"Why the French Don't Suck"
Or: an apology to Loïc and any other French person that followed me on Twitter 2019-2020
The first episode of Anthony Bourdain’s first serious show (for the purposes of this newsletter, I am pretending that A Cook’s Tour does not exist) begins with a plea, one of the few episodes with a title that is not just the name of the place (don’t quote me on this, I’m only one episode into this rewatch).
Namely, Tony wanted Americans to give the French some credit. In a roundabout way, I am part of his target audience because for a while there, I did think that the French sucked, just not for the reasons Tony may have thought. But more on that later.
This episode is interesting because it establishes the stylistic hallmarks of No Reservations, which was always a bit zanier than Parts Unknown. I wonder how much impact Tony had on the artistic choices compared to producers and other people involved with the show, but the black-and-white intro calling back to French New Wave, the Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas references, and the bizarre sequence where he’s “swimming” in a soup pot do seem very “him.” This episode also blends fiction with reality, with a staged fight with a language teacher, dramatic escape through the Parisian sewers, and some visual effects mimicking an Oscar Wilde haunting. The dramatic license would also become a staple of the show, along with Tony’s vocal disdain for television and its conventions.
There are a few parts of this episode that feel comically dated. Scenes where Tony smokes indoors, now banned even in cigarette-happy France, or listens to a radio report about “Freedom Fries” seem as far removed from us as the Pan Am clip from the beginning of the episode feels from the original air date.
Another comment that feels dated but in a far less pleasant way is Tony’s offhand comment saying, “remember kids, cigarettes can kill,” as he lights one up. It’s chilling how often he jokes about his own death or self-destructive tendencies, and how often I’ve caught myself making some of those same jokes.
All that style is in service of the central argument of the episode which is that the French, in a time of anti-Francophone sentiment in the US, are worth learning from, particularly their food culture. Bourdain’s central premise is that French food culture, guided by sensuality, respects the products of the earth in the way that convenience-based culture does not (he also claims the French attitude might save the world, I’m less inclined to agree).
The France he shows us is not the France of white tablecloths and finicky plates, it is the France of smoke-filled brasseries and giant steaming pots of whatever’s left over from the market. My favorite quotation from this episode is, “necessity is the engine that has driven all great cuisines throughout history.” Tony’s not interested in what Marie Antoinette spilled down her stays at Versailles, he wants to know what snacks the peasants were packing for the beheading. I like this episode because it really drives home that a lot of the things that Americans associate with luxury just because they are French, such as snails or frog’s legs, were just foods peasants scrounged up back in the day and that taxi drivers chow down on now.
It would be interesting to unpack how French cuisine became a symbol of luxury when so many of its best parts came from the kitchens of poor housewives, but that might be a bit beyond the reach of this episode. However, I’m not sure I agree with the idea that slow food driven by the pleasure of the senses is something uniquely French. I think most people in the world like their food to taste good—yes, even Americans, and boiling American food culture down to fast food, convenience, and New England boiled dinner is a very white Protestant view of our existence. Some of the things Tony may claim are unique to French culture strike me more as universal human experiences. The reasons why French cuisine is uniquely associated with sensuality and the pleasures of the senses and not, say, Mexican, probably have a lot more to do with whiteness and colonialism than any inherent superiority of French food. But hey, it’s a 45-minute episode.
I also think that despite Bourdain’s assertion that he is challenging the popular view about France, he played into a very stereotypical view of French cuisine. Granted, there is no way he could have predicted that in the year 2021, despite all of Tony’s odes to the slow nature of French food compared to American fast food and convenience, one of France’s fastest-growing culinary exports would be the French tacos. However, by the year 2005, Paris had already been home to vibrant immigrant communities for decades, if not centuries, and it would have been interesting to see him highlight some of those cuisines that are very much part of the real fabric of Paris’s life. After all, who knows better that necessity is the mother of good food than immigrants? He did have the time, he didn't eat his first proper meal until the 20-minute mark of this episode (I think the bizarre sequence with the language teacher could have gone).
This episode also brings in another standard Bourdain theme, which is making fun of American tourists. He says Americans travel like sheep, but as someone who schlepped European tour groups through New York City and is from a popular Eastern European tourist destination, I don’t consider the Europeans much better (I think the common theme here is that a lot of people that are rich enough to travel are also entitled upper-class brats who act even worse when they are from colonial powers, and that this is not a phenomenon unique to Americans, but that’s another essay). I don’t think Bourdain is some chef out-of-touch elite as his America-based episodes often take him to overlooked areas of this country and he handles those visits with grace and beauty. I just think it’s lazy humor and I love him enough to sometimes expect better.
But enough nitpicking. As those of you that follow me, especially those of you that heard my French saga, may know, I have a bad habit of picking apart the things that I love and I catch myself doing it again. Enough about what “Why the French Don’t Suck” could have or should have done, it’s time for me to come clean about what the episode did do—it saved my relationship with France.
Of my pre-diagnosis ADHD hyperfixations, my obsession with the country of France at the age of 8 was one of the weirdest, and it never fully went away. For years I dreamed of France, something not even a disastrous college trip could cure. So when an opportunity fell into my lap post-graduation to move to France and teach English, I took it—then was completely miserable.
There were a lot of reasons why I was out of my mind for my first few months in France. I was on birth control that was frying my brain with depression chemicals and didn’t realize it. The bureaucracy sucked the life out of me. My paycheck was laughable, and contractual funny business made it difficult to find a second job. After a lifetime even on the periphery of New York City, Dijon on the evenings and weekends felt dead. Did I mention the rain?
But at some point, after switching my medication and tweeting a lot of complaints on Twitter, I had an epiphany similar to the Eye of the Tiger montage in Persepolis and began to realize that part of the problem was me. I was looking for the France I’d seen in movies and TV shows, the France I’d read about, when the real France, dog shit and all, was right in front of my nose. I began rewatching Anthony Bourdain’s French episodes for inspiration and heeded his advice from this episode, which was, “allow your senses to guide you, not your itinerary, and you’ll find pleasure in so many things.”
And I did find so many things. I found a soul-changing eclair on a day trip I still mildly regret. I found the best baguette I’ve ever had in my life in an unassuming bakery near the house of a kid I used to tutor. My roommate and I, in an adventure similar to one Tony embarked on in this very episode, stumbled into an absinthe bar populated by metalhead bikers (as a joke, we requested a Blink-182 song. They were not amused. We left).
I think I would have found many more things had I come to this realization a little earlier, but I only got about two months of good mental health and exploration before COVID hit and I had to leave. Still, those are two months that I might not have had without this show.
Is this my favorite episode of Tony’s? No, it’s far from his best work, but every first episode of a show is about the host finding their feet. But it’s one that means a lot to me personally, and one that’s still fun to revisit.
The French are fun to root against. But they don’t suck, after all. My apologies for all those complaining tweets.
What Tony Ate
Cafe creme, orange juice, and a croissant at Le Royale
Red wine, blanquette de veau, baba au rhum and a digestif @ Chez Denise
Roast beef sandwich and wine @ Rungis Market
Boudin noir, head cheese, cote de b)oeuf, potatoes @ Robert & Louise
Pain au raisin and baguette @ Patisserie Pinaud Pascal
Coffee and Ham Sandwich @ Cafe de la Mairie
What Tony Did
Took a French class in NYC and had a staged fight with the teacher
Stayed in L’Hotel where Wilde died
Visited absinthe bar Cantada II, then tasted illegal absinthe from the early 20th century
Wandered the remnants of Les Halles (which I only know as the world’s most stressful metro station)
Descended into Chez Denise wine cellar (which had leftover bones)
Wandered sewers and catacombs
Woke up early to visit Rungis Market
Hung out with expert baker, Pascal, from Patisserie Pinaud Pascal
What Tony Mocked
(this is an incomplete list as it only occurred to me to track this after I had already finished the episode)
Americans
TGI Fridays
Rocco DiSpirito
French pop music
I’ll be publishing another essay hopefully this weekend on sports, although my ravenous appetite for watching them gets in the way of writing about them. The next Bourdain round-up comes next week (hopefully, if a certain bureaucratic headache I’ve been trying to detangle for months doesn’t rear its ugly head). If you liked this essay, let me know! If you didn’t, keep it to yourself lol