January 23, 2012
"In a perfect world, individuals would be free to take all the heroin they wanted – and stuff their faces with trans fats as much as they like – until it becomes a problem for their neighbors. Which it clearly has."

— Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw (via fortuneandglory)

January 17, 2012
"I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able – if called upon to do so – to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world."

— Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw (via fortuneandglory)

(Source: amazon.com, via fortuneandglory)

January 9, 2012
"Sweating through your shirt, resisting the urge to double over in pain, you begin to understand. Pain - followed by relief. Burn, followed by a pleasing, anesthetizing numbess. It’s like being spanked and licked at the same time. … At no point in your youthful misadventures would the offer of even playful discomfort have appealed … Pain, you were pretty sure, was always bad. Pleasure was good. Until now, that is. When everything started to get confused."

I have never really been able to explain why it is I subject myself to foods that cause physical pain. I’m talking burn-my-nostrils, make-me-cry pain. Why?

When I was eleven years old, I had my first extra sloppy, extra spicy chicken wing from a local pizza joint - mild by my current standards, but excruciatingly painful to a child who grew up in a salt and pepper only household. A friend of my older brother - Steven was his name, five years older yet never treating me like an inferior or annoyance as so many of my brother’s other friends did as I tried so desperately to butt my way into the teenage world - brought them over on a Friday night after a football game and asked if I was interested in having some. “They’re damn hot,” he warned me, and I did not hesitate to prove my worth, to show him that I was just as much of a hardass as the rest of them, scrawniness be damned. Those wings burnt - and I panted my way through eating a half dozen, sauce dripping from my fingers, my chin - but they burnt so good. I was hooked.

Soon, my teenage love affair with jalapeno, serrano, and habanero peppers took off. Exploring atomic and suicide sauces with mandatory waivers became a priority. Middle school lunch competitions to see who could bring in and eat the spiciest sauce without blinking or taking a drink became a weekly occurrence.

Nowadays, my more subdued adult self still has an addiction to adding ingredients which cause burning sensations and when asked, I have never really been able to explain it to friends and family. Reading Bourdain’s Medium Raw tonight, I think he did a damn fine job of explaining why it is those of us who love spicy foods enjoy it so much. 

(via fortuneandglory)

January 3, 2012
"If there was any justice in this world, I would have been a dead man at least two times over. By this, I mean simply that many times in my life the statistical probabilities of a fatal outcome have been overwhelming – thanks to my sins of excess and poor judgment and my inability to say no to anything that sounded as if it might have been fun."

— Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential (via fortuneandglory)

December 31, 2011
"If I were a reasonable man, a smart man, I would have retreated to my hotel long ago. But I am a flawed vessel. I carry within me, as so many do, the seeds of my own destruction. A Rumsfeldian delusional belief in my own infallibility."

— Anthony Bourdain, The Layover (Montreal)

(Source: fortuneandglory)

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Filed under: anthony bourdain 
December 29, 2011
"Everything was different now. Everything. I’d not only survived - I’d enjoyed. This, I knew, was the magic I had until now been only dimly and spitefully aware of. I was hooked. My parents’ shudders, my little brother’s expression of unrestrained revulsion and amazement only reinforced the sense that I had, somehow, become a man. I had had an adventure, tasted forbidden fruit, and everything that followed in my life - the food, the long and often stupid and self-destructive chase for the next thing, whether it was drugs or sex or some other new sensation - would all stem from this moment."

— Anthony Bourdain on eating his first oyster as a child - from his memoir Kitchen Confidential. (via fortuneandglory)

December 22, 2011
Anthony Bourdain’s Worst Meals

  1. A Snickers bar at the airport. It was slightly past its expiration date and had the flavor and texture of peanuts preserved in wax. It nearly strangled me as it descended my gullet and it just sort of sat there, choking off my digestive process with its corporate nougat.
  2. A Big Mac eaten between shoots at a Cardiff McDonald’s. It was a greasy, fatty, and grayish-brown lump of wet meat slathered in mustard-colored sauce I’m guessing was produced from industrial solvents by a machine that has to be water-cooled. You truly get the sense of America’s reach when you’re gulping down poorly-cooked American beef covered in American processed cheese substance while a doughy man with rat eyes yells at you in Cymraeg.
  3. Skittles? I don’t know what a Skittle is, but it tastes like iodine and corn syrup. They are the sort of miserable pellets that sink to the bottom of an Easter basket when you’re a kid and you don’t even care enough to untangle them from the grass. Handed to me by my guide, Zyrikikov, during a truck stall on a particularly treacherous mountain road.
  4. There was a Taco Bell at the bus terminal in Trblej. I had something called a “Mexi-Melt” that I assume is a rough approximation of what you would get if you used a heat ray to melt a Mexican. With cheese. It did not mix well with the homemade vodka I drank from a surplus military boot.
  5. A so-called “BK Broiler” at a Rangoon Burger King. I think “BK” is an element forgotten on the periodic table, something mined very close to hell, that they then “broil” in a microwave until all of the juices have been replaced with gristle nodules. The sandwich was so appallingly bad it made me homesick for an Arby’s pile of wet sheets of beef paper on a soggy bun.

(Source: somethingawful.com)

December 14, 2011

fortuneandglory:

Bourdain makes a damn good case for why pho is one of my very favorite dishes (food porn, indeed). The carefully prepared broth, the tender mix of meats, the extreme contrast of flavors… if you haven’t tried legitimate Vietnamese pho, you don’t know what you’re missing. 

December 8, 2011
"I think it’s a willingness to try anything with a smile, and whoever’s offering, to smile back at them and give it a shot, and also a willingness to make mistakes. Things go wrong. What’s the worst that can happen? That’s okay. I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times. If you get lost and you just end up eating just anywhere, you know, you see a bunch of Venetians sitting around smoking cigarettes, eating something unrecognizable in a dark alley somewhere, chances are it’s interesting."

Anthony Bourdain on keeping an open mind when traveling.

When traveling, one can do it the way of the tourism guide (you know, coming back with those mundane stories that everyone dreads listening to) or the interesting and potentially life-altering way. 

Take a wrong turn? Don’t drop the f-bomb. That only serves to make everyone else in the car cranky. So what? Go with it. Keep driving. Switch off that GPS. Go, damn it. The GPS will guide you back later. Pull over at the strangest looking restaurant in the area. Skip the club with the line and check out the dive next door. Talk to people - my god, talk to people. You go places to experience, not to have an exclusive conversation with your travel buddy about how the weather is so much different than back home. Let loose. Don’t worry - none of these people will ever see you again. Just experience it and save the regrets for the morning.

(via fortuneandglory)

(Source: The A.V. Club, via fortuneandglory)

December 8, 2011
"You’d have to make friends [to find that out-of-the-way place the locals go to], and you’d have to get to know somebody in the town. How do you do that? Drink. Drink recklessly. Make mistakes. … This is the distilled wisdom of many wheels gone wrong … But in fact, that little out-of-the-way place, that discovery is often the result of a happy mishap or an accident. You know, car breaks down, you get lost, you end up at some grotty little place that ends up being magical."

— Anthony Bourdain on how to find the right places to eat while traveling rather than the tourist traps. (via fortuneandglory)

(Source: The A.V. Club, via fortuneandglory)

October 31, 2011
"If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel - as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them - wherever you go."

— Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (via fortuneandglory)

(Source: emotional-algebra, via fortuneandglory)

August 19, 2011
fortuneandglory:

Louie - 2x10
Another brilliant episode tonight.

fortuneandglory:

Louie - 2x10

Another brilliant episode tonight.

August 19, 2011
"I don’t have a reputation to protect. I came from nowhere. Whatever success I’ve had is from being frank and not giving a shit. I’m incapable of doing otherwise. It’s not an integrity thing - I’m just constitutionally and emotionally and neurologically incapable of keeping my mouth shut."

— Anthony Bourdain (via fortuneandglory)

(Source: tvguide.com, via somebodysaiditbetter)