Eating with Tony or how to learn about life

When you read Antony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour, you cannot but recognize that food is not just food. Throughout his trips to France, Portugal, Russia or Morocco, the chef -humbly followed by an array of cameras- has eaten a range of dishes from the finest (oysters in Arcachon) to the most suspicious (a desert bug), experiencing emotions worthy of a roller coaster. His aim ? To find the perfect meal.

Dragged away in his race, we readers feel nauseous as well, when Bourdain suffers the slaughter of the Portuguese pig. We cannot but be nostalgic, when we are brought to the beaches of the chef's childhood. And when he runs through the colored street market of Ho Chi Minh, we are seized by the same feeling of amazement than him.

However, the book does not only display how Bourdain got to learn about local food specialities. It shows also how he got to learn about traditions and customs, landscapes and people. Above all, how he got to learn about himself. Indeed, each chapter works on its own, delivering in the last lines a message -personal realization, moral lesson, political awareness- that the whole experience of food literally engendered.

As he returned with his brother on the coasts of Western France, a place cherished since childhood, all is changed. Like a symbol of time passing, the absence of the house of their old neighbor, Monsieur Saint-Jour, torn and built upon, seized the brothers. Whereas Bourdain tried desperately to set the scene of his old memories (ride through the dune, firecrackers, saucisson à l'ail), “something was missing” (p. 35). As we walk along the narrator through the beaches of Brittany, we see more and more accurately the hole left empty since the death of his father in Bourdain's heart. The moment of the realization is particularly poignant : “I'd come to see my father. And he wasn't there.” (p. 46)

However, the chapter is also scattered with flashes of wit, and humor rubs shoulders with culinary explanations. Let's savor again the metaphor of oysters' reproduction (p.41): “Picture the swimming pool at Plato's Retreat back in the 1970s. That fat guy at the other end of the pool with the gold chains and the back hair ? He's getting you pregnant. Or maybe it's the Guccione look-alike by the diving board. No way of knowing.” Despite his underlying sadness, no bitterness in Bourdain's pot.

Indeed, the richness of the style, alternatively juggling with culinary remarks, sociologic or political observations, memories and jokes, gives the book its playfulness. But A Cook's Tour is not only a light-hearted reading. Whether through philosophical inquiries (p. 122, Bourdain is considering “for the first in a while, the possibility of happiness”) or bucolic descriptions of the landscapes of Portugal (p. 20) and Vietnam (p. 56), the book gained a depth that makes us realize that this adventure is not only a matter of food. It is an experience of life.