Global Village People.(The Week)(cosmopolitan Anthony Bourdain)(Television program review)

I'VE become something of a foodie, which is perhaps why I've become addicted to cooking shows. Lately, I've found myself enjoying No Reservations, a TV series hosted by "bad-boy chef" Anthony Bourdain. In No Reservations, which appears on the Travel Channel, Bourdain visits far-off lands as a sort of heavy-drinking (former heroin-addict) gastronomical spelunker, offering wry observations about exotic foods and the cultures that produce them.

The author of numerous books, the most acclaimed being Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain is the sort of guy I think I'd like to drink whiskey with. We'd share a fondness for New York, I'd learn a lot about food, and, I suspect, we'd scream at each other about politics. Sounds like good times to me.

All that said, Bourdain is interesting for another reason: He epitomizes what might be called populist cosmopolitanism. Bourdain waxes eloquent about the nobility of immigrant kitchen workers, he extols the glories of city living (the book flap for A Cook's Tour says, "He lives--and always will live--in New York City"), and expresses culinary solidarity with the eating (and drinking) habits of the day laborer and the street-vendor gourmet. There's an element of shtick to it--we're talking TV after all--but it seems sincere at the same time.

Bourdain displays an amazing comfort with the cognitive dissonance at the heart of cosmopolitanism generally. Bourdain loves distinct, and often pristine, cultures that have managed to endure in the face of globalization: the quaint village in Vietnam, the Mexican street stalls hawking cheap, authentic fare, the Zen-like perfection of a Japanese sushi bar. He loathes globalization, and the fast-food industry that grows on it like mold. The man who has eaten a seal eyeball in the Arctic, a whole cobra in Vietnam, and a warthog rectum in Namibia says the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten is a Chicken McNugget. Okay, as I said, there's some shtick here. But fine: You have the hog rectum and I'll have the McNuggets.

At the same time, Bourdain ...