As a reverse foodie—a rudie, a gastronomically ungluedie, a don’t-bother-cooking-for-that-dudie—I’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 cap, 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 open-all-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.
White-guy-goes-a-wandering, white-guy-goes-a-gourmandizing—that’s the rubric. Specifically, right now, late-career Hollywood white guy. Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, has Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix. Eugene Levy has The Reluctant Traveler on Apple TV+. Stanley Tucci has Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy on Discovery+. Nice work if you can get it. And the genre has been formalized: drone shots of fjords, mesas, and Mumbai street markets; glistening porno food close-ups; tinkly twinkly music; voice-overs saying things like “The Venetians are a thrifty people.” These are the common elements, episode after episode proposing itself as a kind of anemic picaresque in which the host/hero visits a strange place where no misadventures occur, no sex is had, and everyone is very obliging and laughs a little too readily—hahaha!—and gives him nice pieces of pork and yummy desserts.
Each of these guys has his shtick. Rosenthal is childlike and immoderately gleeful, always doing little dances in the street and giggling before he takes a bite of something. And he, too, has his Waffle House moment: It happens to him, it claims him, at Bait Maryam, a Levantine restaurant in Dubai. Chef Salam Dakkak, her face illumined by some kind of beatific culinary compassion, prepares for Phil, with her hands, a dish of kibbeh nayyeh: raw meat, ground with bulgur and spiced with cumin, cloves, marjoram, and cinnamon. Phil builds himself a mouthful with bread and a slice of onion, giggles, shoves it in, and he is gone. Overcome by sensory resonance. The Tigger energy is abruptly stilled, replaced by a silently welling solemnity. It’s a stirring sight: Phil as low-rent Proust, unable to find the words. “I have to tell you something,” he says at last. “It’s so wild to feel an emotion in the food.”
Levy is deadpan, anhedonic, a prisoner of his own eyebrows: Some of his observations seem to be a challenge to the very concept of interestingness. (Breakfasting on a balcony in Saint-Tropez: “The food is exceptionally good and, you know, the view is stunning. I mean, you can see why this is such a popular place in Europe. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Really.”) Tucci in Italy is mysterious, saturnine. Bald as a saint. Strolling about in a subdued ecstasy of dapperness, sockless and stubbled, scarf knotted just so. His fine downward-tending actor’s cadence ripples through the commentary. Reaction-wise, he’s a minimalist, relying on the calligraphy of his thick-framed glasses and the lean planes of his face to communicate a deep inwardness of foodie joy. Except in Sicily, for some reason, where he becomes particularly expressive: “I want to live with you!” he tells one chef after a bite of raw fish, and “I want to take a bath in it!” after a swallow of local wine.
There’s a countercultural aspect—given the state of things right now, given the roar in the ether—to these shows. The niceness in them is pervasive, like a contagion. People are taking their time, perfecting their crafts, enjoying their lives. Tremendous local pride, but no tribalism. A spirit of welcome everywhere. Very alienating after a while. You’ll crave some anarchy, some venom, some madness. As Jim Henson put it when he was pitching The Muppet Show to TV stations: “The time is right for a variety show hosted by dogs, frogs and monsters.” Which is why, after Phil, and Eugene, and Stanley, you must watch Conan.
Conan O’Brien has been getting more and more interesting. Now 61, he’s an elder statesman of comedy, chortling away with the celebrity guests on his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and reminiscing about the high days of Saturday Night Live. But as he ages, he’s also becoming wilder and clownier and more unstably and violently ginger, as if there’s an Eric André crashing around inside him, or one of the Jackass crew.
Did you see him on Hot Ones ? This is the YouTube talk show, sort of an anti-food show, where guests—while attempting to answer the eloquent and searching questions of the host, Sean Evans—must work their way through progressively more annihilating levels of hot sauce on a chicken wing. It’s a great show: Guests are regularly reduced to, in Martin Amis’s phrase, “tears of barbaric nausea.” And O’Brien really goes for it. Sauce by sauce and wing by wing, he devastates himself. He gnaws, he drools, he emits steam. He changes color, and then changes again. His quiff twanging madly, he rubs hot sauce onto his shirted nipples. Then—to the mild alarm of Evans—he guzzles the hottest, most dangerous sauce straight from the bottle, crying, “Why can’t I feel ?”
So here he is, in the Dantean wood of midlife, advancing upon decrepitude, his palate destroyed by lethal peppers. The intro to his new show on Max, Conan O’Brien Must Go, is spoken by Werner Herzog: the voice from the iceberg, crystallizing its syllables. “Behold the defiler.” (Cue a montage of O’Brien variously writhing, collapsing onto bystanders, and floating down a Thai canal with a rubber chicken in his hand.) “His character is vile, base, and depraved … This clown with dull, tiny eyes, the eyes of a crudely painted doll.”
O’Brien knows all the tricks of the eating-and-traveling show. In Norway, he invites the ubiquitous drone into his hotel room; it floats down across Bergen Harbor (“Oh man,” O’Brien says in voice-over. “Look at this incredible drone shot! … You gotta use drone cameras on these travel shows”), flies in through the balcony window, and hovers by his bed as he sips a glass of red wine. In an Irish butcher’s shop, he explains that he’s gotta taste the local food and react lavishly to it. The butcher gives him a couple of slices of black pudding—nothing fancy, a breakfast staple in Ireland—and O’Brien has a fake gastronomic fit. He falls to the floor, eyes closed, caressing his long thighs in erotic rapture. The butcher stands by, deadpanning like Eugene Levy.
Has O’Brien fluked his way to the dark, dark heart of it? Because maybe this is what they’re all about, the eating-and-traveling shows: It’s late in the day, and our taste buds have been blasted, and we’ve got to feel something.
This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “Men on Trips Eating Food.”