Bourdain is back with new show

Travel inspiration comes in many forms, but few things are as dangerous to your vacation budget as a great travel show. The problem is that most of them follow the same well-worn itinerary. A smiling host points at the famous cathedral, reads boring facts from a script and moves on to next monument. Rinse. Repeat.

Then Anthony Bourdain arrived and flipped the table. When his now-famous first essay appeared in The New Yorker in 1999, chefs stopped being anonymous figures sweating behind swinging kitchen doors and started looking suspiciously like rock stars. Bourdain was more than a chef, though. He was a storyteller with an unhealthy curiosity about the world and the good sense to distrust anything polished enough to appear in a tourist brochure.

His books became essential reading for anyone who wanted to know what really happened after the dining room doors closed. But for most people, he became the face and voice of No Reservations, a show that proved travel wasn’t about ticking landmarks off a list. It was about sitting down with strangers, eating something you couldn’t pronounce, and discovering that the best stories rarely happen in front of famous monuments.

For seven seasons he wandered across the globe with equal enthusiasm for street food, questionable delicacies and conversations that no focus group would ever have approved. A standout episode is when he goes to Rome with his wife Ottavia. The entire episode is all shot in black and white Fellini style with sardonic voice overlays. That is as far from Michael Palin as one can come.

Now he’s back. On November 21, Anthony Bourdain returns with a new series, The Layover. If it captures even a fraction of the curiosity, irreverence and appetite that made No Reservations unforgettable, it’s already worth clearing a spot for in the schedule.