| | |  | Culinary Books | Home » » A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal | | | | | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Anthony Bourdain | | Paperback:
| 274 pages | | Publisher:
| No Imprint | | Publication Date:
| 2001 | | Package Length:
| 8.8 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.7 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.0 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.95 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 127 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
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 Funny, outrageous and informative at the same time.Jun 16, 2010
Bourdain combines a zest for the outrageous, total honesty and an enormous curiousity about places and their foods.
The result is a book that keeps you chuckling (sometimes while shaking your head in disbelief) and simultaneously totally informed about the countries he visits and the culinary adventures he experiences in them.
Much better than the tv showAug 25, 2009
I'm a huge Bourdain fan. Kitchen Confidential is one of my favorite books of all time. His initial foray into TV on the Food Network was ok at best. This book reveals some of why that was the case, giving insights into the tv production process here and there.
However, what I love about this book is that it has a soul and is revealing and emotional in ways that Food Network probably wasn't interested in. This book is much more akin to what No Reservations has become - a show about exploring food and foreign cultures and being open to learning and experiencing new things in the world.
This book is at times moving (the chapter in France - if you've lost a parent, you'll feel the same way) funny and always interesting. A great read, which I've returned to many times over the years.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Ethnoculinary Traditions ExposedJul 31, 2009
"A Cook's Tour" by the wonderfully worldly and well-traveled Anthony Bourdain, is a book about food like no other, and it is simultaneously entertaining, exciting, and revolting. Tony travels the world in search of the perfect meal; it's an exciting quest for any chef to ponder, but along the way he comes across numerous local delicacies that can be best described as only for the strong of heart.
Although he encounters several problems with dishes from around the world (the Mexican sautéed ant eggs and Scottish deep-fried haggis with curry sauce and deep fried egg stand out), the most stunning for my money are the things he eats in Asia, and especially Vietnam. I for one would not be able to eat the traditional Vietnamese breakfast of soft-boiled duck embryo complete with feathers, followed by a steaming bowl of "chao muk", a hearty soup made from ginger, sprouts, cilantro, shrimp, squid, chives, pork-blood cake, and croutons; later Tony enjoyed some braised bat ("imagine braised inner tube, sauced with engine coolant"). Even worse than that, though, is the concept of eating a still-beating cobra heart, after a very special snake disemboweling ceremony.
While Vietnam takes the proverbial cake, the book features other gastronomic nightmares from around the globe, with Japan coming in second in the contest for unusual and disturbing foodstuffs. The foodie tour of Japan started out benignly enough, with an appetizer of "amuse-gueule of hoshigaka goma-an" (dried persimmon and fried soy curd with sesame paste), but quickly progressed to things like "suppon-dofu" (a soft-shell turtle in egg pudding with green onion and turtle broth), and culminated in the classic and beloved Japanese delicacy, "natto", which Bourdain describes as "an unbelievably foul, rank, slimy, glutinous, and stringy goop of fermented soybeans". After the natto, Bourdain finished with a dish described as "mountain potato": of this he said, "I could only handle a single taste. To this day, I have no idea what it really was.... The small, dark, chewy nugget can only be described as tasting like salt-cured, sun-dried goat rectum".
Throughout the book, Bourdain maintains his wry, sarcastic sense of humor, possibly as a survival tool to get him through his next meal. He mocks a vegan potluck dinner as the "real heart of darkness", discusses fabled and exotic foods such as the unbelievably rank durian fruit, and always manages to do it while being respectful of local traditions and cultures very different from his existence in New York City. This is a great book for anyone interested in foods and cultures of the world, and I recommend it highly!
 Anthony Bourdain eats the world!May 09, 2009
This was good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as Kitchen Confidential. I've been trying to decide why & I think it's because ultimately this isn't so much a food book as it is a travel book. That's okay, but the notion of hunting down the perfect meal has an appeal to me & led me to expect something different.
Having said all of that, I enjoyed the book. It's hard not to love someone who hits the jackpot with a best seller & says to themselves, "Hmmm ... I think I'll see if I can get someone to pay for me to travel around the world eating cool stuff & looking at cool & interesting places." That someone actually did agree to pay for this & that it was the Food Network makes it all the more amusing since he spends much of Kitchen Confidential slagging the Food Netwok & many of its chefs.
If you've seen No Reservations you know the schtick - Tony visits exotic locale, meets interesting people, talks a lot, & eats cool food. Often there is is drunkenness & there is the occasional oblilgatory inspired by the producers moment of Eat-This-Weird-Thing-While-We-Film-You-It'll-Be-Great-Remember-We're-Paying.
I like that Bourdain gets that great food doesn't all happen at 5-star restaurants. It can, but it doesn't happen only there. Great food also happens at people's houses, from street vendors, down at the local. It was fun to read about his meal at The French Laundry, but I'm not dropping $400-$500 on a meal anytime soon & I much more enjoyed his writing about his adventures in Mexico with the families of some of his cooks from his New York restaurant.
All in all I think that this kind of thing works better as a TV series. Ultimately with travel I want to actually see the place, the food, the people. What works as voiceover makes for okay reading, but just okay.
Well written journey for travelers and the food obsessed.Jan 13, 2009
A humorous, dark and entertaining read. After becoming obsessed with his travel channel show "No Reservations" I was drawn to delve deeper into the depths of Mr. Bourdain's twisted brain. I would say that the subtitle of my 2001 edition, "in search of the perfect meal" is slightly inaccurate. I see that the 2002 edition was renamed "Global adventures in extreme cuisines." While that may be more accurate, I would say that the book is more of a personal journey for Tony. The food descriptions are delicious, the stories are shocking and funny (sometimes in a dark way) and the book is terribly hard to put down. I loved it will probably tear through a few more Bourdain books.
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