Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
A Cook's Tour is the written record of Anthony Bourdain's travels around the world in his search for the perfect meal. All too conscious of the state of his 44-year-old knees after a working life standing at restaurant stoves, but with the unlooked-for jackpot of Kitchen Confidential as collateral, Mr. Bourdain evidently concluded he needed a bit more wind under his wings.The idea of "perfect meal" in this context is to be taken to mean not necessarily the most upscale, chi-chi, three-star dining experience, but the ideal combination of food, atmosphere, and company. This would take in fishing villages in Vietnam, bars in Cambodia, and Tuareg camps in Morocco (roasted sheep's testicle, as it happens); it would stretch to smoked fish and sauna in the frozen Russian countryside and the French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. It would mean exquisitely refined kaiseki rituals in Japan after yakitori with drunken salarymen. Deep-fried Mars Bars in Glasgow and Gordon Ramsay in London. The still-beating heart of a cobra in Saigon. Drink. Danger. Guns. All with a TV crew in tow for the accompanying series--22 episodes of video gold, we are assured, featuring many don't-try-this-at-home shots of the author in gastric distress or crawling into yet another storm drain at four in the morning. You are unlikely to lay your hands on a more hectically, strenuously entertaining book for some time. Our hero eats and swashbuckles round the globe with perfect-pitch attitude and liberal use of judiciously placed profanities. Bourdain can write. His timing is great. He is very funny and is under no illusions whatsoever about himself or anyone else. But most of all, he is a chef who got himself out of his kitchen and found, all over the world, people who understand that eating well is the foundation of harmonious living. --Robin Davidson, Amazon.co.uk
Book Description
Dodging minefeilds in Cambodia, diving into the icy waters outside a Russian bath, chef Bourdian travels the world over in search of the ultimate meal. The only thing Tony Bourdain loves as much as cooking is traveling, and A Cook's Tour is the shotgun marriage of his two greatest passions. Inspired by the question, 'What would be the perfect meal?', Tony sets out on a quest for his culinary holy grail. Our adventurous chef starts out in Japan, where he eats traditional Fugu, a poisonous blowfish which can be prepared only by specially licensed chefs. He then travels to Cambodia, up the mine-studded road to Pailin into autonomous Khmer Rouge territory and to Phnom Penh's Gun Club, where local fare is served up alongside a menu of available firearms. In Saigon, he's treated to a sustaining meal of live Cobra heart before moving on to savor a snack with the Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta. Further west, Kitchen Confidential fans will recognize the Gironde of Tony's youth, the first stop on his European itinerary. And from France, it's on to Portugal, where an entire village has been fattening a pig for months in anticipation of his arrival. And we're only halfway around the globe... A Cook's Tour recounts, in Bourdain's inimitable style, the adventures and misadventures of America's favorite chef.
Customer Reviews:
Review #1: Delicious read!
2007-02-20 
I loved eating vicariously through Bourdain and will recommend this book to anyone who's into food/cooking/travelling. The pursuit of the perfect meal sounds rather silly and impossible, which the author also acknowledges, but is fraught with lots of fun! I like Bourdain's candid writing style and found myself snickering/laughing/giggling while reading the book. There are also moments that I think anyone can identify with him, specifically, when he was reminiscing about foods he ate in his childhood.
As a cooking/baking/food enthusiast, I thought it's really cool to have a glimpse of the world from a chef's viewpoint. Before reading this book, I didn't like Anthony Bourdain because I thought he was intentionally abrasive and rude. However, after reading this book, I can't get enough of reading him. I wish I could watch the TV series of the same name somehow but there are no DVDs of it. Anyway, this is a totally worthy, fun read from start to finish!
Review #2: ANOTHER BOURDAIN GEM
2007-02-17 
A CULINARY TRIP AROUND THE WORLD WITHOUT HAVING TO GET ROT GUT YOURSELF, OR ANY OTHER DYSENTERIC ILLNESS. THAT'S WHERE ANTHONY COMES IN. HE DOES THE TRAVELING AND TASTING FOR YOU. IT'S ALL WRITTEN IN HIS SPECIAL, WITTY STYLE.
Review #3: Chef Bourdain strikes again!
2006-09-21 
The book if fun to read. Buy it. All right, borrow it from your library. This travel-food-olog mixes wild & interesting places and wild & interesting foods in about equal amounts. Yes, Mr. Bourdain does write like a chef, but what the heck? In his words, that's "pretty neat."
At all these wild places he goes -- Russia, North Africa, Vietnam, Japan -- one wonders how he survives both the places and the meals. The answer is, he threw himself into both with a gusto and with good expectations. This unintended lesson on life would be hard to improve on. Readers will be pleased to note how Mr. Bourdain leaves all his hosts delighted with his visit. This makes him the perfect guest. Very likely the aged Vietnamese army veteran was especially so, ever after being able to boast that he drank an American under the table.
His hosts liked him because he liked them, without prejudice. What a wonderfully entertaining book this is. If this man can find the value, and the fun, in all that he ran into, you can't help but put the book down a bit more inspired.
Review #4: confused in my reaction--great content, less than thrilling execution
2006-08-28 
I can't figure what holds me back about his book. I love Anthony Bourdain's attitude about food and his philosophy about what makes a great meal. I love his desire for absolutely fresh food, right off the bleeding stick or never touching a refrigerator, and I admire the distinctions he makes about how food looks and how it tastes--my wife is one who cannot get over the appearance of food and lets it affect her enjoyment of it, while I don't care how food looks, but simply want good-tasting stuff. I love Bourdain's sense of experimentalism, his willingness to try live cobra heart, and his sense of adventure, how he searches out a fugu chef (who knows how to properly prepare poisonous blowfish), and my wife is now relieved that I take Bourdain at his word that the stuff doesn't really have much flavor and wasn't quite worth all the excitement.
The concept of this book is fantastic--Anthony Bourdain travels to Vietnam, Japan, Cambodia, Portugal, Russia and other fine spots for the adventure of eating. And we're not just talking about the food itself--Bourdain wants the whole experience of food, from the killing of the livestock to the last shot of vodka before heading out into the night. He understands that food comes from a place and people, and he wants to know both as intimately as he can to get a true sense of what the food is about. It is a brilliant gesture in a category of writing that I find all too sterile, a style of writing often taken over by self-professed food gurus sitting in palaces removed from the real cooks and snubbing their noses at true cuisine while only praising what is served in delicate portions in a fine atmosphere. That Bourdain continually bashes Food Network stars is wonderfully brilliant and it makes me trust the man implicitely--were he to serve me brains wrapped in pig cheek and smothered with mayonnaise, I would gladly eat it if he told me it would be some good stuff.
But for whatever reason, I found this book as a whole not so engaging to read, and I can only attribute that to the writing itself. I don't know if this books suffers from Bourdain's inexperience at writing, or if this simply has been edited to death to remove a lot of life from the prose. I would love to praise this book as one of the best that has ever crossed my path, for the content itself is comforting in that it expresses the heart of a true food lover, one I will probably emulate for years to come, but as a book itself, I must say that I skipped over passages that I found highly tedious to read.
Review #5: Gonzo-gastronomic Writing at it's best
2006-08-25
It's never quite clear whether Bourdain is really after the 'perfect meal' or just expanding his repertoir of local libations. Either way, he sounds like he's having a heck of time eating, drinking, and razing the Food Network crew trailing him. Not every chapter is stellar, nor is there a particularly coherent thread, but the good chapters are bitingly hilarious and will make you want to eat things you didn't know were edible!
Two dictums attributed to the father of gonzo fit best: "Never let the facts get in the way of reporting the truth;" and "when the going turns weird, the weird turn pro." Bourdain embodies both as the delinquent chef-turned-author who manages to capture a piece of the soul of eating (and drinking) around the world. |
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