Bizarre Foods vs. No Reservations

[Ruhskins]

Originally Posted by over the mountain

me and the lady watch both shows. i like them both for different reasons but i agree with your reasons for not liking bourdain as much besides him being a bit of an ass, but thats his angle/approach to his show.

what reaally got me about bourdain is that for one of his shows he was going to see 3 down on their luck "rust belt" towns as the show called them. so he did detroit, another city and for some reason baltimore.

so he goes to baltimore, and chooses to go to this out in nowhere indian food place surrounded by empty warehouses and stuff. then he decides to meet up with some hood lady from the show the wire and she takes him to something like a lake trout in the ghetto west baltimore.

it just sucked that he actively had to go to they very worst and emptiest parts of baltimore so it meshed with his theme of down trodden "rust belt" cities.

he didnt go to fells or canton or lil italy or charles village or fed hill or inner harbor where there are a ton of real nice high end restaurants from chains like ruth chris to smaller awesome restaurants like peters inn.

i really didnt like how the show went well out of their way to try and display baltimore like its this abandoned city akin to buffalo or cleveland.

they literally went to the far east and far west spots of baltimore (where noone goes) to find neighborhoods that appeared to be run down.

im repeatting myself but man, that show really changed my perception of whether other cities he visists is a true representation of that city or whether he picked and choosed what he wanted the viewers to think of that city.

fuck bourdain, i never curse on here but fuck him actually.

I thought that was the whole point of the show, to go where tourists typically don't go. And I thought that whole episode's point was to show how much these one prosperous cities (i.e. Detroit with the car industry boom) were, how they were affected by economic problems, and how people have coped with it. I'm sure Bourdain rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but that's kinda of his whole point. He goes to places that are not touristy, places that are not mainstream, and to me that's what makes his show interesting.