by Tom Vitale
“There are some logistics I want to go over,” Mitchell said. “You’ll have forty-five minutes with the president beginning at seven-thirty p.m. Local Vietnamese authorities will be performing security checks throughout the day and then begin shutting down the area surrounding the restaurant in the early afternoon. So anybody and anything you want there needs to arrive by one p.m.”
“Everyone?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mitchell said. “Is that a problem?”
“No, no, of course not,” I said, swallowing hard. I usually had Tony arrive about ten minutes before we started rolling. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like having him there six hours early.
“We do have one very important request,” Nicole said. “The upstairs air-conditioning unit is broken; can you have it fixed? We don’t want the president sweating on camera.”
“Absolutely, of course, no problem,” I said. “It’s the least we can do.”
I was overjoyed. Thank God Jared had pushed to shoot for the stars. That afternoon the crew and Sandy arrived from New York. As executive producer, Sandy didn’t get out of the office much, but as far as I could tell, her presence had yet to tip the camera guys off to the fact that something out of the ordinary was underfoot. As far as I knew, they were still thoroughly unaware of our special guest, and I couldn’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they found out.
Once everyone settled in and got some rest, we gathered for a meeting.
“So… I have some news,” Sandy said. “Tomorrow evening… President Obama will be joining Tony for dinner on the show!”
After a minute or two of what looked like jet lag–related non-comprehension and a lot of blinking, Todd was the one to break the silence.
“Aww geez, a lame duck president?” he said.
THE FIRST DAY OF SHOOTS was always a bit bumpy, but this first day was going to be positively Himalayan. We hadn’t taken any chances regarding the impending security cordon, so everyone and everything—including Tony—had made it through the restaurant’s front door by noon for a 7:30 p.m. scene. But there was plenty of work to do, and I had a feeling time was going to move quickly. The first thing I noticed on arriving upstairs was the temperature.
“Please tell me the air conditioner is working,” I said to nobody and everybody at the same time. “Perhaps it’s just off at the moment to save energy?”
Somehow, attending to the air conditioner—the sole request from the White House—had slipped through the cracks.
“Oh no, oh no! We need to get a functioning AC unit immediately.”
“You’re not helping, go have a cigarette, I’ll take care of this,” Jared said.
While Ha and Phi attempted to figure out how to resolve the air-conditioning situation before the entire city around us shut down, Zach, Todd, and I set to work figuring out a seating plan. There were two upstairs dining rooms, each about thirty feet by fifteen feet. We chose the back room for filming, while the other would be used for staging gear and holding people.
Given that it was a pretty small space, there was no way to place light stands in the background without them being in the shot. So Zach decided the best option was to suspend the lights from a concrete support beam on the ceiling, right above the table.
“If the clamps come loose, the whole lighting rig would fall right on the president and Tony,” I pointed out.
“It’s strong, don’t worry,” Zach said.
“But what if the Secret Service doesn’t agree?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” Zach shot back.
“It’s less about me personally worrying the lights will collapse and more that when a whole bunch of Secret Service agents rush here right before filming, one of them might have a concern about seven hundred pounds of sharp metal film equipment dangling above the president’s head,” I said.
I probably would have continued fretting about the death lights Zach was hanging, but I was distracted by two teenagers in flip-flops, carrying a massive box.
“The new air-conditioning unit has arrived,” Jared said.
It wasn’t the window type, but instead the kind that went on a wall with a big condenser outside. I remember thinking the installers looked like they couldn’t be more than fifteen as I watched them climb out on the roof with a ladder, still wearing flip-flops. It had started raining, and one of them was clearly going to fall three floors to his death, which would probably mean the shoot with the president would be canceled. So we made the unpleasant decision to risk the heat and sent the air-conditioner boys home.
“What else could go wrong?” I said, instantly regretting having just jinxed myself. My mind involuntarily ran through a laundry list of worst-case scenarios. What if someone picks up a chopstick and stabs the president through the ear before the Secret Service could do anything? What if Tony only talks about Richard Nixon’s obsession with cottage cheese? Are we going to get a scene out of this? And is that guy who carries the nuclear football going to be here?
I wasn’t the only one stressing out. I noticed Tony was sitting by himself at a table in the corner looking withdrawn and nervous. He was never at his best around famous people, but his expression today was extremely unusual and unpleasant. I went and sat down across the table.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
Tony was deep in thought and barely acknowledged my presence. As we waited in silence, I wondered what was going through his mind. Personally, I didn’t feel worthy of the honor. I mean, we were getting paid to be in one of our favorite places on Earth and have dinner with a historic president. The bigness of the moment was frankly overwhelming and intensely humbling. I’d found what I was pretty sure were a couple of expired Valiums in a seldom used pocket of my suitcase, and I’d greedily swallowed them to help get me through the day. Given I wasn’t wearing a straitjacket, it would be fair to say they were working.
“Ha, can you join Tony and me?” I asked, figuring a distraction might be helpful. Usually a local was across the table explaining the meal to Tony, but this time he was the “local.” So to ensure Tony knew what he was talking about, we ordered a couple bowls and Ha explained the dish in detail.
“So you add the rice noodles and pork belly and meatballs to the soup,” she said. “Then on top you put the fresh herbs. You can add fresh garlic, chilies, and vinegar as you like… Tony, may I ask you, why is this happening?”
“Fuck if I know,” Tony said. “Obama only has six months left in office, he must be on his ‘I don’t give a fuck’ tour.”
Time, it seemed, was moving rapidly. Sandy made an announcement to the local crew that we were filming with President Obama, but like Ha, I was pretty sure they’d already connected the dots. The camera guys continued to work on the lighting setup while intimidating local security dressed in all black with big German shepherds came through the building sniffing everything. I joined Tony for a smoke on the small balcony and watched the gathering crowd on the street.
“I guess people in the city are starting to figure out the president might be visiting,” I said.
“Could you have ever believed this was going to happen?” Tony said. “Not in a million fucking years…”
“It’s pretty amazing, but I still can’t figure it out either…” I said. “No offense, of course.”
An hour before the president’s arrival, the tension began to increase as people from the White House and the Secret Service started showing up. We all got checked with a metal detector wand several times. A very friendly man who seemed to be a dietary specialist checked out the kitchen. The meal was given a thumbs-up, but the president would be advised to stay away from the local greens.
Rachel and Nicole appeared thirty minutes before go time with a group of excited locals selected to fill out the dining room. Everyone was instructed to play it cool when we filmed and pretend they weren’t in the same room with the president and a bunch of cameras. A man from the national archive showed up and explained they’d need an audio feed from o
ur cameras for posterity. We ran multiple camera and audio tests, and I went over the plan with everyone several more times as the minutes whizzed by.
In the final sixty seconds before the presidential motorcade arrived, I could feel the energy in the restaurant intensify, almost like a charge of electricity in the air. This must be what a dog feels when it senses an earthquake before it happens, I thought.
“Make sure to get a good picture I can tweet,” Tony called as Zach and I squeezed through the crowd of security personnel and bureaucrats on our way downstairs to film an entrance shot. We got into position just in time. Seeing President Obama walk through the restaurant’s front door, everyone erupted into applause. He grinned ear to ear, waving back.
I can only describe what I felt as sort of a surreal, even out-of-body experience. It was almost like I wasn’t actually there. Ironically, it felt more like I was watching the whole thing on TV.
I stood behind Zach as the president walked right past us with a big smile and a nod. Arrival shot in the can, Zach and I squeezed our way back up the staircase, which was now even more crowded with people. Zach got through first, then just as I reached the top of the stairs, the president moved through the narrow hallway landing from the holding room to the camera room. As I learned, when the president is on the move there’s no time to say, “Please stand back.” The Secret Service just pushes you out of the way. I started to fall backward down the stairs, but fortunately, in addition to pushers, they also have catchers.
I arrived in the dining room unharmed, and it was decided I would be the one to put the microphone on the president. He was relaxed, friendly, and kind enough to not mention anything about my trembling hands. In the dining room were fifteen local Vietnamese in the background filling the tables, Tony sitting with President Obama, the three cameras, and me, standing just next to the table. Jared was by the door next to the president’s head Secret Service guy. The official White House photographer came in a few times to snap some pics. And that was it. The experience was unbelievably intimate.
The cameras were rolling; it was go time. I signaled to Jared who sent in the waitress. She placed white rice noodles, greens, fried pork rolls, two steaming bowls of broth, and two beers on the table.
“I feel a little awkward sitting in front of all this good food with you guys standing there working. Did you get something to eat?” President Obama asked before starting the scene. He was one of the few people in the thousands we’d filmed who inquired if the crew was hungry.
“Grab a spoon and chopsticks, hack off some noodles,” Tony said, demonstrating. “Chilies to taste.”
“That’s good stuff,” President Obama said, taking a bite of the bun cha.
Tony had done a good job of explaining the dish and how to eat it, though he was talking a little fast and laughing a bit too much anytime he thought a joke was being made—but I don’t think that anyone other than Zach, Todd, and I knew him well enough to tell.
“Now if you were still running for office, enjoying this dish might be seen as a liability,” Tony said with a chuckle. “I mean we live in a world where even enjoying arugula is apparently problematic. How did we reach this point in history? There’s a fear, you can feel it, towards the other. Whoever they might be. How do we change that?”
“Well, first of all, I think it’s important to recognize that America has always been of mixed minds about the outside world,” President Obama said. “On one hand we’re a nation of immigrants, and that’s not going to change. That’s one side of America. And another part of America is that we’ve been so big, we haven’t always had to pay a lot of attention outside our borders. And so, we’ll go through periods of time where anti-immigrant sentiment rears up or xenophobia. A lot of times it happens when people are feeling stressed. It is easy for people sometimes, for politicians at least, to use immigrants or foreigners as a scapegoat as opposed to talking about how we work through this together. Now, the good news is overall I think America is more tolerant, more mindful of the world than it’s ever been, particularly the younger generation. So overall I tend to be optimistic…”
“I used to have a pretty dim view of humanity,” Tony said. “But since I started traveling—particularly to places where I anticipated being treated badly—I am on balance pretty convinced that generally speaking the human race are doing the best they can to be as good as they can, under the circumstances, whatever they may be. I guess my hope is the more people see of the world, in person hopefully, or even on television, they see ordinary people doing ordinary things, so when news happens at least they have a better idea of who we’re talking about. Put a face to some empathy, to some kinship, to some understanding. This surely is a good thing. I hope it’s a useful thing.”
“And this is why a show like yours is terrific,” the president said. “Because it reminds people that actually there’s a whole bunch of the world that on a daily basis is going about its business, eating at restaurants, taking their kids to school, trying to make ends meet, playing games. The same way we are back home.”
I’d been worried Tony would choke and totally flub the interview, but it appeared Tony had, in fact, known what he was doing. It was actually so beautifully simple. Just two dads hanging out, having some noodles and a beer in Vietnam.
“As a father of a young girl, is it all gonna be okay? It’s all gonna work out?” Tony asked. “My daughter will be able to come here. In five years, ten years, twenty years, she’ll be able to have a bowl of bun cha and the world will be a better place?”
“I think progress is not a straight line. You know?” President Obama said. “There are gonna be moments at any given part of the world where things are terrible. Where tragedy and cruelty are happening. Where our darkest impulses pop up. I think there are going to be some big issues our children are going to have to address, because we didn’t address them. But, having said all that, I think things are gonna work out. I think the world’s a big place, and I believe that people are basically good. I think humanity is still in its awkward adolescent phase, but it’s slowly maturing, and if we get a few big things right, I think we’ll be all right.”
Then all of a sudden it was over. We took a group photo, the president left, and his entourage began to disappear. The dietary specialist handed everyone a box of White House–branded M&Ms. Tony tweeted the picture I took, writing, “Total cost of bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00. I picked up the check. #Hanoi.” I chuckled at that. Regardless of how you did the accounting, the meal had cost far more than six dollars. When you think about the production costs to cover crew, things like equipment, airfare, lodging, not to mention the fee for commandeering a restaurant. There was the money expended by the Vietnamese government in security personnel required to lock down a quadrant of Hanoi. Then of course there was the Secret Service and presidential entourage followed by the press pool of at least seventy, the jet fuel to move everyone and the motorcade, all the salaries plus the cost to rent the JW Marriott. I’m guessing the cost of that meal could easily have surpassed the annual GDP of a small nation, and now, having survived the experience, as far as I was concerned, it was worth every penny.
Chapter Fourteen
PLAYING WITH MY FOOD
IT’S BEEN SAID TONY USED FOOD AS A PASSPORT, AND WE DID. FOOD was a fantastic device, our way into a culture. Sharing a meal put people at ease, helped them forget the cameras were there, and inspired them to open up about their lives. Most importantly, food had become our cover, at least as far as I was concerned. In Iran and Laos, it was actually thought we were CIA like in the movie Argo. And in certain ways they were right. If it wasn’t for the cover of a “food show,” we never would have been able to get to the places we did. Season after season while planning the shoots, food had morphed from the show’s raison d’être to almost an afterthought. By the end, it was a show about people far more than one about food.
“Did you eat the food? Was it good?” was something I’d been asked a lot. W.
C. Fields famously said, “Never work with children or animals.” He forgot to mention food. To be honest, I wasn’t in it for the food. I always wanted everything to be perfect, and food was a difficult and highly perishable resource to work with. Despite constantly trying to keep all the plates spinning, over the years I experienced just about every possible food catastrophe imaginable. Usually cramped, bustling, and extremely loud, restaurants were a difficult place to film. After promising we’d be “low impact” to business, the production would inevitably take over, much to the owner’s horror. Whatever spot our DPs chose was sure to block the path from the kitchen or to the bathroom. Hitting a lunch or dinner rush so the establishment looked full was perpetually challenging. “Picture food” was either ready too soon or took forever, and Tony delivered all the good content over an empty table. Sometimes the sidekick was nervous and didn’t eat at all, which looked awkward. Not to mention the sanitary standards I’d witnessed, which gave my already germaphobic imagination plenty to dwell on.
And it wasn’t just the food on camera. All the food off camera was a disaster too. Feeding the crew was surprisingly hard. We often ate where we filmed the scene, but for a host of reasons that wasn’t always possible. Probably because we ate at off-peak hours, the restaurant designated for crew meal would be overwhelmed by fifteen to twenty different orders, and the food would take two hours to arrive. The shooting schedule could barely even afford the one hour allotted for the break. The solution was to pre-order from a deli-type place, but, understandably, the crew didn’t appreciate warm mayonnaise. Tony endlessly ridiculed the crew for eating “sawdust energy bars” and rancid sandwiches.
“I just don’t understand cameramen. They load up at the hotel buffet, or I catch them eating those cardboard granola bars before coming to shoot an amazing meal like this. If they could just wait a little longer, then they’d enjoy one of the best meals of their lives,” he’d say.