Anthony Bourdain helps me focus my travel bucket list, Part 2

I’m reading World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, which was published after famed chef Anthony Bourdain’s death by suicide. His co-author compiled Bourdain’s impressions and here is some of the good stuff and some I already covered.

The section in the book on Canada covers several cities. Montreal is his favorite of them and he calls the locals some “tough, crazy bastards” and that it is a must to eat smoked meat at Joe Beef. Toronto is the fifth-largest city in North America. It’s not a good-looking place because of its “Soviet chic” architecture, but there is a lot of good weirdness on the inside, such as eating a classic peameal bacon sandwich with horseradish and maple-spiked mustard. Vancouver is where it rains all the time and there is a public beach “filled with albino tourists,” but it was recently ranked the most livable city in the world. Eat street food there, like Japadog, for hot dogs with Japanese ingredients.

In China, Bourdain first heads to Hong Kong, which “if you can’t enjoy for a few hours or days, there’s no hope for you.” He writes that the films of Wong Kar-wai are a good way to get prepared for the place. It’s definitely on his short list for greatest food cities of the world, with its roast meat (especially at Joy Hing’s and Kam’s Roast Goose), drunken chicken, and spicy crab. Goose is even better than pork, he writes. Eating at cheap open-air stalls (dai pai dongs) is the way to go. They are becoming extinct due to fancy monied restaurants but a few dozen remain. His other recommendations literally had my stomach making outrageous sounds at me as I read. Shanghai is a city of 25 million cut in half by the old (the western side) and the new (the eastern), and by the Huangpu River. The city is a hodgepodge of immigrants from areas outside Shanghai and the food is often black or dark because of liberal use of sugar, soy, and vinegar and fresh ingredients bursting with flavor. Sichuan Province in the southwest of the country is known as a fertile breadbasket and the home to an exploding middle class far from the cities in eastern China. It’s a place where you are judged on how you can drink alcohol and eat fiery hot peppercorn-laced food. If you’re good at it, you have a big penis, are generally manly, and have a good net worth as a human being. Pockmark granny tofu or hot pots are two dishes Bourdain said must be had.

To prepare for his visit to Croatia, Bourdain read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which Rebecca West wrote about her journeys in the Balkan states in 1937 before Germany invaded Yugoslavia. The Dalmatian coast in the southern part is what people have now come to understand as a dream Mediterranean vacation away from the masses in other parts of Europe, but Bourdain loved the foodie (kind of like Italian) parts in the north and central coasts and islands as well. Sea bass, shark liver, and monkfish tripe are all really good choices in the region.

Cuba is enchanting and beautiful, with people who are “open hearted, friendly, relentlessly curious, and sophisticated about nearly everything.” It’s quintessential Havana to walk along the five-mile coastal esplanade called the Malecon. And of course catch a baseball game.

Helsinki, Finland is a place with people tough enough to have fought off the Nazis and Russians, not to mention all those cold, long, depressing winters. Possibly because of the lack of warmth, saunas were a Finnish invention and something visitors must experience there. Massages come with bloodletting to remove toxins. Late-night drinking while consuming pucks of meats is also on the docket.

Next we move to a place that Bourdain clearly feels a lot less sarcastic about—France. In Chamonix (French Alps), chicken fingers and Bud Light is not the way of skiing life like in the U.S. It will be more like foie gras, veal, the most amazing cheese with holes, and fondue on bread and potatoes. This will result in a cannonball of crap lodged up your butt like a baby’s head, Bourdain offers. Moving south from the Alps on the way to the Mediterranean is Lyon, where cured pork is essential, as is rabbit. Maison Troigros is said to be the best restaurant in the world and this is a city heralded as burgeoning perhaps the greatest selection of chefs in history. It launched a filet of salmon dish in butter and white wine, which sounds simple but was transformative to cooking when introduced in 1962. But also, Lyonaisse rules about eating haven’t changed in over 100 years: you always sit while eating, you think about what you’re eating, you don’t read or listen to music while eating, you only drink wine and not water while eating, and you always eat dessert. Marseille is the second-biggest city in France and most tourists haven’t been there, but as a port to people coming from Africa, it is a place of delectable sights and smells emanating mostly from seafood bouillabaisses and a variety of sticky, gooey, sweet, and tangy cheeses. We finish in Paris, which is in many ways exactly what you would expect: socialist free medical care, long vacations, and high quality of life. The key when visiting is to avoid doing too much. You can’t see everything like the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, Arc de Triomphe, and standing in line at museums. “Do as little as possible,” like walking a little, get lost a bit, have some sex, read a book, eat, tool around on a Velib bikeshare, and repeat. The first thing upon arriving is to slip into a cafe for a ham sandwich, a coffee, and a reset for yourself into Paris’s specific pace of life.

In sub-Saharan Accra, Ghana, slave forts still dot the coast in a place that is now proud to be democratic and ruled by law as well as the home of great food, music, and natural beauty.