Bourdain in Hanoi
Here is an excerpt from a classic article written by for The New Yorker (February 5, 2017). To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: William Mebane for The New Yorker
* * *
Guided by a lusty appetite for indigenous culture and cuisine, the swaggering chef has become a travelling statesman.
When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV.
Obama was scheduled to meet with President Trần Đại Quang, and with the new head of Vietnam’s national assembly. On his second night in Hanoi, however, he kept an unusual appointment: dinner with Anthony Bourdain, the peripatetic chef turned writer who hosts the Emmy-winning travel show “Parts Unknown,” on CNN. Over the past fifteen years, Bourdain has hosted increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same program. Initially, it was called “A Cook’s Tour,” and aired on the Food Network. After shifting to the Travel Channel, it was renamed “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” and it ran for nine seasons before moving to CNN, in 2013. All told, Bourdain has travelled to nearly a hundred countries and has filmed two hundred and forty-eight episodes, each a distinct exploration of the food and culture of a place. The secret ingredient of the show is the when-in-Rome avidity with which Bourdain partakes of indigenous custom and cuisine, whether he is pounding vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg or spearing a fatted swine as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo. Like a great white shark, Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open, on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy. In Bourdain’s recollection, his original pitch for the series was, roughly, “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” The formula has proved improbably successful.
People often ask Bourdain’s producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.
* * *
Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer, has been contributing investigative reporting to The New Yorker since 2006. His coverage of crime and corruption has ranged from the mystery of a teen’s drowning in the Thames to Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid epidemic. Keefe is the author of “London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth,” based on his 2024 feature in the magazine; “Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks,” a selection of his New Yorker pieces; “Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty,” which received the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction; and “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Orwell Prize for political writing, and the Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations, and was named one of the twenty best books of the century by the New York Times. His previous books are “The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream,” which was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, and “Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.”
Keefe’s story “A Loaded Gun,” about the troubled history of the mass shooter Amy Bishop, received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing in 2014. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and for Profile Writing in 2024. Keefe holds a law degree from Yale. He is the creator and host of the 2020 podcast “Wind of Change,” about the strange convergence of Cold War espionage and nineteen-eighties heavy metal, and he was an executive producer of FX’s limited series “Say Nothing,” from 2024, based on his book of the same name. Originally from Boston, he lives with his family in New York.