Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

 @JeffHouck
 The Stew
 Table Conversations
 StewVision
 Foodspotting
 Email Jeff Houck

Most Recent Entries

• USF Poly senate expresses alarm at independence bill in the Legislature
• USF showcases creationism critic tonight
• Times reporter goes to work at USF St. Pete
• Slutty Brownies, Homemade Snickers And Bacon-Wrapped Beef Hot Dogs [This Week’s Weekend Eats]
• USF Poly board member quits, saying USF is scuttling the “Poly model”
• Decision 2012: Florida’s Pizza Primary [Every Slice Of Newsroom Pie Tells A Story]
• USF gets big grant for veterans research
• Merlot Jelly, Korean Fried Chicken and Grand Marnier Souffle [This Week’s Weekend Eats]
• Researchers say cell phone waves can reverse Alzheimer’s
• Klasko and Obama grip and grin
• Genocide, memory and art the focus of USF conference
• Poly announces budget cuts; fires top administrators
• Debate turns into test of free speech. Some students failed.
• Homemade Potsticker, Pulled Pork With Fried Egg, And Unstuffed Pork Chops [This Week’s Weekend Eats]
• What’s up with the USF debate?

More

• The Stew
• The Dirt
• Hot Pursuits
• HOMEwork
• Inside USF
• L Archive
  • Green Lite
  • Bring It!

Monthly Archives

• February 2012
• January 2012
• December 2011
• November 2011
• October 2011
• September 2011

Anthony Bourdain Comes To Lakeland Tonight [‘I’m Talking To Grandma’]

Posted Jan 8, 2010 by Jeff Houck

Updated Jan 8, 2010 at 12:45 PM

Back in August, I threw a bit of a snit about an episode of “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” that I had watched on Travel Channel. That week of the show featured the food of “Rust Belt” cities Buffalo, Detroit and Baltimore. The dubious “rust belt” label should have tipped me off.

As you can probably guess, Bourdain’s show didn’t exactly portray the cities in their best chamber-of-commerce light. And people took offense to it. Especially people in Baltimore, who didn’t like that Bourdain focused the show on the narrow prism of how the HBO dramatic crime series “The Wire” portrayed Charm City. It’s one thing to have a critically acclaimed city use Baltimore as a backdrop. It’s another to tie the food to that reputation.

Here’s a sample:

“He ignored any sense of the real diversity of Baltimore’s rich ethnic mix to try and imitate a narrow slice of it found in a TV show,” Baltimore Sun critic David Zurawik wrote. “What viewers were left with was TV imitating TV and a hot dog host acting like he was getting down with the nitty-gritty, hard core reality of urban America.”

As someone born in Baltimore who has relatives still living there, I got a little pissy about it and wrote a column which suggested that when Bourdain planned to appear in January in Lakeland at the Youkey Theater, that I would very much appreciate him not doing anything on Tampa anytime soon if it meant that he’d tag us like he did Baltimore. [Note, he appears tonight at 8 p.m. tonight. Tickets are $47.50, $75 for VIP seating.]

Anyway, I got lots of e-mail and phone calls after the column ran from readers who felt protective of Tampa as a place showcasing food with great cultural depth while being surrounded a fertile hatchery of hack chain restaurants and ephemeral dining concepts.

So when I got a call from the Lakeland Center asking if I’d want to do an advance interview, I was kind of nervous about it. I’d interviewed him before and talked to him in person once, but that was before I called him a jerk.

When we finally connected last week he could not have been any more forthcoming. And I wrote an advance story that ran earlier this week in the Tampa Tribune and TBO.com.

The story only had space for about a third of our conversation. In the resulting conversation, I confessed that I had taken a swipe at him. The part that showed him being gracious, as well as other moments that displayed an ease to laugh and his playful side with his daughter Arianne, didn’t make it into the story, so I wanted to include it here:

Q. I feel like I’m old school. On my desk, I have a paperback version of “Kitchen Confidential” on my desk which has a sticker on the front that reads “Catch the New TV Series Kitchen Confidential” on Fox.

A: [laughs]

Q. I’ve obviously been aware of it for a while, but what I didn’t realize until a couple weeks ago was that Bradley Cooper [of “Wedding Crashers,” “The Hangover] played you on the show.

A. Yes.

Q. He’s gone on to be huge.

A. Yep. And in fact, I feel a lot better about that show on DVD. [sound of child in background playfully screaming] My daughter just said, “Ariane to the rescue!”  [speaks to her] I’m on the phone. I’m talking to grandma.

[returns] Okay. Every time I talk on the phone it’s, “I’m talking to grandma.”

Q. She’s going to be in therapy years later going, “All he did was talk to grandma.”

A. Right.

I was very divided on how I felt about “Kitchen Confidential” when it was on the air, for the few weeks it was on the air. I was a little uncomfortable to see somebody with my last name and things that were both very familiar and not my book at all at the same time… with the distance of time I look back at the DVD… there’s a lot to like about that show, actually, now that I’m separated from the idea that it’s my book. As sitcoms go, and particularly sitcoms set in kitchens, it’s pretty racy and pretty funny.

Q. I keep seeing variations of your book come out where they say, “It’s the ‘Kitchen Confidential’ of X.”

A. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Q. Does it seem odd to you to have inspired that kind of cottage industry?

A. “The book that will blow the lid off the landscaping business” Aw, I don’t know. I think in a lot of cases I’m really, really happy. If “Kitchen Confidential” made it easier for other chefs and cooks to write memoirs… You know, there was a time when nobody gave a [fecal expletive]. That would not be a viable product for a lot of publishers. So if it made it easier for someone like Gabrielle Hamilton to write a memoir, then I am just thrilled and honored.

Q. Hard to believe it’s only been 10 years.

A. For me it feels like yesterday because my life changed so, so drastically. Literally overnight I went from a guy with nothing and no hope and no future and not even any dreams to someone who lives out their dreams for a living.

Q. The next season starts on Jan. 11. Where will you be going this time?

A. The first episode is Panama, I think. Among other things, I get to burn 6 tons of pure-cut cocaine. That was fun. We got up into the Darien Gap in the jungle.

We have Panama, the central highlands of Vietnam. Manchuria. Let’s see, we’ve been to Ecuador … Prague.

Q. So you wanted to go to somewhere less exotic than Baltimore.

A. [laughs] Uh, Baltimore is pretty exotic.

Q. In the interest of full disclosure, when they announced you were coming to Lakeland, I wrote a column that basically said, “Please don’t come to Tampa.”

A. [laughs]

Q. My family is all from Baltimore and I’m fully aware of all the problems Baltimore has. But I thought, “Oh [fecal expletive], if he comes to Tampa, we’re dead.”

A. You know, I was not looking to make a Baltimore show. I was looking to go hang out with the people from “The Wire.” That was that.

It’s funny how the different way that Detroit and Baltimore reacted to the show. Detroiters were totally, like, they were like, “[Deistic-based expletive] right we’re one of the most [intercourse-related expletive] up cities in America and proud of it.” And Baltimore got really bent out of shape. I got really overwhelmingly negative response.

Q. I think the show, from a cinematography and storytelling side, is the gold standard and has been for a long time on TV. Do you think the backlash is a sign of the influence of the show?

A. I don’t know. I think in a lot of places that don’t get a lot of coverage that there’s an expectation that when a presumably food and travel show comes to town that they’re going to show the best side and the best face of that town and give a representative picture. That there’s some implied responsibility. That’s not what we’ve ever been about. Ever.

That whole show was about David Simon’s view of Baltimore as interpreted by me. And about the cinematography. And because I’d spent a little bit of time there. I am even as a New Yorker with the South Bronx not too far away, it’s pretty damn unbelievable. It’s idiomatic of a national ill that frankly pisses me off. And when I read in the paper people saying, “Well, that’s not my Baltimore,” or “That’s not the Baltimore I live in or I see,” I say, yeah, exactly.

Q. It’s emblematic of a slice, but it’s a slice that exists nonetheless.

A. And I, quite frankly, had a really good time. I used to really have a problem about Baltimore and I found a lot to love about it. People really hated seeing me eating lake trout [at The Roost], like it was embarrassing or something. I thought that stuff was great.

Q. The only way it could have been better is if you had gone to the Giant and picked out some Tastycakes.

A. Yeah. [laughs]

Q. I think last season you went back to sort of rediscover the parts of New York you hadn’t been fully aware of and you found this huge range of cuisine that before that time wasn’t on your radar.

A. Yup. Yup. It’s shameful.

Q. Well, we started doing this thing after your series and Andrew Zimmern’s show debuted where we said, you know, we don’t have your budget. But I can drive through Tampa and do what we called “underbelly tours” of places you’d only normally drive by and see bars on the windows and not go in. It’s amazing to me the hunger there is for people to discover these new places. They either don’t have the motivation or the courage to go to the areas that they’re not familiar with.

A. I think Jonathan Gold, that’s the kind of food writing of the future. I think the Pulitzer he got was totally a game changer. And in his recent op/ed in the Sunday L.A. Times, he said something really important. For the first time, eating has become a countercultural movement. Like these Twitter-based mobile restaurants and this frenzy among young people who are dying to find these out of the way places and hole in the wall places. That’s a whole new dynamic and really exciting. It’s a good time to be hunting down those kinds of places.

Q. I saw your piece recently in the New York Times. It’s almost like you’ve become an elder statesman. Do you feel any type of responsibility or are you just trying to do what you do?

A. I feel no responsibility at all.

As a chef, I was in the pleasure business. I was not an ethicist or a dietician. As a writer and TV guy, I think the best I can hope to do is stay curious and stay engaged and entertaining myself. Because if I’m not entertaining myself, or satisfying my own curiosity, there’s no reason for anyone to care what I say or what I do or where I go.

I think if I have one responsibility I feel deeply about is that as someone who is amazingly lucky enough to travel this world, I feel an obligation to be a good guest, to be appreciative of the people who cook me food.