Men on Trips Eating Food

Why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants

- James Parker

As a reverse foodie-a rudie, a gastronomically ungluedie, a don't-bother-cooking-for-that-dudie'm not exactly a target viewer for the eating-and-traveling shows. I'm happy sitting behind my stacked up cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, reading Frederick Seidel. But now and again I'm touched; an image or a moment from one of these shows will move me.

Like the sequence in Season 6, Episode 8, of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in which Bourdain (God rest his troubled soul) sits down with Sean Brock at a Waffle House in Charleston, South Carolina.

To set the scene: Bourdain has never been to a Waffle House before. Brock, by contrast, a southern chef in a baseball сар, is a lifelong connoisseur not just of the food that golden-griddled, all-forgiving food; that eternal breakfast, mystically charged with the democratic yellow glow of Waffle House neon-but of the openall-hours, come-all-ye-faithful, come-all-ye-fucked-up Waffle House vibe.

"This was action to me," he tells Bourdain. "I would see these people cooking at a pace, and cooking for people who were completely out of control, but still providing hospitality." For his guest, he has devised "a tasting-menu experience," one delirious grease-load after another, and as the food hits them, the two men lose their minds.

They slump and surrender and dissolve into a single namelessly buzzing poetic orality: "Patty melt! Augh... Mmmm... Come on... That's not insanely delicious?... That's not insanely delicious? Ooohhh... God damn."

Why is this so beautiful? Because the ambience and the cultural context-the pure, generous, flavorous, spiritually flowing Waffle House-ness of the moment are enfolded in the reaction: the faces that Brock and Bourdain make, and the noises coming out of these faces, as they express (and share) the intensely and otherwise invisibly subjective experience of tasting something. It's the primal spark, I think, of the eating-and-traveling show.