by Tom Vitale
With Burma just emerging from fifty years of Big Brother, I’d worried that the local population would be paranoid and afraid to open up to the camera, yet midway into the shoot everyone we had filmed with thus far had been shockingly candid. Instead it was Tony who seemed off his game and generally dyspeptic. Several days ago, he’d greeted me with a stinging accusation. “This show is grievously lacking some quality food porn! All I’ve eaten is the color brown.”
Unfortunately, he’d been right. So far we’d featured what had inadvertently turned out to be a string of monochromatic dishes. Attention had been paid to the “must-have” dishes in Burma, what restaurants were appropriate for which sidekicks, and what they wanted Tony to try. Research had been done on what foods told a story, and everything was carefully cross-referenced with what would fit into the schedule. But in the process an obvious detail had been overlooked: what the food actually looked like. Neglecting color and variety in the food was an amateur screwup.
The truth is, the food part of our food show never ceased to trip me up. It was a central element of each episode, but food was a fleeting and perishable resource that was logistically difficult to work with. Worse, I didn’t actually like a lot of it. I found most of what Tony ate on camera, well… less than appetizing. In fact, I was probably the only person in the world who could go on an all-expenses-paid food tour with Anthony Bourdain and lose weight. Before you judge, please know I considered this a shameful handicap given my job. It wasn’t that I was just some picky eater, although I sort of was. For some reason I’ve still yet to determine, I suffered from a myriad of food phobias since childhood. It was a constant struggle I was forced to deal with on a daily basis, especially when it came to fish. I did my best to keep it a secret from Tony as well as overcompensate for my deficiencies. But sometimes I dropped the ball. Point was, the show needed at least one glorious food scene, and after Tony’s recrimination, it was clear we needed it fast.
“Maybe Ma Thanegi would reconsider if Tony reached out to her directly?” Patrick had suggested. “He could promise to keep away from politics and focus on the food.”
“Wait, do you think that might work?” I asked. “Why the hell didn’t we try that before?”
Ma Thanegi was the one that got away. Preeminent expert on Burmese cuisine, she was the author of books on the subject as well as former aide to the leader of the opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi. She’d spent time in prison for her pro-democratic leanings and spoke perfect English. As far as I was concerned, Ma Thanegi was the perfect person to walk Tony through the nuances of Burmese politics and food. Unfortunately she’d also refused multiple requests to appear on the show, citing a desire to “keep a low profile.”
Apparently, Ma Thanegi had served only three years of a ten-year prison sentence. Given the extremely unclear definition regarding what was and wasn’t permissible to say, I could understand she didn’t want to risk rocking the boat.
Sending an elderly woman to prison was not something I wanted on my already checkered résumé, so I’d reluctantly accepted that Ma Thanegi wasn’t meant to be. But that was before I found myself halfway through the shoot teetering on the edge of yet another food-related cataclysm. So I’d explained the situation to Tony, who rolled his eyes and asked for a pen.
I would be most grateful for the opportunity to do real justice to the extraordinary cuisine of this country and would like to portray it in the best light—as explained by the most qualified person. That would, of course, be you. I am a fan of all your books which I found inspiring and hope we can arrange to meet for a meal of prawn curry or something similarly delicious. I would honor any restrictions you care to impose as regards to subject matter.
And that’s all it took. After two months of saying no, Ma Thanegi agreed to be in the show. Somehow Tony possessed a devilry that made people do whatever it was he wanted.
Ma Thanegi had outlined two conditions, however.
“Don’t say good things about me, just that I write on things, Myanmar and food,” she said. “And don’t say that I was once assistant to Ms. Suu Kyi… too many people ‘use’ her name for reflected glory and I am not from that group.”
Back at the café, the walkie clacked, “THIRTY MINUTES TO TONY, THIRTY MINUTES TO TONY.” Time was running out fast, and there was still a lot left to do. I took a deep breath and went over to check on Ma Thanegi. Pushing seventy years old, she was dressed in black and peered up at me skeptically through Coke-bottle glasses from under the shade of a black parasol. Despite her small frame, Ma Thanegi radiated authority, and her patrician commands had kept the restaurant staff nervously hurrying about all morning.
“Have you had time to think about paring down the menu?” I asked.
“As I informed you, I’m going to do a tasting thing,” Ma Thanegi said, presenting me with a handwritten list of dishes while exposing her lower row of teeth in what was either a smile or a grimace. Her most distinguishing feature was an extremely pronounced underbite, which she accentuated with bright red lipstick. “I’m going to order a lot of salads and then a lot of noodles that Tony probably hasn’t had yet.”
Ma Thanegi was the expert, but I had to regain control of the situation or she was going to food-fuck us. Hours before, when I discovered she wanted to order thirty-seven dishes, I’d delicately explained the gist of how we worked and that to do the food justice we needed to not bite off more than Tony or the cameras could chew. The blunt truth was that I basically had to film all the food three times: first in a wide shot while Tony ate it at the table; after he left, we’d film preparation in the kitchen, then back out at the table, this time getting insert beauty shots, which required lens changes and a hand model, often Josh or me.
For an important meal scene like this, we had to film absolutely everything. Every ingredient, every step in the cooking process, every finished dish, because with Tony you never knew—until weeks later in the edit—what element he was going to want to talk about in his voice-over. And trust me, you did not want to be the one to tell him, “I’m sorry, I don’t have that shot.”
Filming in the kitchen after Tony ate the meal presented its own set of challenges. Over the years there’d been enough instances of “Oh no, we’ve run out of that dish,” after a busy lunch or dinner rush that I’d enacted a policy of pre-ordering seven of whatever one dish might be eaten on camera. One for Tony, one for the kitchen prep, one for food inserts, double the number for fuckups, and add one more for safety. If I didn’t know what he was going to eat, I’d have to order all the possibilities multiplied by seven. My strategic food-hoarding didn’t always go over well in countries where resources could be scarce, and there were a number of times I’d inadvertently triggered a food riot. Worst of all, Tony getting food-fucked, a.k.a. overfed—a constant and very real concern—resulted in additional “digestion time” needing to be factored into the production schedule. Glancing over the scribbled laundry list Ma Thanegi had handed me, it appeared she was failing to grasp that it was in everyone’s best interest to keep the menu as straightforward as possible.
“This is just too much for us to cover,” I said, wiping the sweat from my forehead and forcing what I hoped was a convincing smile. “Normally we only film one or two things.”
“No, no, no!” Ma Thanegi practically shouted. “As I informed you, that’s not the proper way of eating in Myanmar, there must be a full table!”
“FIFTEEN MINUTES TO TONY, FIFTEEN MINUTES TO TONY,” the walkie screeched in my ear. Our intrepid host’s impending arrival elevated the already fever-pitched atmosphere in the restaurant to full-on panic. “I’m getting interference on my microphone,” Todd yelled. Music from the temple had started up again. Zach was still adjusting lights, and it looked like Mo’s camera was being denied access to the kitchen. When it came to Tony and the far-flung and ever-changing locations in which we filmed the show, nothing went according to plan.
“We’ll be ready to start soon,” I said. “How about we compromise on
three to six dishes?”
Cursing food under my breath, I headed to the street to intercept Tony’s arrival and clear my head with a pre-shoot smoke. Doing the math, I realized that, including duplicates for safety, I would have to order and film 259 dishes if Ma Thanegi had her way. With a sigh I turned around to get a cigarette, only to find Tony standing behind me. “Ack!” I involuntarily choked. “I mean, hi, Tony. Just a little food delay, we’ll be ready to go soon.”
“FIVE MINUTES TO TONY, FIVE MINUTES TO TONY,” the walkie taunted.
“Why didn’t you tell me we were filming with, like, the most hated woman in all of Burma?” Tony asked, lighting a cigarette. “You set me up with a fucking apologist for the regime!”
“Umm… huh?” I said. “Where did you hear that?”
“I bothered to take like twenty seconds and google her,” Tony said. “She backstabbed all her former democracy buddies in exchange for early release from prison… It has to be acknowledged, or all the other people we filmed with who spent time in prison and didn’t squeal will be furious!”
“But we promised no politics…” I trailed off while affixing Tony’s microphone. Well, this was unfortunate… Screwing up the food and then missing this detail about Ma Thanegi was pretty inexcusable. Even though one of Tony’s mottos, “Prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance,” was drilled into my head, the show had been very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation. Make-or-break scenarios often happened in real time, requiring lightning-quick decisions and the ability to adapt to countless ever-changing variables. We were making a show for CNN now, and I’d been playing the television production equivalent of Russian roulette. Even though Ma Thanegi was apparently a “traitor to freedom,” she’d offered her help when I needed it, and as a thank-you I’d put her in danger. I felt awful, and at the moment I wasn’t sure who Tony hated more, Ma Thanegi for crimes against democracy or me for crimes against TV. As I watched him charge toward the table, I estimated there was a fifty-fifty chance of the scene landing like the Hindenburg.
“Thank you so much for doing this,” Tony said, sitting down.
“It’s my pleasure,” Ma Thanegi said, lower teeth glinting white against the red of her lipstick. She barked some orders at the wait staff and straight away, food started hitting the table.
“I want you to try the pennywort salad, give me your plate,” she said. “It’s very medicinal.”
“Mmm, that’s delicious,” Tony said.
“This is tomato salad, and this one is samosa salad, and what is this that we have here?” Ma Thanegi said, raising her glasses to examine the dish in her hand. “That’s either the ginger salad or tea leaf salad.”
“Salad is a loosely used term here,” Tony observed.
“We make anything into a salad, just chop it up. This is a salad of, um, tummy. And this is wild citrus salad with a very bumpy rind. And let’s see,” Ma Thanegi said, lifting a plate of greens up to her face for inspection. “Yes, this is string bean salad.” She waved toward the waiter, who placed several more salads on the table. “This is grilled eggplant salad, and this is fish cake salad.”
Shit. Ma Thanegi had gone rogue. My head was spinning with the number of dishes piling up on the table. Several bowls of steaming noodles arrived, and Ma Thanegi began shouting in Burmese. The waiter retreated into the kitchen, noodles in hand, and I sighed with relief.
“I told them to bring the salad first and then we’ll have the noodles,” she explained to Tony.
At this rate it was going to take all three cameras the rest of the day to get food prep, plating, and insert shots. We were on Ma Thanegi’s turf, but I had to do something.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But we should probably…”
Tony shot a frightening look in my direction, clearly telegraphing it wasn’t a good time to speak up. Okay, message received, backing off.
“This salad is made from all parts of the chicken—the feet, the neck, and everything, and so it’s all the chewy stuff, the skin, chop, chop, chop,” she said.
“This is so good,” Tony said. He’d been eating like a bird, courteously taking one peck from each plate.
If the list Ma Thanegi presented me before the scene was accurate, she’d ordered tea leaf salad, pennywort salad, long bean salad, kaffir lime salad, tomato salad, samosa salad with chickpeas, baked eggplant salad, fish cake salad, pork head salad and kaffir lime leaf, vermicelli chicken soup, shwe taung noodle salad, Putao noodle with soy bean sugar cane paste, and pickled tamarind noodle salad with dried prawn powder. But looking at the carnage on the table, it seemed like there’d been more.
“Well, that all suited me very nicely,” Tony said. “If I didn’t have dinner tonight, I’d eat more. I’m amazed by the variety. Actually, this is the most variety that I’ve seen at a restaurant since I got here. It’s pretty extraordinary.”
“We love to eat and don’t forget, for fifty years we were under two dictatorships especially under socialist regime, not a lot of things to do…” she said with… was it a hint of regret?
“Yeah, socialists are very ambivalent about food,” Tony said.
“No, it was just that there was no private enterprises allowed,” Ma Thanegi said. “So it was like there was nothing to do but—”
“—but eat,” Tony said. “Well, I’m grateful and honored that you did this.”
“No, I’m honored,” Ma Thanegi said, baring her lower teeth. “Very honored.”
“Wide,” Tony said. “Wide” was Tony’s code word, meaning as far as he was concerned the conversation—and the scene—was done.
“Okay, thanks, everyone, take five then reconfigure for food,” I said to the crew. Following Tony toward his waiting car, I crossed my fingers that he’d mellowed in regard to the earlier misunderstanding. All said, the scene had gone well, no lines had been crossed, and the food was certainly pretty. Blubbering apologies didn’t go over well; it was best to stick to the basics. “Are there any dishes in particular we should cover?”
“Film everything,” Tony said. Everything?! He must have known that would sentence me to food prison for at least the next twelve hours.
“So we can use the scene then?” I asked, trying to find the bright side. “Ma Thanegi ended up being okay?”
“We’ll assassinate her in voice-over,” Tony said.
“FRANKLY, I’M A LITTLE DISAPPOINTED,” Tony said. “You had led me to believe there was going to be a colonial-era dining car with liveried waiters serving scones and Welsh rabbit almandine. But my spirits are buoyed seeing your look of utter misery and confusion.”
Tony hated “transport beats”—the beauty shots that showed Tony en route from point A to point B—about as much as he enjoyed making my life a waking nightmare whenever I insisted on filming them. Regardless of the personal demoralization, I fervently believed that, this being a travel show, the spaces in between were worth the risk. And with the stakes so high for the new series, I needed something special. The Night Express to Bagan, a classic sleeper in the Darjeeling Limited tradition, seemed like a two-birds-with-one-stone solution. The British colonial–era train offered a textural and immersive way to film Tony taking in the countryside while also getting us 600 kilometers north to Bagan, Burma’s ancient capital. It was perfect. If I could pull it off.
When we arrived at the station, a worried-looking representative from the Ministry of Rail Transportation and Ethnic Minorities regretfully informed us that the first-class sleeping coach had “lost a wheel.” Fifteen minutes later, news came that the dining car—the main reason I was confident we could get a scene out of the trip—had suffered the same fate. It was looking more and more likely that putting all my eggs in what was turning out to be a rickety basket of vanishing train wheels might have been a colossal error in judgment.
In the interest of full disclosure, it wasn’t a total surprise that moving our crew of twelve people and twenty-something cases of film equipment halfway across the country
by rail involved an element of risk. I’d been warned that due to advanced age and poor maintenance, Burmese trains lacked punctuality, reliability, and were prone to “slip on the railway.” Lurid photographs of smoldering wreckage and burn victims from last week’s derailment that killed twenty-five and injured twice as many more were plastered across every front page. But there was no going back now.
A green flag waved, and the bell rang. With a hiss and ca-clack, the Night Express to Bagan lurched into motion. Creaking and shuddering out of the station for the ten-plus-hour overnight trip, I assumed my position behind Zach’s camera.
“Tony, how do you feel finally being here?” I asked.
“I feel jet-lagged,” Tony said.
Since arriving I’d really been hoping to get him to comment about his lifelong desire to come to Burma. We called these riffs “content” and Tony hated them, but he was just so good. When in the right mood, he could fucking talk, elevate the mundane into high art. Extreme, subtle, sentimental, amused, apoplectic, or sarcastic, his reactions spanned the gamut, and it was ideal when the content flowed naturally, but sometimes he needed a little help. The challenge was to keep Tony interested and stimulated. The way I saw it, if he wasn’t inspired, or interested, that wasn’t only my problem, it was my fault. Even though he never did anything but complain about my harassing him, I believed that deep down he was glad I tried so hard. Being oppositional was one of Tony’s core personality traits, but his attitude toward the camera had been even more aggressive than usual this trip. I had a feeling that beneath the tough exterior something else must be going on. Or was the show just not living up to Tony’s expectations?