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Tony Bourdain Talks Baltimore...kind of

This was linked at the end of the Colicchio article from the DCist. It's an interview with celebuchef Anthony Bourdain and he talks a bit about Baltimore and its racial problems:

:What differences do you encounter when planning a show at a domestic versus an international location? How do you scout them out?

There was a basic change in perspective that happened, looking at a place outside of New York with the same approach I give to foreign countries. Very early on, I was a snob about where we went. The Vietnamese could do no wrong, and I tended to look down upon or sneer at Middle America and the South and Southwest. That's changed a lot for me over time. I eventually started cutting people in the States the same slack that I do for people who believe very different things on the other side of the world. But generally what gets us to a place is we get hooked into a visual or film cue.

It helped very much in the case of Baltimore that I'm a total, obsessive fan of The Wire. Being able to access a couple of characters from the show, and having the look of that show in the front of our minds made our camera crew very excited about riffing off the look of that show. It's just a starting point. If there's a film we want to rip off for the cinematography or the music, for instance. Characters or some aspect of the town that I'm interested in or obsessed with, chefs I'm friends with in that area. All of those things are good factors. With D.C., I know Jose Andres is doing very well. I've been there a number of times, and there were certain places that I wanted to get, personal obsessions that I wanted to indulge. That wasn't as hard a show to set up, and a fairly personal one.

In the D.C. episode, you discuss the "other" D.C., the non-political one. You talk with author George Pelecanos about the racial and economic divisions of the city, following a narrative of destruction, renewal and hope for the future. This seems to have some parallels with your New Orleans show. Do you feel like this is a pattern true across a number of urban areas?

The challenge for us from the very first episode is that we vowed that we're going to do a Paris show without going to the Eiffel Tower. If we can do that and keep to a minimum of recognizable landmarks, that is definitely a good thing. And I think George Pelecanos's work was the way in for me in D.C. I like the way he makes D.C. an interesting place to read about. I don't really care about monuments. We're bludgeoned with politics and pundits all day long. We know what happens with that Washington, because if that Washington catches a cold, we all sneeze. The terrain that Pelecanos has been mining in his fiction was very interesting to me. And Jose got me involved with DC Central Kitchen.

The racial problems, the racial divides are very, very similar to what's going on in Baltimore, Detroit, Buffalo, a lot of other towns. I'm not Dan Rather here, but I'd rather show people that side of town than the best restaurant in town. But of course, being friends with Jose, I couldn't resist doing Minibar. If I can get that kind of access to a restaurant or personality, and show people in an informal way what I really like to eat, it's always going to work better as television than somebody I don't know. I generally don't do the best restaurant in town unless I know the chef. And it helps when they're funny as hell."

The rest of the interview is here

posted by Bagel @ 12:24 PM