling about in a subdued ecstasy of dapperness, sockless and stubbled, scarf knotted simply so. His high-quality downward-tending actor’s cadence ripples via the commentary. Response-wise, he’s a minimalist, counting on the calligraphy of his thick-framed glasses and the lean planes of his face to speak a deep inwardness of foodie pleasure. Besides in Sicily, for some cause, the place he turns into notably expressive: “I need to stay with you!” he tells one chef after a chew of uncooked fish, and “I need to take a shower in it!” after a swallow of native wine.
There’s a countercultural facet—given the state of issues proper now, given the roar within the ether—to those reveals. The niceness in them is pervasive, like a contagion. Persons are taking their time, perfecting their crafts, having fun with their lives. Great native delight, however no tribalism. A spirit of welcome all over the place. Very alienating after some time. You’ll crave some anarchy, some venom, some insanity. As Jim Henson put it when he was pitching The Muppet Present to TV stations: “The time is correct for a range present hosted by canine, frogs and monsters.” Which is why, after Phil, and Eugene, and Stanley, you have to watch Conan.
Conan O’Brien has been getting increasingly attention-grabbing. Now 61, he’s an elder statesman of comedy, chortling away with the superstar friends on his podcast Conan O’Brien Wants a Pal and reminiscing in regards to the excessive days of Saturday Evening Dwell. However as he ages, he’s additionally changing into wilder and clownier and extra unstably and violently ginger, as if there’s an Eric André crashing round inside him, or one of many Jackass crew.
Did you see him on Scorching Ones ? That is the YouTube discuss present, type of an anti-food present, the place friends—whereas trying to reply the eloquent and looking out questions of the host, Sean Evans—should work their approach via progressively extra annihilating ranges of sizzling sauce on a hen wing. It’s an important present: Friends are frequently decreased to, in Martin Amis’s phrase, “tears of barbaric nausea.” And O’Brien actually goes for it. Sauce by sauce and wing by wing, he devastates himself. He gnaws, he drools, he emits steam. He alters shade, after which modifications once more. His quiff twanging madly, he rubs sizzling sauce onto his shirted nipples. Then—to the gentle alarm of Evans—he guzzles the most popular, most harmful sauce straight from the bottle, crying, “Why can’t I really feel ?”
So right here he’s, within the Dantean wooden of midlife, advancing upon decrepitude, his palate destroyed by deadly peppers. The intro to his new present on Max, Conan O’Brien Should Go, is spoken by Werner Herzog: the voice from the iceberg, crystallizing its syllables. “Behold the defiler.” (Cue a montage of O’Brien variously writhing, collapsing onto bystanders, and floating down a Thai canal with a rubber hen in his hand.) “His character is vile, base, and wicked … This clown with uninteresting, tiny eyes, the eyes of a crudely painted doll.”
O’Brien is aware of all of the tips of the eating-and-traveling present. In Norway, he invitations the ever-present drone into his lodge room; it floats down throughout Bergen Harbor (“Oh man,” O’Brien says in voice-over. “Take a look at this unbelievable drone shot! … You gotta use drone cameras on these journey reveals”), flies in via the balcony window, and hovers by his mattress as he sips a glass of crimson wine. In an Irish butcher’s store, he explains that he’s gotta style the native meals and react lavishly to it. The butcher provides him a few slices of black pudding—nothing fancy, a breakfast staple in Eire—and O’Brien has a pretend gastronomic match. He falls to the ground, eyes closed, caressing his lengthy thighs in erotic rapture. The butcher stands by, deadpanning like Eugene Levy.
Has O’Brien fluked his option to the darkish, darkish coronary heart of it? As a result of possibly that is what they’re all about, the eating-and-traveling reveals: It’s late within the day, and our style buds have been blasted, and we’ve obtained to really feel one thing.
This text seems within the October 2024 print version with the headline “Males on Journeys Consuming Meals.”
