A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines (paperback)

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) is easily described as the godfather of an entire generation of cooks. While, yes, at one time a restaurant chef himself, his influence was not through delicately tweezered garnishes upon elaborately manipulated ingredients or through grandiose tomes of stunning food photography. Rather, Bourdain lured hordes of young misfits into kitchens around the world with the extraordinary writing in his 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential.

A Cook’s Tour followed in 2001 in conjunction with the Food Network show of the same name, setting the stage for Bourdain’s move to television where his grit, charisma, and insatiable curiosity made him an easy star.

As the original subtitle suggested, A Cook’s Tour documents Bourdain’s travel “in search of the perfect meal” from a pig slaughter in Portugal to forced inebriation in Saint Petersburg to a picnic on a shooting range in Cambodia. This is storytelling at its finest, devoid of any trite or saccharine undertones, pulled off only as Anthony Bourdain could.

Paperback.