Chef remembers Bourdain

Jose Andres talks about his final trip and TV episode with friend.

This Sunday will bring a scenario chef Jose Andres never envisioned: being the featured guest on his friend Anthony Bourdain’s CNN travel show, but with Bourdain no longer alive to watch, tweet and laugh about it.

Andres spent a week in April with Bourdain in the Asturias region of Spain, Andres’ birthplace, filming what will turn out to be one of the final episodes of “Parts Unknown.” They spoke about returning without cameras in the summer for vacation. On June 8, Bourdain killed himself in a hotel room in France.

“His voice will always be with me,” Andres said at a recent book-tour appearance in Miami. Andres pointed heavenward and said, “I think up there somehow Tony has already found his kitchen, and he’s already cooking and feeding everybody.”

Andres came to Miami Dade College to talk about his book, “We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time,” about the culinary army he mobilized last year after Hurricane Maria. Earlier that day, the charismatic chef was in North Carolina, where his World Central Kitchen nonprofit has distributed more than 250,000 meals in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. Prodded by moderator Ana Navarro, Andres took swipes at President Trump for his lack of empathy and FEMA for its flat-footed response in Puerto Rico and held forth on everything from the spherification of olives — a molecular-gastronomy cooking technique — to how he served the late Sen. John McCain one of his final meals in Washington, D.C., at his restaurant Minibar.

But the most poignant part of the two-hour talk came when Andres spoke about his longtime friend Bourdain. Andres says it was Bourdain who urged him to write the Puerto Rico book — “tell their story,” he said — and Bourdain’s book imprint, Ecco, a division of HarperCollins, published the book. The upcoming “Parts Unknown” episode featuring Asturias, which airs at 9 p.m. Sunday, will be the first without Bourdain’s trademark voiceover narration.

“He was the voice of the voiceless. He was the voice of immigrants with no papers before anybody. He was the voice of women before others. We’re going to miss him. We’re all going to miss him,” Andres said.

The posthumous season of “Parts Unknown” started Sept. 23 with an episode featuring comedian W. Kamau Bell in Kenya. The series will conclude with travels to Spain, Indonesia, Texas and New York’s Lower East Side, and two special retrospective episodes.