Anthony Bourdain Colombia – No Reservations

Ok so these videos have circled the blogosphere for a while now, but since we’ve posted a fair bit about food we thought we’d share with you the thoughts of the infamous and erudite Anthony Bourdain. In the first part of the video he heads to Cartagena to sample some fruits from the coast. We covered our favourite fruits here and here, but this gives you a couple more you should try out if you come here:

Part two concerns… well, more food, some of which we looked at here, including arepas, empanadas and chicharron. It also takes a look at the progressive and surprising Medellín as Anthony learns a little about the history of the city and some of the things that have brought about its rapid propulsion into one of Colombia’s richest cities for culture and cuisine:

In the final part of the documentary Anthony attempts to conquer the Bandeja Paisa, which you might remember me struggling with a while back. He washes it down, typically, with an Aguardiente, which I wrote about before and have been steadily getting used to thanks to its ubiquitous nature. In this part of the episode Anthony delves more deeply into Medellín’s darker past, including the infamous figure of Pablo Escobar, and also delves into the comunas via Medellín’s MetroCable (another topic we’ve looked at in the past):

Talking about Colombia’s past can be difficult for many reasons. Primarily, it was a difficult time for Colombians and even those who weren’t directly affected will normally know someone who was. Secondly, being here now it doesn’t just feel like the past, it feels like a different country; some other place, some other time. But that’s not to say we should ignore the past, and we say well done to Bourdain for at least approaching the issue and doing it with sensitivity, never allowing those clouds to cover what is a brilliant new dawn for this amazing country. Countries all over the world have difficult pasts and all over the world the reverberations of these pasts are still felt. What sticks out about Colombia is that people seem less willing to accept what happened here for what it is: history. Hopefully people like Anthony Bourdain can help us keep changing that.

Paul