Men on Trips Eating Food - Why TV is full of late-career Hollywood guys at restaurants

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.

- By James Parker - Illustration Mike Copola

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.