San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Finishing Anthony Bourdain’s last book.
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, this week, 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, N.Y. “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 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: One particularly charming section includes a delivery request that Bourdain emailed to Woolever, for Pastrami Queen, a kosher deli on New York’s Upper East Side.
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 them that a guide could be exactly what his fans wanted.
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 hour-long, recorded conversation in the spring of 2018 between Woolever and Bourdain held 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: His younger brother, Christopher Bourdain, writes about traveling to the Jersey Shore and Uruguay for episodes of “Parts Unknown” and “No Reservations”; record producer Steve Albini provides a lengthy list of his favorite where-would-Bourdain-eat spots in Chicago; Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg recounts how the stunt that made her restaurant famous (a “bone luge” shot, in which bourbon is poured down a hollowed-out veal bone) was concocted for an episode of “The Layover,” the relatively short-lived Travel Channel show that was, before this book, the closest Bourdain ever came to making a “how to” guide.
“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.
Woolever knew Bourdain well after so many years, and it was that closeness that helped her get through some of the hard decisions in putting together the book, she said.
Much of that decision-making process involved talking to others: members of his close circle of confidants, his production team and past fixers who offered updated information on old spots Bourdain might have visited.
“I never want to speak for Tony, but if I had to speculate — and I think we all agreed — I think he would want these things that had been set in motion to go on,” she said. She ran decade-old “No Reservations” picks by past collaborators to make sure they were still good. She pored over transcripts of past shows and spent days contacting chefs in the French countryside or along the Mozambique coast to make sure they were still operating.
That fact-checking process took on a new level of intensity, of course, with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, as restaurants globally were hit hard.
“I did check to see that all the listed venues were still open just before the window closed to any new edits,” she told me. She knows of just one establishment — Cold Tea bar in Toronto — that has closed since but doesn’t regret its inclusion in the book.
“I am happy to have its listing remain in the text because Tony loved it, and I hope that the business owners may be able to resurrect it in the future,” she said.
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. The countries of Ghana, Ireland and Lebanon get three pages apiece; the United States gets nearly 100. There is a chapter on Macau but nothing on Indonesia or Thailand. These are somewhat predictable shortcomings, dependent as the book is on voice-over transcripts spanning decades and the impossible task of stringing them together across time.
Some of the inclusions feel at odds with Bourdain’s avoid-the-tourists approach to travel as well. In the Tokyo section, recommendations include the Park Hyatt hotel (made famous by “Lost in Translation,”); Sukiyabashi Jiro, the restaurant at the center of the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”; the bizarre kitschfest that is the Robot Restaurant; and a bar in the tourist-clogged Golden Gai neighborhood. These may be all appealing attractions to a first-timer in Tokyo, but there is nothing in that selection that you wouldn’t find at the top of an algorithm-generated TripAdvisor list.
Because of tragic circumstances following its inception, “World Travel” may feel more like an anthology of greatest hits than a new, original guidebook. But read cover to cover, country by country, it is an enduring embodiment of Bourdain’s love for the whole world and a reminder of how to stack our priorities the next time we’re able to follow in his footsteps.