Bourdain Returns: Parts Unknown

Anthony Bourdain returned to television after a brief hiatus following his clip show-laden final season of No Reservations on Travel Channel.  A little less than a year ago he announced his move to Sunday nights on CNN in primetime with a plan to expand on the scope of the shows and the locations they shoot.

The format of the show is similar.  There's some background on the location and Tony hangs out with a local chef, a local celebrity/celebrity from the area/cool quirky guy who lives in the area, and includes a home cooked meal.

Having missed the premier due to high demand of the DVR on Sunday and a repeat pre-empted by news coverage of the hunt for the Boston Marathon bomber, the first episode I saw is "Koreatown" (Los Angeles).

Few episodes of No Reservations focus on just a city, let alone a neighborhood.  The closest possibly being "Brooklyn" in the series finale...not exactly small considering it'd be the third largest city in the country if the five boroughs were counted separately.  The smaller area, with the neighborhood's border streets explained in a handy on screen map, allows them to tackle a lot more topics and interesting local sites in an hour.  It even allows Tony to stop by Little Bangladesh (apparently the first in America) within Koreatown within Los Angeles.

His shows are always also about making the show, never more evident in the "Beruit" episode.  Parts Unknown includes Pop Up Video-esque cards on the screen providing background and other facts about shooting the episode, like how the crew used a remote controlled helicopter to obtain a certain aerial shot.

While the episode packs a lot in, there's the three staples mentioned above:

Chef

Roy Choi covers both his time in Koreatown during the 1992 riots, and his current small empire of restaurants rising from the original iterations as a single food truck to four trucks (longest line for one: 600 people) and three brick and mortar restaurants.  Choi talks about the identity of his food, in an urban environment, and how the barb wire, puddles and telephone poles of the city inform his food as much as 

Quirky local celebrity

David Choe, an artist commissioned to do murals for the Facebook offices who took his pay in stock cashed in for $200 million when the company went public.  If you have seen Bourdain's twitter avatar, you've seen Choe's work.

Home cooked meal

Bourdain visits the Choe house for dinner.  Both of Choe's parents are artists, formerly in the real estate business which was obviously hit hard following the riots in 1992.  They launch into a discussion about Han.  Which West Wing fans may be familiar with.  

Sundays being what they are, I can record the repeats (sorry, "encores") on Fridays and have a full ninety minutes of televised worldly macho-ness, watching it after the VICE recordings