The Periphery Bites Back: Anthony Bourdain in New Jersey
On Jersey, Roadrunner, my extended absence from writing about Bourdain, and (somehow) my daddy issues
I hope that at least some of you noticed that this newsletter vanished for a few weeks, although I think most of my subscribers have already been trained to accept my disappearances.
There are a couple of different reasons that I could give as to why I disappeared this time, even though compared to my other absences, which were months-long, it hasn’t been that drastic. I’ve been extremely busy with work and sorting out my bureaucratic shit (yes I moved three months ago, but this is Croatia that we’re talking about), and this newsletter is pretty time-consuming. I have to find 45 free minutes during the week to watch an episode, spare minutes that I rarely have, and then even more free time (and spare brain cells) to write about it.
I was also at my grandmother’s for a few weeks to sort out paperwork, and I have this bizarre guilt about watching stuff on the computer when I’m at her house (if we’re watching TV together, that’s fine). It feels rude, especially when I’m already working 10-hour days and she has to spend that whole time watching me cry on the computer and she’s nice enough to tiptoe around the house to avoid bothering me. My brother has no qualms about spending a few hours on YouTube when he comes for a stay, and my cousins spend most of their visits on their phone, but I got walloped with most of the familial guilt because I’m the only girl. I’m also trying to hold on to my title of favorite grandchild here.
But those are all excuses. I could have watched an episode when my grandmother went to sleep, I could have found the time. I just didn’t want to because for a while I felt ambivalent about this whole newsletter project thanks to Roadrunner.
For those who don’t know, Roadrunner is a documentary about Anthony Bourdain’s life made by Morgan Neville. It may seem strange to make a documentary about a man whose every moment was documented on TV for the past twenty years, but there is a potential for great insight here—potential that I’m not sure was realized in the movie, given the reviews. The director has said that part of the reason he made the film was to understand why Anthony Bourdain died by suicide, which strikes me as a very 13 Reasons Why approach by a grown man to another grown man’s death.
I’m young and fortunate enough to not have known the grief of losing someone close to me (the closest family members that have died were my grandfathers, and both of their deaths were more relief than grief for me). But even I know that sometimes death has no answer, and even if it did, those of us who did not know Anthony Bourdain are in no way entitled to it, no matter how strong our perceived parasocial bond was with him when he was alive.
I will not be watching the movie because suicide and self-harm are difficult enough topics for me to parse without watching someone else’s life get raked across the coals, and I have questions about the film’s ethics with its use of AI and its treatment of Asia Argento, who does not deserve to be blamed for anyone’s death even if it is just implied. Instead, I recommend these reviews by Maria Bustillos in Eater and from the always-excellent Alicia Kennedy.
I held off on writing this newsletter because even though I have no plans to watch the movie, it felt like I had to address it somehow as someone writing, however tangentially, about Bourdain. I also didn’t want to be part of what Bustillos called “the Bourdain-industrial complex,” and part of my break was to figure out whether it’s ethical to write this at all. On the one hand, I have this nasty tendency to moralize my way into deciding that not only should I quit something, but that quitting is the noble thing to do, when really I’m just terrified of commitment and trying new things (if you doubt my abilities to gaslight myself in such a way, please know that I was on Tumblr between the years of 2012 and 2016. I can moralize about anything). But I’m also very aware that I’m building my newsletter brand on the back of another man’s work that still inspires massive collective grief when so many others have already raked his legacy apart, although I try to tell myself that I’m focusing on the writing and art he left behind, not the man himself, because his personal life is not mine to excavate.
I haven’t decided yet but clearly I’m leaning towards publishing this newsletter (obviously, since this essay is coming out). I want to use Bourdain’s shows as a jumping-off point into the great big world, not into the depths of his psyche, so I hope that doesn’t make it exploitative. Of course, maybe this is just a cynical way to justify writing this to myself. I don’t know. Sound off in the comments if you have strong opinions.
But enough about the movie that’s already gotten enough press and my moral dilemma. It’s time to write about the periphery striking back.
The third episode of No Reservations, after elegant Paris and distant (and disastrous) Iceland takes Bourdain back home—to New Jersey. The first time that I watched No Reservations, my friend Lily and I skipped all the American episodes. We thought that the United States had nothing more to offer us, we wanted to go elsewhere. Since then, some of the US-based episodes have become among my favorites because they show just how much there is on offer in our own backyard.
I think that I didn’t want to watch the New Jersey episode in particular because I was scared about what I would find staring back at me. Us New Yorkers like to make fun of New Jersey and Long Island (somehow Westchester is in a league of its own). I mock Jersey and the twin demons of Nassau and Suffolk counties particularly loudly to cover up my own insecurities, because I know as someone from Eastern Queens, so close to the periphery of New York that I can walk to Nassau County but it takes me hours to get to Manhattan on public transit, that my own claim to belonging in New York City will get questioned. Long Islanders, their faces smug when they find out which neighborhood in Queens I’m from after I’ve just clowned them for saying they’re from New York City, love to do it, which pisses me off to no end (I still had the MTA and poorly funded public schools. No Long Islander gets to tell me that I’m not a real New Yorker!). I bow my head and accept it when other New Yorkers do it. I live in a neighborhood where some people have lawns and my apartment complex has rows and rows of identical duplex buildings. I know that I deserve it. This part of New York City is hanging on to the title of “City” like an Olympic diver’s toes are gripping the diving board.
Even more than neighboring Long Island, New Jersey, with its reputation for suburban cookie cutter existences, for some reason will always remind me of my father’s perpetual striving for middle class American acceptance that propelled my brother and I through a series of sitcom-like escapades that are funny now, with the retrospective rosy glasses of years of therapy, but were humiliating in the moment. A proud New Yorker, my dad probably would have fit in better had he landed over the river in New Jersey. A man with a deep-seated inferiority complex due to his immigrant status and lack of education, he spent our whole childhoods trying to approximate what he thought middle-class Americans did, and that included day trips to go ski in New Jersey that none of us enjoyed (my mother’s scared of heights, I have chronic joint pain that nobody bothered to diagnose until I was 17, and my brother is my brother). I’d almost buried this memory until I watched this episode and saw Anthony skiing in New Jersey, reminding me of all the shitty roadside Dunkin Donuts breakfasts because my dad didn’t want to let us have breakfast before leaving on our road trip. Through no fault of its own, in my brain New Jersey gained a permanent association with the kind of soul-crushing flattening you must undergo to become the perfect suburban child, or at least the perfect suburban child my father thought he wanted (I don’t think he really wanted me to be like that because no matter how much I tried to flatten myself, my dad never loved me all that much. He’s a man that doesn’t know what he wants, just that he doesn’t want what exists in front of him and it terrifies me to become like him. This perpetual wanting is why I also think he would be a good fit for New Jersey.)
That’s all to say that I was afraid to see what I would find when I clicked play on the New Jersey episode. When I did watch the New Jersey episode my worst feelings were confirmed—it was familiar. When Tony described the agony of living just a few minutes away from the place where it all happened, but never being able to go, I felt that. It intensifies when you’re technically within the same city as everyone having fun, but you can’t go. I remember when kids from my high school started getting the freedom to go into “the city” by themselves. Every Sunday night, Instagram would fill up with photos of girls and boys who had donned their best outfits just for a walk under the Brooklyn Bridge or an excursion to midtown, hoping that HONY would take a picture of them. My strict parents didn’t really let me go on those excursions with my friends until my last year of high school, and even then I can count my city excursions on one hand. I spent a lot of my high school days staring out the window at the skyline cruelly visible in the distance, yearning to be there. Even now that I broke up with the city for good I feel that yearning.
Tony also captured the boredom of suburbia perfectly, one that drove lots of people I know towards petty vandalism, drugs, playing endless games of basketball, and cruising fast food restaurants, but only drove me further into my interior world (even the camaraderie of bored suburban teens was denied to me by various factors in my upbringing).
But Tony’s Jersey also captured the food that happens on the periphery. There is something exciting about a greasy sandwich from a Howard Johnson’s or a burger from a diner or shack. There’s a reason that Anthony Bourdain, cool celebrity chef and writer, was visibly fanboying over the hot dog chef at Hiram’s, a greasy spoon he remembers from childhood, in a way he rarely does at more upscale restaurants. These things are special in their mediocrity. I got to discover this for the first time last year. I had to move back to my loathed suburban-like Queens neighborhood for the first year of this pandemic, and one of the only bright spots was my brother. A typical bored suburban teenager, he and his friends would pass the time going to fast food drive-thrus and he’d always bring me back something. Taco Bell may mean nothing to the rest of you heathens, but fast food was practically banned in my household when my dad was still living with us. At 22, for the first time I got to know the joy of Taco Bell, Popeye’s, Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, two rival delis in Whitestone competing for the title of best sandwiches in this neck of Queens, and other purveyors of America’s myriad of health problems and food injustices with the gusto they deserve. My mother and I would also sneak in a visit to pick up food from our favorite diner, the site of some of my only positive culinary memories of Little Neck, when we could.
But Bourdain’s episode of New Jersey also highlights that there is good food to be found in the periphery of the cities, something that I’m sure has intensified now that the Disneyland prices of America’s cities have pushed out immigrant groups and young people even further than when this episode first came out. My favorite part of the episode was the Italian bakery, which is nearly identical to the bakeries I frequented in Queens. Just thinking about the lobster tail at Gian Piero’s in Astoria makes my mouth water. There’s a couple of good ones in Whitestone too and even one in (gasp!) Mineola. For more on eating in the suburbs, I really love this package in Munchies on the State of the Suburbs, featuring some of my favorite food writers.
There’s a lot about this episode that I didn’t get, namely the copious Sopranos references (please do not give me shit about not watching the Sopranos, I was a child when that show was on air and it was definitely not age-appropriate viewing) and the now-dated presence of the disgraced Mario Batali. I also don’t think that I’ve reached the pride Tony shows in New Jersey yet. I’m proud of Queens, but being proud of Little Neck will take some time (I spent my first formative years in Astoria anyway, and I will continue to tenuously claim that neighborhood). I did get the boredom and the yearning that has made the suburbs produce such great artists, from Springsteen to Tony himself.
And I got the food.