It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV.
When the President of the United
States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments
after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack
Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter
masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon
and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad
avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and
some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the
intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he
encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass.
He might as well have watched it on TV.
Obama was scheduled to meet with President
Trần Đại Quang, and with the new head of Vietnam’s national assembly. On his
second night in Hanoi, however, he kept an unusual appointment: dinner with
Anthony Bourdain, the peripatetic chef turned writer who hosts the Emmy-winning
travel show “Parts Unknown,” on CNN. Over the past fifteen years, Bourdain has
hosted increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same program. Initially, it
was called “A Cook’s Tour,” and aired on the Food Network. After shifting to
the Travel Channel, it was renamed “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” and it
ran for nine seasons before moving to CNN, in 2013. All told, Bourdain has
travelled to nearly a hundred countries and has filmed two hundred and
forty-eight episodes, each a distinct exploration of the food and culture of a
place. The secret ingredient of the show is the when-in-Rome avidity with which
Bourdain partakes of indigenous custom and cuisine, whether he is pounding
vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg or spearing a
fatted swine as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo. Like a
great white shark, Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open,
on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy. In Bourdain’s
recollection, his original pitch for the series was, roughly, “I travel around
the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” The
formula has proved improbably successful.
People often ask Bourdain’s
producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to
Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of
the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I
kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible
place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with
Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized
tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that
it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the
planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals,
where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates
himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively
dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got
that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to
brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of
unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps
more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables
and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.
Before becoming famous, Bourdain
spent more than two decades as a professional cook. In 2000, while working as
the executive chef at Les Halles, a boisterous brasserie on Park Avenue South,
he published a ribald memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” It became a best-seller,
heralding a new national fascination with the grubby secrets and “Upstairs
Downstairs” drama of the hospitality industry. Bourdain, having established
himself as a brash truth-teller, got into public spats with more famous
figures; he once laid into Alice Waters for her pious hatred of junk food,
saying that she reminded him of the Khmer Rouge. People who do not watch
Bourdain’s show still tend to think of him as a savagely honest loudmouthed New
York chef. But over the years he has transformed himself into a well-heeled
nomad who wanders the planet meeting fascinating people and eating delicious
food. He freely admits that his career is, for many people, a fantasy
profession. A few years ago, in the voice-over to a sun-dappled episode in
Sardinia, he asked, “What do you do after your dreams come true?” Bourdain would
be easy to hate, in other words, if he weren’t so easy to like. “For a long
time, Tony thought he was going to have nothing,” his publisher, Dan Halpern,
told me. “He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is
Anthony Bourdain.”
The White House had suggested the
meeting in Vietnam. Of all the countries Bourdain has explored, it is perhaps
his favorite; he has been there half a dozen times. He fell for Hanoi long
before he actually travelled there, when he read Graham Greene’s 1955 novel,
“The Quiet American,” and the city has retained a thick atmosphere of colonial
decay—dingy villas, lugubrious banyan trees, monsoon clouds, and afternoon
cocktails—that Bourdain savors without apology. Several years ago, he seriously
considered moving there.
Bourdain believes that the age of
the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food,
and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population
were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As
a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance
team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city
for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment
across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The
restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and
charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth.
At the appointed hour, Obama exited
the Beast and walked into the restaurant behind a pair of Secret Service
agents, who cleared a path for him, like linemen blocking for a running back.
In a rear dining room on the second floor, Bourdain was waiting at a stainless-steel
table, surrounded by other diners, who had been coached to ignore the cameras
and Obama, and to focus on their bún chả. Like many restaurants in Vietnam, the
facility was casual in the extreme: diners and servers alike swept discarded
refuse onto the floor, and the tiles had acquired a grimy sheen that squeaked
beneath your feet. Obama was wearing a white button-down, open at the collar,
and he greeted Bourdain, took a seat on a plastic stool, and happily accepted a
bottle of Vietnamese beer.
“How often do you get to sneak out
for a beer?” Bourdain asked.
“I don’t get to sneak out, period,”
Obama replied. He occasionally took the First Lady to a restaurant, he said,
but “part of enjoying a restaurant is sitting with other patrons and enjoying
the atmosphere, and too often we end up getting shunted into one of those
private rooms.”
As a young waitress in a gray polo
shirt set down bowls of broth, a plate of greens, and a platter of shuddering
noodles, Bourdain fished chopsticks from a plastic container on the table.
Obama, surveying the constituent parts of the meal, evinced trepidation. He
said, “All right, you’re gonna have to—”
“I’ll walk you through it,”
Bourdain assured him, advising him to grab a clump of noodles with chopsticks
and dunk them into the broth.
“I’m just gonna do what you do,”
Obama said.
“Dip and stir,” Bourdain
counselled. “And get ready for the awesomeness.”
Eying a large sausage that was
floating in the broth, Obama asked, “Is it generally appropriate to just pop one
of these whole suckers in your mouth, or do you think you should be a little
more”.
“Slurping is totally acceptable in
this part of the world,” Bourdain declared.
Obama took a bite and let out a low
murmur. “That’s good stuff” he said, and the two of them—lanky, conspicuously
cool guys in late middle age—slurped away as three cameras, which Bourdain had
once likened to “drunken hummingbirds,” hovered around them. Noting the
unaffected rusticity of the scene, Obama was reminded of a memorable meal that
he had eaten as a child, in the mountains outside Jakarta. “You’d have these
roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields,” he recalled. “There’d be a
river running through the restaurant itself, and there’d be these fish, these
carp, that would be running through. You’d pick the fish. They’d grab it for
you and fry it up, and the skin would be real crispy. They just served it with
a bed of rice.” Obama was singing Bourdain’s song: earthy, fresh, free of
pretense. “It was the simplest meal possible, and nothing tasted so good.”
But the world is getting smaller,
Obama said. “The surprises, the serendipity of travel, where you see something
and it’s off the beaten track, there aren’t that many places like that left.”
He added, wistfully, “I don’t know if that place will still be there when my
daughters are ready to travel. But I hope it is.” The next day, Bourdain posted
a photograph of the meeting online. “Total cost of Bun cha dinner with the
President: $6.00,” he tweeted. “I picked up the check.”
By Patrick Radden Keefe
*
This article is extracted from the original post on The New Yorker on February
13 and 20, 2017, issue with the headline ‘Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast’.