Late chef and author Anthony Bourdain was one of the most charismatic and outspoken
figures to ever hit the small screen.
His first foray into TV was on Food Network's A Cook's Tour, but Travel Channel's Emmy-winning
No Reservations was the show that really put Bourdain on the map.
Launched in 2005, the irreverent food-and-travel docu-series made Bourdain a household name
and paved the way for his more politically-charged work on CNN's Parts Unknown.
Here a few things you may not know about No Reservations.
The pitch
One of the reasons Bourdain moved from Food Network to Travel Channel was because of a
falling out with the network's higher-ups.
Bourdain was on a book tour in Spain when a famous local chef invited him into his kitchen
to film an episode, but Food Network rejected the idea.
He made the episode anyway and sold it to Travel Channel, who had no qualms about running
it, and it later aired as a No Reservations special.
Bourdain told The New Yorker that his initial pitch for the show was basically
"I travel around the world, eat a lot of s***, and basically do whatever the f*** I want."
Years after Bourdain left the Food Network, he openly criticized many of its chefs and
shows.
According to Bourdain, the network's biggest stars are largely intolerable, saying that
Emeril Lagasse is "unwatchable," Sandra Lee is "pure evil," and Rachael Ray, quote, "sells
the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough."
Slow start
Travel Channel was an underperforming network when No Reservations was first conceived,
and was probably best known for carrying of the World Poker Tour - if you're into that
stuff.
. The pilot episode of No Reservations, set in France, reached fewer than one million
viewers.
The second episode of the series, featuring Bourdain in Iceland, also bombed.
Instead of cancelling the show, network execs decided to make it even bigger and bolder,
and let Bourdain's personality really shine through.
A former executive at Travel Channel told The Washington Post,
"I knew this was someone [viewers] would respond to.
They just had to see him."
The strategy worked.
Soon, viewers were tuning in not only to see where Bourdain would travel to next, but to
see Bourdain himself, and, over time, some incredible guest stars.
A mainstay of the show was Bourdain's friend and fellow chef Eric Ripert.
Ripert first appeared on A Cook's Tour and would continue to make appearances on his
shows until Bourdain's passing.
It was Ripert who found Bourdain in his hotel room while the two were filming an episode
of Parts Unknown in France.
Changing lives
Xi'an Famous Foods started as a simple noodle stand.
After being featured on No Reservations in 2007, business started booming.
Years later, the owner's son Jason Wang was able to tell Bourdain how the lives of everyone
in his family had changed.
He wrote on Twitter,
"I approached Tony and told him, while he may have no idea what he has done for our
family and business by simply saying he enjoyed the food, I wanted him to know it helped bring
our family out from living in one room in Flushing to living the American Dream."
The restaurant paid homage to Bourdain by donating their earnings on the day Bourdain
died to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
They raised more than $73,000 and thanked their customers on Twitter for helping them
honor Bourdain's memory.
In a 2018 piece for Elle, filmmaker Danya Alhamrani, who guided Bourdain during his
2008 visit to Saudi Arabia, wrote about what he had done for her country.
"To this day, 10 years later, I'm still told by people I meet that the only good thing
they see online about Saudi Arabia is the episode of No Reservations.
[...] People were hungry for real stories from Saudi Arabia, about real Saudis, and
Tony finally gave us a voice."
Alhamrani added that more than simply filming in her country, Bourdain genuinely tried to
get to know the culture and the people.
"He experienced everything with an open mind and an open heart and relayed it very beautifully
in the episode."
Road-tested
To do what Bourdain did on No Reservations took not only an incredible sense of adventure,
but also an iron stomach.
He swallowed everything from a warthog anus that had been cooked without a thorough cleaning
in Namibia to fermented shark in Iceland.
Those two dishes topped the list of foods Bourdain said he would never eat again along
with airplane food in general.
He once told Time magazine:
"No one has ever felt better after eating plane food."
According to Bourdain, the secret to not getting sick on the road is to simply eat what the
locals eat.
He shared with Newsweek what he learned while filming No Reservations.
"I've long found that the person on our crew most likely to get sick is the one who is
sort of wary of street food and local food.
They always get sick from eating the breakfast buffet at the hotel.
[...] You eat in crowded local joints, and chances are you're going to be okay."
It might be sound advice, but you can't really blame members of the crew for not wanting
to eat raw seal eyeball.
"Hmm.
Not bad!"
Double duty
Filming more than a dozen episodes each season of a show that requires you to travel around
the globe can be taxing.
Bourdain would often be out of the country for 250 days out of the year.
To make things worse, while filming No Reservations, he also filmed two seasons of a sort of spin-off
show called The Layover from 2011 to 2013.
While Bourdain and the crew would spend several days in each location for No Reservations,
on The Layover they would only have 24-to-48 hours to build a story around each destination.
Bourdain told Eater,
"I like doing what I do and I like doing sixteen episodes of No Reservations a year, but The
Layover was hard on me.
It was hard with that much food and liquor in a two-day shooting period, back-to-back-to-back.
And that's after shooting No Reservations."
No second takes
One of the most endearing aspects of No Reservations was Bourdain's frank and outspoken personality.
The sincerity he brought to the screen helped viewers relate to him, and Bourdain recognized
this.
While most of "reality" TV is anything but, Bourdain didn't believe in faking anything
on the show.
Over the years, he worked to eliminate what he called "painful fakery."
He told Forbes,
"You won't see me entering the house or the restaurants meeting the chef.
We don't do retakes [...] it ruins everything."
Bourdain added that he omitted these kind of shots and kept everything to one take because
he didn't want his hosts to think he was insincere.
"It's already an artificial, weird construct, but with that kind of nonsense […] it's
only going to get worse.
We hope this makes an essentially artificial process, less artificial."
Full circle
After years of filming in exciting cities around the world, fans expected No Reservations
to go out with a bang.
It did, but not in the way they expected.
Instead of going to some remote location, Anthony Bourdain kept things local.
Born in New York City and raised in New Jersey, Bourdain never spent much time getting to
know the nearby New York City borough of Brooklyn.
For the show's final episode, he decided to explore it.
It was a sharp change from the international destinations viewers had come to expect from
the show, but in many ways Brooklyn was a foreign country for Bourdain.
The TV personality spent so much time traveling for his show that his own city became something
of a stranger.
Setting the final episode in Brooklyn also drove home Bourdain's belief that travel is
important, but that you don't need to go far to have an adventure.
One of Bourdain's most beloved quotes ends the episode and declares his travel philosophy:
"If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move.
As far as you can, as much as you can.
Across the ocean, or simply across the river."
Switching gears
The final episode of No Reservations was the end of an era, but also the start of a new
one.
Bourdain didn't end the show to quit traveling and retire, but rather to travel to even more
destination.
He moved to CNN and began work on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, which carried on
the spirit of No Reservations and its predecessor, A Cook's Tour, but with a decidedly more political
edge.
"So there's life after coal?"
"There's life after coal."
Bourdain told Adweek after No Reservations wrapped,
"There are a lot of places where me and my team have been wanting to make television
for a long time and haven't been able to.
And CNN has the infrastructure and inclination to make those places doable."
Bourdain would end up working on Parts Unknown until his death.
CNN mourned the loss of Bourdain, as did the rest of the world.
The network expressed their thoughts in a statement that reflected what millions around
the world also felt:
"His talents never ceased to amaze us and we will miss him very much."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.
That's 1-800-273- 8255.