Good Eats II

Chef Anthony Bourdain is a fucking badass. As I wrote in To the People's first-ever blog post earlier this month:

Bourdain cooks and eats greasy, fatty and even repugnant foods, all while swearing, drinking and smoking like a condemned prisoner with nothing to lose. He’s a hero.

Besides his status as executive chef at New York City's Les Halles brasserie (I've had their great steak frite at both the Miami and DC locations), Bourdain is also a superb author -- of a fantastic cookbook, an "urban historical", and at least one turgid and -- sadly -- unreadable work of fiction. (Clarification: I've only read one of his three.)

More notably -- to me, at least -- Bourdain also has written two of the finest books I've ever read. In the first, Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain tells of his own fascinating, funny and eminently readable rise from the bottom of the kitchen to success through hard work, good luck, bad luck, and copious amounts of drugs and alcohol.

In A Cook's Tour, Bourdain takes readers with him as he travels the world in search of numerous cultures' best and riskiest eating experiences. As a reader, I practically felt the knife in my hand as Bourdain slaughtered a pig on an Iberian farm, drooled as he described the succulent sheep testicles cooked by his Bedouin hosts in North Africa, and shared his urge to retch while eating iguana in Mexico.

Not risky enough for you? Try not to fear for your own life as Bourdain describes his time eating and drinking in the Wild-West atmosphere of a Cambodian automatic-weapons firing range.

But Bourdain is not just a successful chef and writer (and Ramones fan). A Cooks' Tour the book was paralleled by Bourdain's sadly downplayed Food Network show of the same name. If you have not seen the show, you need only know it is undeniably the best television show ever made. And I blame its relegation to off-hours programming on the Food Network's self-loving simp and everywhere-man Emeril Largeass -- whom Bourdain has derided as an "Ewok."

All this leads me to implore you -- the now-interested reader -- to park your ass in front of your television for Bourdain's new show, No Reservations, which debuts on the Travel Channel this Monday at 10 p.m.

"Basically, everything that makes this place good would be illegal in the United States," say Bourdain in a promo for No Reservations. Bourdain's contempt for the nanny state, and his love of straight, plain language makes his return to original programming sure to be the highlight of my summer.

Update: Fox is making Kitchen Confidential into a show.