meandering eats

Anthony Bourdain rocks my world. I agree with his thoughts on the Food Network (scroll down 2/3 of the page). I like his Travel Channel show, No Reservations, although I don't get many opportunities to watch it. He goes all over the world and looks for the local food. He'll eat anything and doesn't try to "dilute" the cuisine to make it more familiar to his audience. We share a birthday, so I guess it's an auspicious day for assholish food snobs. Hehe.

Alton Brown's Feasting on Asphalt was just on. He was eating soul food in a mom-and-pop place somewhere along the Mississippi. Now I really want to try authentic soul food. I hear Magnolia is pretty good. I doubt I'll find anything completely authentic in San Diego, but I want to try Magnolia for soul food and Bud's Louisiana Food Shoppe for Cajun.

As for Bourdain's thoughts on FN, I couldn't agree more on the tragic excising of Mario Batali from their lineup. I used to find Molto Mario pretty daunting a few years ago, but now I wish I could watch it so I can attempt some of the recipes. I can understand why the show doesn't appeal to a huge audience, but I am growing seriously sick of how FN is full of mindless and useless crap. Those inane "challenges"? The plethora of cleavaged bobbleheads (if you look at the chef bios, all the bobbleheads and Paula Deen have elaborate pages and everyone else has two paragraphs and a bad picture)? The descent of my beloved Giada to the dark side? The dominance of Rachael Ray? While I think it's cool that FN is mainstream and more people are cooking as a result, they shouldn't knock off anyone who doesn't use canned food regularly.

Don't even get me started on Sandra Lee.

Anyhoo, even though Molto Mario's not on anymore, I can sample his cooking (or his sous chefs' representations of his cooking). We'll have a chance to go to New York City and I plan to make reservations at Babbo as soon as I know when we'll be in town. We ate at Lupa the last time we were there and it was awesome. Expensive, but awesome.