by Tom Vitale
The reality was, by the time we were done filming the food, there often wouldn’t be time to eat, or sometimes even any food left. The irony of going hungry on a food show was a recurring joke. I remember the crew eating van-temperature sandwiches out back by the dumpsters at several of the world’s best restaurants.
I’m talking about the four-hour, twenty-five-course, several-thousand-dollar-plus per meal sort of places. Customers at these restaurants might wait months or even years to get a reservation. Others, possessing household names, dropped in by helicopter and snagged a table at the last minute. Well-heeled captains of industry, celebrities, hard-core epicureans, bucket listers… and me.
The kitchens in these restaurants were something to behold. Usually with an international collection of extremely talented and obsessively driven young chefs, there were often more people working in the kitchen than could be seated in the dining room. When you did the math, at restaurants like El Bulli or Noma, it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine your appetizer took a combined twenty man-hours to prepare.
As much as they did their best to remain “down to earth,” there was an undeniable cult of personality surrounding whichever chef helmed one of these culinary cathedrals. Let’s just say that calling the seven hours we would spend at a place like this a staggeringly extraordinary and intimidating experience would be a serious understatement. When we filmed at Noma in 2013, which had been awarded “World’s Best Restaurant” three years in a row, chef René Redzepi created a customized menu just for Tony. Each ingredient was locally sourced or foraged and meticulously prepared.
BOURDAIN MENU
SNACKS:
Nordic coconut and flowers
Blackcurrant berry with roses
Reindeer moss and dried mushroom
Edible branch with pine shoots
Fresh peas and chamomile
Cod liver and milk crisp
Hay-smoked quail egg
Aebleskiver
Sorrel leaf
Urchin toast and stock film
Leek and cod roe
Pike head and beach herbs
MENU:
Shrimp, wild garlic, and rhubarb
Onion and preserved pear
Lobster tail, head sauce, and nasturtium leaves
Lobster claw broth and nasturtium petals
Asparagus and pine
Potato and caviar
Turbot and greens
Pickles
Blueberry and ants
Bitters and woodsorrel
Yeast and skyr
Red seaweed danish
Pork skin and dried berries
While this is the sort of meal that people would—and have—gone to extraordinary lengths to partake in, I didn’t mind not getting to try it. Somewhere along the line the food—regardless of what it was—had been too closely associated with the stress of the job, and usually, by the end of the shoot day, I’d lost my appetite.
Other members of the crew were not so afflicted. In fact, Josh was known to eat the things that even Tony refused to eat. That Tony was the guy who “ate all the weird stuff” was a misunderstanding that plagued him to the end. A good deal of this undeserved reputation can be traced back to a mistake he made on his first trip to Vietnam in 2000. Back then, before he’d got his sea legs, so to speak, he was much more suggestible, and was persuaded to eat the beating heart of a cobra on camera.
If Tony sniffed out that the producers were adding a scene or dish for the “shock value,” he’d cancel it instantly. That said, Tony would eat nearly anything, but because he wanted to be a good guest. If the locals enjoyed it, he’d eat it—rotten fermenting shark meat, bull penis stew. If a diseased zoo animal, for example, was the local specialty offered to guests, it was an honor Tony couldn’t refuse. He did always say he’d draw the line at eating dog. Fortunately, it never came up.
Tony never claimed to be an expert when it came to the food, despite his many years as a chef. There were a few particularly humorous examples of when he got it wrong. On The Layover Hong Kong episode, we stopped off for a last scene on the way to the airport. The restaurant supposedly served the best Peking duck in the city. It was a solo scene, and Tony raved on and on about how this was the best Peking duck he’d ever had. Just as we were about to finish, I got a tap on my shoulder.
“I’ve just been informed there was a mix-up in the kitchen,” China Matt, our fixer, said, a distressed look on his face. “Tony’s been eating suckling pig.”
Thinking there might be some time to save the scene, I interrupted Tony, letting him know the Peking duck he’d been raving about wasn’t actually Peking duck.
“Well… this is awkward,” Tony said, putting down his chopsticks.
There was another time Tony kept raving about the pepper crab.
“Oh my god, this pepper crab is fantastic. The pepper sauce is so rich and nuanced, it’s unbelievable,” Tony said.
“Oh yeah! It is really good pepper crab,” the sidekick said in agreement.
After Tony left and we went to the kitchen to film the food prep, the chef looked puzzled, explaining, “We don’t have pepper crab. We don’t have pepper anything.”
Confused, I went to talk to the sidekick. As a local, he couldn’t have also been mistaken about the pepper crab.
“Tony’s the food expert,” the sidekick said. “I thought I just couldn’t taste the pepper.”
BEING SICK WHILE TRAVELING IS never fun. But it’s a lot worse when you’re not able to sleep it off. We didn’t do sick days and were always out in the loud, crazy, chaotic world and sweltering heat, constantly in the presence of food smells, kitchens, restaurants, and aromas.
After a scene in Haiti, everyone was eating, talking, and Tony was watching Todd. Halfway through the meal Tony said, “I guess you weren’t paying attention during the scene you just filmed, Todd. Or you would have known a garden salad isn’t the wisest dining choice in the middle of a fucking cholera epidemic.”
Connecting the dots, though a little late, Todd rushed from the table to induce vomiting.
“It’s okay, don’t worry. I took three Cipros,” Todd said when he returned to the table.
“I regret to inform you, Todd, that’s not how it works,” our medic said, shaking his head. “You may have just made yourself immune to Cipro.”
We spent enough time out in the real world when the cameras were rolling, so when we shared a meal with Tony it was often at the hotel. He always enjoyed studying the crew’s menu selections, then analyzing the choice. Spaghetti bolognese was the smart option. Hotel food was always more likely to get you than the local stuff. “Spag bowl,” as Tony called it, was on every menu, hard to mess up regardless of location and unlikely to make you ill. Tony lived for the times the crew made amateur ordering mistakes. Offhand, here are a few of his favorites. There was a seafood medley in Iraq, a Caesar salad in Medellín, late-night gyros in Granada, gas station sandwiches in Ireland, Bob’s Jungle Burger in the Amazon, and of course the time one of the producers ordered Louisiana-style jambalaya at the hotel in Namibia.
“Mark the time,” Tony said, halfway through the meal. He went on to explain how in Namibia seafood jambalaya was an extremely poor menu choice, pointing out how far each of the ingredients had traveled to get to this landlocked central African country, and how long they’d likely been sitting in the back of the freezer, as jambalaya probably wasn’t ordered often, and how it only took a single bad mussel or clam to shut you closed like a book. And then Tony would go on to remind you about the sanitary conditions of the kitchen, the statistical likelihood that at least one of the people who’d handled any single ingredient somewhere along the line hadn’t bothered to wash their hands after coming back from taking a steaming dump. Then he’d explain in medical detail the types of bacteria and parasites likely to already be attacking you from the inside, and how—looking again at his watch—about three hours from now you were all but guaranteed to be shitting and vomiting at the same time.
Even if the food wasn’t contaminated, Tony’s monologue was enough to give almost anyone a bad case of psychosomatic food poisoning. Tony loved retelling these poor-food-choice stories time and time again during crew meals, and even during his speaking engagements in front of an audience.
But Tony wasn’t immune to getting sick. The warthog anus in Namibia got him bad. Fortunately, his hotel had two bathrooms. As he explained it, he spent the whole night getting up every fifteen minutes to vomit furiously into one toilet then run across the room and shit in the other one. It was the only time I knew of when he’d actually been convinced to go see the doctor after returning to New York.
Tony got sick both times we went to Sri Lanka, and he came down with a particularly nasty stomach bug in Manila, likely from a fried tripe bar snack, and had to call out sick for a day.
“I was up most of the night experiencing chills and dementia, projectile vomiting bile and reptile parts, so we’ll need to cancel the street food scene,” he said.
I didn’t get sick often, mostly thanks to my policy of not eating much. On the rare occasion it did happen, I did my best to keep it a secret—and usually succeeded—like in Toronto when I nearly blew the scene throwing up out back by the dumpster.
Tony only caught me sick one time. It was Sri Lanka, and I’d started feeling ill the day we took a train ride south down the coast. I repeatedly threw up in the train toilet, which was really just a hole in the floor. I continually ran back and forth between directing the scene and the toilet to barf. But I’d managed to keep it a secret from Tony.
By the end of the shoot, I was starving and feeling weak. When we finally made it to the airport lounge, I was about to collapse from low blood sugar. I saw some pizza underneath a warming light. Yes, I should’ve known better, it probably had been sitting there for a long time, and yes, it had some shriveled chicken looking thing on top. But my biggest mistake was allowing Tony to see me eat it. It didn’t take long before I started to feel incredibly nauseated. Of course, not wanting Tony to see that I was ill, I calmly got up and headed toward the bathroom. As soon as I was out of sight, I started running down a maze-like series of hallways and made it just in time to projectile vomit into the toilet. Everything in my stomach forcibly ejected, I washed up and headed back to the group.
“Tom, feeling okay?” Tony asked, looking up from his iPad with a huge smile on his face.
“Fine, of course, why?” I said, reflexively wiping my mouth.
“Just checking,” he replied.
Jared explained to me afterward that everyone could hear me vomiting, presumably through the ductwork. Tony brought up that cautionary tale for years to come. Despite all my hard work, I’d finally been added to his list of shame. Eventually I determined that not eating around Tony was the best solution.
Years ago I’d been scouting a high-end restaurant in Barcelona—the kind with obsessive waiter service where they were constantly at the table introducing and explaining each dish as it arrives. It can get distracting if you’d intended to have any conversation with your dining companion. To be fair, it was a molecular gastronomy–type tapas restaurant, so the food required a bit of an instruction manual. However, my opinion about the interruptions changed when Alejandro came to the table. He was extremely handsome and—unusual for me—we flirted a bit. He asked how I liked Barcelona, and I mentioned how much fun the nightlife was. Turned out Alejandro was of the same opinion and offered to show me a great spot, and we exchanged numbers. Score!
“Look, Tom, jamón de toro,” said Lucy, our Spain fixer, pointing to the menu. “I bet you’ll love it. What a perfect way to help you with your fish problem.”
I didn’t like peer pressure, especially when it came to fish, but maybe Lucy was right. She had been our fixer in Spain for years and was a food expert. The “jamón de toro” was actually tuna but supposedly tasted like ham. Tuna was the most vanilla of fishes, and I love ham, so I thought, why not? I’ll give it a try! I’d gone out of my comfort zone and got a phone number as a result; I was on a winning streak. The more I thought about it, the more I decided Lucy was right, I’d been too much a prisoner of my phobias for far too long. Hey, who knew, I might end up liking it! Alejandro arrived and made a show of presenting the tapa.
“This is the jamón de toro,” he said enthusiastically. “It is made of house-salted tuna belly painted with Iberian cured ham fat. ¡Que aproveche!”
I waited for Alejandro to leave before trying the dish, just in case I didn’t like it. It looked just like jamón. I hadn’t eaten fish since 1984, but hey, this was going to be fine. I could do this. I took a deep breath. But after one bite I started heaving. It was a textural thing. I tried as hard as I could to stop the gag reflex, but I couldn’t. I grabbed my napkin and threw up. Unfortunately, not only the jamón de toro came up, but everything else I’d eaten—just as Alejandro returned to the table with the next tapa. Alejandro and I never made it to that club.
WHENEVER POSSIBLE, WE’D FILM THE animal from alive to table, which usually meant me calling in a hit on a cute little fuzzy thing and then getting to meet it before the slaughter. In these admittedly uncomfortable situations, I tried to console myself with the knowledge that it’s a part of life, and whatever animal we were offing was treated with infinitely more respect than factory-farmed livestock. I remember a darling fluffy little sheep tied to the bed of a pickup in Crete. She stood there meekly blinking at me. Despite sounding tough, Tony didn’t like this part either. So of course, he came over, affectionately named her “Socks,” and bleated, “Why me-eeee, Tom?” in mock sheep falsetto. I would hide behind the camera. Their death was for the camera’s consumption, not mine. And if preparation took too long between slaughter and table, sometimes I’d have to order two.
There were also a few unfortunate instances where Tony’s motto “Eat what the locals eat” resulted in us inadvertently consuming what turned out to be an endangered species.
“Well, Tom, in addition to the Romania scandal, now there’s the ‘mouse-deer incident,’” Tony said.
“Okay, well, I feel really bad about that,” I said. “But who even knew the lesser Java mouse-deer was endangered?”
“Oh, let me think… Maybe the World Wildlife Fund, most responsible citizens, PETA, the Vietnamese government, the animal poachers who sold it to you, the sponsors pulling their ads, and the authors of that article accusing me of ‘promoting the delicacy of endangered wildlife,’” Tony said. “Would you like me to go on?”
I’m not sure, but I think we might have been responsible for consuming the last giant Mekong catfish, and Tony didn’t even like catfish. I’d once rescued a monitor lizard from a food market in Malaysia, intending to release it at the snake temple, where it would be safe. We all forgot, and it expired in the baking hot van. But I’m probably most haunted by my Portuguese rabbits Hip and Hop.
“I bought you a fish. His name is Pepe,” Tony said, thrusting a lifeless sardine in my face.
“I don’t want it,” I said, recoiling.
“C’mon, you can adopt him and release him into the ocean. Or feed him to your bunnies?” Turning to the camera, Tony said, “Tom our producer bought six bunnies yesterday, to ‘free them into the wild.’”
“Not funny,” I said.
“Lunch,” Tony fake-coughed.
First of all, it was two bunnies, not six. Second, I was the director, not the producer.
By the winter of 2017, having the best job in the world had left me resembling what can only be described as a complete and utter train wreck. My dating life was frequently on the rocks and my best friend, the black cat Frida—renamed “Mr. Whiskers” by Tony—was having kidney trouble and had been diagnosed with a heart condition. Lonely, nerves shot, and probably clinically depressed, I was so emotionally raw on the flight to Portugal that the part of the in-flight safety video with the child and oxygen mask caused me to sob uncontrollably, alarming nearby passengers. For way too long I had been eating, sle
eping, breathing, and—increasingly over the years—drinking the job.
First day of filming we’d scheduled a typical pig feast scene, which of course meant we had to shoot the animal being killed, bled, scalded, scraped, skinned, eviscerated, butchered, cooked, and whatever else it was Todd filmed for a living. I looked into Piggy’s eyes before the slaughter, knowing it wasn’t too late. I could untie his rope and we could run off together. Knowing I had the power to grant him a stay of execution, and knowing that I wasn’t going to do it—that Piggy, like so many innocents before him, was going to die because I had chosen it to be so—well, it was as difficult as it was irrational. I felt like I was teetering on the verge of a very public mental breakdown.
Adding to the malaise, rather than getting a production tan in our usual tropical February destination, I was shivering in northern Portugal. Seven cold, rainy days later I was barely hanging on by a damp, slippery thread. We were filming at Porto’s historic Mercado do Bolhão, and I needed a break from the shouting and cameras and the butcher smells.
Wandering down a cobblestone alley near the back of the market, I came across a stall selling small livestock; it could have doubled as a pet store back in New York. Inside was a cage containing two of the most adorable little floppy-eared rabbits I’d ever seen! Ever. They were contentedly snuggled together like yin and yang. Possessing neither local currency nor fluency, I rushed back to our fixer Carla, and demanded she buy my rabbits immediately. Carla laughed, thinking it was a joke, and I burst into tears.
“You don’t understand. If I can just save these two little rabbits, it might help make up for all my past sins! They can live on José’s farm!” Carla wasn’t laughing anymore, and I could tell by the look in her eyes she was worried I might climb one of the city’s famous clock towers and start shooting. That afternoon we were headed to a beautiful farm in the Douro Valley; it was the perfect place for my rabbits to retire.
“My bunny hops over the ocean, my bunny hops over the sea… Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my bunny to me, to me,” I sang while feeding them fresh lettuce and carrots.