A Cook's Tour

The book opens with a letter from chef and author Anthony Bourdain to his wife, Nancy, written from a squalid hotel in Pailin, Cambodia, a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge, the former Cambodian communist guerrilla movement. He describes suspicious stains on the walls, a sign prohibiting automatic weapons in the lobby, and pervasive hostility, confessing that he misses home and asking Nancy to schedule a full medical workup for his return.

In the Introduction, Bourdain explains the book's premise. After the surprise success of Kitchen Confidential, his memoir about restaurant life, he pitched his editor on a plan to travel the world, eat fearlessly, and search for the perfect meal. He reflects on how context, memory, and setting often matter more to a great dining experience than technique or costly ingredients, illustrating this with a game he plays with chef friends: asked what they would choose for a last meal, they invariably name simple, nostalgic dishes rather than haute cuisine. He also discloses that he sold the television rights to the Food Network, with a crew from New York Times Television following him throughout, a compromise he describes with self-reproach after years of mocking TV food personalities.

The journey begins in Portugal, where Bourdain's boss at Les Halles, his New York restaurant, José Meirelles, arranged a traditional pig slaughter at his family farm. After 28 years of ordering meat by phone without witnessing the killing, Bourdain watched as hired butchers slaughtered the pig in a violent, protracted struggle. Over two days of meals, the community ate every part of the animal, from grilled heart and liver to blood soup and stuffed stomach. Bourdain left confirmed in his love for pork but less likely to waste it.

He and his younger brother, Chris, returned to southwest France in January to revisit the sites of their childhood summers. They found their old house largely unchanged but occupied by strangers. Bourdain ate the dark brown fish soup he remembered from decades earlier and rode an oyster boat at dawn, tasting fresh Arcachon oysters with white Bordeaux at eight in the morning. The oysters were excellent, but the transcendent epiphany he sought never arrived. He realized he had not returned for the food but to find his father, Pierre, who had died in the 1980s, a shy man who found his greatest happiness on the beach at Cap Ferret eating saucisson (dry-cured sausage) between slices of crusty bread.

Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, Bourdain discovered what he considers possibly the best food on earth: bowls of pho at the Ben Thanh market, tiny fried birds eaten whole, and Vietnamese iced coffee with condensed milk. He dined with Madame Dai, a diminutive former lawyer who was the first female lawyer under the South Vietnamese government. She teased her Communist minder by joking about being CIA and KGB. Bourdain's euphoria collapsed when he encountered a burn victim outside the market, a man whose entire upper body was uninterrupted scar tissue. Paralyzed with guilt, he retreated to his hotel and ate nothing for 24 hours.

In San Sebastián, in Spain's Basque country, he attended an all-male gastronomic society where members cooked elaborate traditional meals and sang patriotic anthems. A bar crawl through the old quarter yielded wild mushrooms sautéed with a raw egg yolk, a moment Bourdain describes as "ready to die." A tasting menu at three-Michelin-star Arzak, run by chef Juan Mari Arzak and his daughter Elena, left him awed.

Russia during its coldest winter in a century delivered Mafiya nightclubs with caged extreme fighting, a traditional banya (Russian steam bath) where Bourdain was flogged with birch branches before plunging into a frozen lake, and marathon vodka sessions with his fixer, Zamir. A cook named Sonya bullied market vendors over every beet and carrot before serving sensational borscht and pelmeni (meat dumplings) in her cramped apartment.

In Morocco, Bourdain traveled from the walled medina (old city) of Fez, where he stayed in a restored medieval palace and ate harira (a traditional soup), pastilla (pigeon pie), and couscous, to the Sahara. After watching a lamb slaughtered in an alley, he rode camels across the Merzouga dunes to a desert camp where the lamb was roasted in a sealed mud oven. He smoked hashish under the stars and, for the first time in a while, felt able to relax.

Back in Vietnam, a terrifying drive down Highway 1 to the Mekong Delta involved repeated games of chicken with oncoming trucks. At the floating market at Cai Rang, Bourdain bought coffee, baguettes, and pho from vendors who pulled alongside his boat. He reflects on the pride visible everywhere in Vietnam, arguing that it explains how a nation of farmers defeated the world's most powerful military.

Tokyo yielded what Bourdain calls the best sushi of his life, eaten at master chef Kiminari Togawa's Karaku restaurant. A transformative kaiseki dinner, a multi-course meal rooted in Japanese tradition, at a mountain ryokan (traditional inn) featured over a dozen courses served by geishas. A fugu (puffer fish) meal disappointed by being merely excellent rather than life-threatening. At the Ota fish market at four in the morning, Bourdain ate o-toro, prized fatty tuna belly, scraped from the spine of a 400-pound tuna.

The Cambodia chapter is the book's darkest passage. In Phnom Penh, Bourdain fired automatic weapons at a shooting range and ate durian for the first time, finding that the notoriously foul-smelling tropical fruit had a surprisingly rich, cheesy interior. The journey to Pailin involved a boat trip up an unmapped waterway commandeered by armed strangers, followed by 60 miles of unpaved, land-mined road lined with human skulls. Pailin proved to be a hostile, desolate town where a former Khmer Rouge official spoke of rearming rather than tourism. A nighttime encounter with screaming police at a roadblock in Battambang ended only when the group explained they were headed to the brothels.

In England, Bourdain profiles Fergus Henderson of St. John, a chef who has Parkinson's disease and has championed "nose to tail" eating. Bourdain calls Henderson's roasted bone marrow "butter from God." He also celebrates Gordon Ramsay, a leading British chef and restaurateur, whose braised beef and foie gras Bourdain found stunning. In Mexico, he visited the hometowns of his Poblano cooks in the state of Puebla, ate the best tacos of his life, and killed a turkey with a machete for mole poblano, a rich sauce of chiles and chocolate. In San Francisco, Bourdain assembled a group of top chefs for a six-and-a-half-hour, 20-course meal at Thomas Keller's French Laundry in Napa Valley, which he calls the most impressive restaurant meal of his life. In Scotland, haggis, a mix of sheep's organs, oatmeal, and black pepper, turned out to be peppery, hearty, and glorious.

Along the Vietnamese coast near Nha Trang, Bourdain selected live seafood from underwater pens and feasted on grilled lobster, steamed squid, and green crabs overflowing with roe. Returning to Saigon, he formed an intense bond with Madame Ngoc, a formidable restaurant owner who combined smothering affection with terrifying authority. At a specialty restaurant, he swallowed the still-beating heart of a cobra, drank its blood mixed with rice wine, and ate every remaining part of the snake.

In the final chapter, Bourdain abandons the quest for perfection. Writing from a beach in the French West Indies, where he and Nancy had vacationed since the 1980s, he ordered barbecued ribs at Gus's Beach Bar while Nancy ordered a cheeseburger topped with a single Kraft cheese slice. The service took half an hour, and for once Bourdain did not fidget. He concludes that he learned something on the road: "It doesn't do to waste. Even here, I use everything."