Bourdain’s voyage goes on 3 years after his death
Chef ’s assistant finishes his ‘travel guide’
In March 2017, Anthony Bourdain had an idea for a book but no time to write it. Since he started traveling and eating on camera with the Food Network’s “A Cook’s Tour” in 2000, the chef, frequent dropper of f-bombs and insatiable eater of delicious things had spent the majority of his time in the field, most recently for his CNN show, “Parts Unknown.” Bourdain and his team decided he would carve out some time to write in the summer of 2018, when he would have a few rare continuous weeks at home during a break in filming. That, of course, never happened, as Bourdain died by suicide in June 2018.
Nevertheless, almost three years after his death, and after a pandemic that almost completely shut down international travel, Ecco will publish “World Travel: An Irreverent Guide” by Bourdain and his longtime assistant (or “lieutenant,” as he often referred to her), Laurie Woolever.
“To me, there was no question that the book would go on,” Woolever said in a recent video call from her home in Queens, New York. “As long as I had the blessing of his estate, which I did, I wanted to finish it as a way to serve his legacy.”
“World Travel” is built out of a somewhat amorphous vision, an “atlas of the world as seen through his eyes,” Woolever writes in the book’s introduction. It is the second book, after 2016’s “Appetites,” that includes Woolever’s name on the cover just under Bourdain’s, albeit smaller. It speaks to the power of Bourdain’s legacy and the singularity of his point of view that his name still sits so boldly on the book’s cover despite the fact that he contributed not a single new written word to its 469 pages.
The book is built to read like a travel guide, even if it would be a stretch to use it as one. It covers 43 countries, with Bourdain’s recommendations for restaurants, hotels and other attractions in each one drawn mostly from his various TV shows. In between, Woolever, who was archivist, fact-checker and editor on the book, as well as its co-author, has inserted context and, for each destination, a section on airports, public transportation and taxi costs. Occasionally she adds her own recommendations based on her travels and knowledge of Bourdain’s favorite off-camera spots.
Bourdain never professed to being a fan of travel guides and, before this book, he had never really expressed much interest in writing one. In an interview during South by Southwest in 2016, he admitted that he rarely read them.
“I like atmospherics,” he said. “I don’t want a list of the best hotels or restaurants; I want to read fiction set in the place where you get a real sense of what that place is like.”
Despite this, Woolever said there was also an understanding between the two of them that a guide could be exactly what his fans wanted.
“I would like to think that even if someone has seen every episode, even if they’ve read every book, there is the possibility of fresh discovery with this book,” she said.
The choice of what to include — which Singaporean hawker stalls, Spanish tapas restaurants or American dive bars made the list — mostly came out of one hourlong, recorded conversation in the spring of 2018 between Woolever and Bourdain at Bourdain’s Manhattan high-rise apartment, which he had, according to Woolever, decorated to mimic one of his favorite hotels, Los Angeles’ Chateau Marmont.
“I prepared ahead of time for this meeting with Tony by making a list of every place he had been,” Woolever said. Then, as Bourdain chain-smoked and free-associated, she took notes.
“He would just, off the top of his head, say, ‘We’ve got to include this market stall, and this place with the chicken,’ ” she recalled. “He had a pretty astonishing level of recall for somebody who had done so much.”
In that quiet summer of 2018, Bourdain was planning
to go through the curated list of countries and cities and write new, original essays about them. From his work on television, it isn’t hard to imagine what they could have been: an effusive, profanity-laced ode to the decadent and delicate noodle soups of Vietnam perhaps, or an examination of why he loved old colonial hotels in the tropics so much despite their often problematic histories.
The conversation, meant to be the first of many brainstorming sessions, became Woolever’s only blueprint. Facing all of the unwritten essays, she reached out to Bourdain’s friends, family members and former colleagues to fill that space.
“It’s a hard and lonely thing to co-author a book about the wonders of world travel when your writing partner, that very traveler, is no longer traveling that world,” Woolever admits in the book’s introduction.
Over the course of the
book, Woolever never makes the claim that the guide is comprehensive — and the end result does feel incomplete and unbalanced. And if it’s a guide they are after, travelers may be left wanting.
In Cambodia, you get recommendations for three hotels, two markets for dining and a suggestion to check out the temples of Angkor Wat, the country’s most famous attraction by a long shot. It isn’t exactly the list of hole-in-the-wall spots with no addresses that fans of Bourdain may be hoping for. What those fans will find, though, is Bourdain’s word-for-word rant against American military involvement in Cambodia. (“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”)
Having those passages — the no-holds-barred monologues that were a hallmark of his television shows — in one place might be the book’s greatest strength.