BE MORE LIKE TONY LESS LIKE GORDIE

It is there any way to travel for food and not be awful? Claudia McNeilly

The announcement for Gordon Ramsay’s forthcoming National Geographic series Uncharted was met with immediate and intense backlash, and it’s easy to see why. The show plans to feature a travelling Ramsay parachuting into various food cultures to prepare his versions of national dishes to “beat” the real thing. Chef, author and food personality Eddie Huang tweeted that Uncharted is “the last thing the food world needs right now.” Meanwhile, countless fans of the late Anthony Bourdain renounced the program as a crass copycat version of Bourdain’s Parts Unknown.

At a time when food-travel show host roles are still dominated by men, the choice to appoint Ramsay as the latest gastronomic adventurer seemed both predictable and boring. The celebrity chef ’s signature brand of yelling criticism at underlings is also not expected to bode well with the already insensitive premise of teaching local cooks how to cook their cuisine in “better” (cough: more Western) ways.

While comparisons between Uncharted and Parts Unknown were common, the CNN series accomplished the opposite of what Uncharted intends to do. Bourdain went to great lengths to avoid “othering” cultures through vigorous study and compassion. Ramsay’s desire for culinary exhibitionism, meanwhile, sounds like he’s going to parade into Laotian villages and list off all the ways the locals are preparing their sticky rice wrong.

But even while Parts Unknown continues to serve as a shining example of everything a food-travel show should be, it has spawned a particularly unsavoury phenomenon.

It all started with Bourdain’s appetite for culinary adventure. The chef, author and television personality – who once mused, “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride” – encouraged timid travellers to leave the chicken tenders at the resort buffet and journey into town to try raw pig’s blood soup and deadly fugu. But while Bourdain helped expand our palates, he also contributed to what can only be called the Anthony Bourdain effect. Many of the small, family-run eateries he visited on Parts Unknown were catapulted to global superstardom overnight, exploding with new clientele soon after the episode in which it was featured aired.

There is obviously nothing wrong with boosting a restaurant’s publicity. And yet, a sudden influx of North American tourists can cause a once charming dining room to change for the worse. It’s not Bourdain’s fault that North American tourists love to dine at restaurants with cameras wrapped around their necks and selfie sticks stacked on the table. Nor was it up to him to teach us how to be respectful while visiting international restaurants. And yet, being featured on popular food-travel shows like Bourdain’s Parts Unknown transforms a restaurant into a place that feels more touristy than authentic.

Once a restaurant gains a touristy stench, discerning travellers quickly flock elsewhere, eventually also ruining those eateries in their wake.

This form of food travel is imperfectly impossible. For every authentic street food stall we find in Bangkok and Lisbon, there are countless other eateries that travellers before us have already altered. It’s why many restaurants in Japan don’t allow tourists unless a Japanese speaking person accompanies them. I learned this firsthand when I was turned down from a sushi restaurant in Tokyo for this very reason. At first the exchange left me feeling embarrassed and furious. The second time it happened, however, I began to understand.

Restaurants have no way of knowing which diners are going to ruin their ambiance with too many photos and disrespectful attitudes. Better to keep all tourists out and preserve the ambiance that encourages local customers to return.

If there is a way to travel for food without simultaneously ruining restaurants then we have yet to discover it. And yet, our desire to dine at authentic eateries while travelling shows no signs of slowing down. Dining at local, non-touristy eateries has become a bragging right. Who hasn’t been subjected to sit through a friend, freshly back from a trip to South America, parade the incredible “hole-in-the-wall” dining experience she had in Peru like a victory badge?

But even the term “holein-the-wall” feels unnecessarily dismissive. Often, it’s reserved for eateries we deem unworthy of being called “restaurants.” Maybe the food is served with paper napkins and house wine, or a husband and wife team is working the kitchen. No one would dare call an upscale Michelin-starred restaurant like Sukiyabashi Jiro a “hole-inthe-wall.” And yet, the eatery has all the immediate qualifiers of a “hole-in-the-wall”: it’s located in a basement with only 10 tables and nothing but a small plaque indicating you’re in the right place.

It seems the first solution to our food-travel problem is to be aware of our own bias and ignorance. Instead of dismissing restaurants as “holes-in-the-wall,” we should take a more backseat approach to dining while travelling. We live in a golden age of jet-setting and connection, where authentic Thai Tom Yum soup is a mere plane ticket away. But international dining experiences are not trophies to acquire like Pokémon Go captures.

Eating is a massive part of the appeal of going on vacation. Even if you’re not a self-described “foodie,” the inclination to abandon diets and calorie counts in order to relax and enjoy everything a place has to offer – especially its food – is on the top of most people’s vacation to-do lists. We should be thankful and respectful to the eateries that host us on our journeys, instead of parading through restaurants and food cultures like we own the experience of discovering it.

In other words, be more like Bourdain and less like Ramsay.