Did you miss last night's episode of No Reservations? It was Part 2 of Anthony Bourdain's food porn exposé, featuring chefs Daniel Boulud, Cesare Casella, and Michael White as well as former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni. Oh, and actual porn star Ron Jeremy (unappetizing!) doing intros. Here you go! More

Anthony Bourdain has been all over the map for his show No Reservations. Here he talks for a few minutes to ProjectExplorer.org's Good Global Citizen project about how this has changed his perspective. "The more you travel, the less you realize you know...When you travel it changes the definitions of words that you thought you understood. You thought you knew what the word "work" meant. You didn't know if you're from the West until you've seen a rice farming community, for instance." More Anthony, after the jump.... More

Photograph courtesy of Kathryn Yu's Flickr photostream Well, it's not like Serious Eats' Robyn Lee was a talking head on No Reservations, but you do see the back of her head on the show. FoSE Kathryn Yu captured the moment. There's Robyn in the background having lunch at Momofuku Ssam Bar. Update: Highmtn pointed out this photo in Robyn's Flickr stream. Thanks! Strangely appropriate, as the episode had to do with food porn, which Robyn excels at. Bourdain talks about food porn in this blog post and in this video with David Chang, where Bourdain says: It's anti-food in a sense. This is the thing with the food nerds—they're your most loyal followers. They spread the gospel, for sure,... More

I just mentioned Bourdain in an earlier post as being one of Serious Eats's favorites. Here's just one reason why. From his Travel Channel blog: Currently, wading through the submissions for the Travel with Tony thing—an often terrifying task. Just started in—but so far it’s like choosing between John Wayne Gacy, Linda Kasabian, or Robyn Miller. So many people seem to be videoing themselves from a cellar apartment—a suspicious-looking chest freezer in the background. Posters of Taxi Driver and multiple copies of Catcher in the Rye. Empty tubes of airplane glue. A plastic tarpaulin rolled up against wood paneling … So many candidates seem to want to take me to rural areas in the Pacific Northwest. The words “drainage culvert”... More

Word is that Anthony Bourdain filmed an upcoming No Reservations holiday-themed episode with rock band Queens of the Stone Age (QOTSA). While Bourdain prepares a traditional holiday feast at his Connecticut home, QOTSA are rocking out in the basement rec room. Bourdain describes the episode: It’s a traditional Thanksgiving/Christmas meal with turkey, all the trimmings, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie … some Christmas carols … and a vicious brother-on-brother knife fight. We spent a fair amount of time spraying stage blood onto my niece and nephew’s face. What’s a holiday special without violent mayhem? I think it’s an honest reflection of the holiday season. Happy holidays, indeed. [Thanks to Kathryn for the link!]... More

This week's episode of No Reservations follows Anthony Bourdain as he traces the footsteps of legendary French impressionist Paul Gaugin, who ditched Paris for the sun and fun (and artistic angst) of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands. Each segment, framed by a quote from Gaugin, shows a different hop along the path from civilization to oviri (or "wild" in Tahitian). The food goes from the fusion fare of an expatriate French chef preparing to open a high-end restaurant in Papaete to amazing-looking coconut crabs on the beach in Rangiroa. That said, the star dish was the omnipresent raw fish salad that seems to be the national dish of Tahiti—poisson cru. Tony gets his first taste after a night of clubbing... More

After managing to miss the first couple of installments due to my own incompetence with the big red button on the TiVo remote, I finally got a chance to check out the latest run of No Reservations, which is billed as "Season 3, Part Deux." Having watched the previous seasons pretty much in their entirety, it was just like returning to a well-worn vinyl chair at the kitchen table of an old friend, albeit an old friend who you are incredibly envious of. I mean, why does this mook get to travel to the world's great cities, get whisked instantly to the best local spots by eager, attractive foodies, all the while having no apparent raison d'etre beyond getting smashed... More

Before we begin the feature presentation here, we'd like to introduce the author of this post. Deb Perelman, whose work you may already know from Smitten Kitchen, will be joining us weekly to write about current trends in the food world. Say hi in the comments. And now, on with the show. —The Serious Eats Team Ratatouille, Babette's Feast, Chocolat and now No Reservations. Sense a theme? French cooking, French feasts, French chocolate, French restaurants—if an alien landed in the Twin Cinemas in your town, it would think we ate nothing but crepes, bonbons, and rustic Provençal fare. A raging Francophile myself, I'd be the last to complain, and yet in my own kitchen pot-au-feus and consommés are constantly pushed... More

Take your pick: Catherine Zeta-Jones or Tony Bourdain. On Friday, July 27, Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart debut No Reservations on the big screen. Following on the heels of Ratatouille, we've got a second food-related film hitting theaters this summer. No Reservations is a remake of Mostly Martha, a German film released in 2001 that centered on an uptight chef who is forced to work on her personal life when her young niece comes to live with her. The remake, judging by the preview, looks to be a faithful adaptation of the earlier film. That bodes well, considering the original was a very charming affair. As for the chemistry between Zeta-Jones, Eckhart, and Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin—take a gander at... More