Anthony Bourdain's new show Parts Unknown on CNN is debuting this coming Sunday, April 14 at 9 p.m., and yesterday the author, chef, and travel show host was on the network being interviewed CNN staffers significantly less famous than him about how this show is different from all the others he's done before.
He said that “With CNN, I get to go to all the places that I never would have been able to go really with any other network. Places like Congo, Libya, Myanmar, would have been very, very tricky to do elsewhere. Able to go places I never would have been able to go and look at these cultures in either a bigger picture or a more narrow focus as I choose.”
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His first episode is in Myanmar, and from the previews CNN has put out (see them below), it does, indeed, look very different than No Reservations. For one, it has dreamier photography more apt for movies. But Bourdain himself also seems more humbled as he goes to countries that have been ravaged by war and turmoil.
And that's probably what will make this series great. His most interesting shows have always been when the host is out of his comfort zone of “shoving expensive food” in his mouth and acts like what he denies he is: a journalist fit for CNN.
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.