Stick To Your Ribs Food

If you’re not familiar with Anthony Bourdain’s Travel channel show, No Reservations Required, do yourself a favor and tune in. If you don’t get North American TV, the story is he reviews food and culture from every corner of the planet, including Uruguay.

Bourdain is my kind of guy; he never minces words. He is brash, tattooed, foul-mouthed. He’s like an aging rocker, pounding back so much of the national booze in whatever corner of the world he visits, that his morning-after taping sessions inevitably involve a discussion on the local hangover remedy. All the while looking quite fit for 51.

And he’s fun, in a charming Beavis and Butt-head sort of way. You’ve gotta laugh when he goes off. Blasting restaurant and food personalities he doesn’t love is clearly his favorite sport, second only to the daredevil eating.

Here are a few comments about his trip to Uruguay a few months ago:

“I was just in Uruguay. It was one of those great discoveries. Montevideo is outrageously cool. I ate meat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I don’t think I saw a single vegetable for 10 days. Everything is cooked over roaring heaps of wood. They are burning down the whole world to feed themselves. I had armadillo. Hadn’t had that yet. And some emu/ostrich varietal. But the big surprise was how good the blood sausage was. Maybe the best morcilla I ever had.”

So how good is the beef?

“It was better than I had in Argentina. People say the beef in Argentina is great. I prefer American beef to Argentine beef. But everything I had in Uruguay was unexpectedly great.”

His irreverent response when presented with a Chivito for the first time is typical, “That’s really F….d up! This is one massive injection of cholesterol.”

For those of you not familiar with the national equivalent of a hamburger, a Chivito is large toasted bread sandwich, pilled high…..I mean loaded with bacon, beef, chicken and melted cheese to name one possible combination, served with a massive side of fries.

Bourdain declared the Chivito the, “Greatest sandwich in the world, if for no other reason than the calorie and cholesterol count.”

He continues, “Today at noon we went to the Mercado del Puerto. I swear that in this city I ate more meat than I’ve ever eaten in my life. In the parrillada they served us an enormous brazier with five pounds of meat—with sausages, blood sausage, sweetbreads, lamb, asado—and didn’t stop until I finished it all. In Uruguay, they have the best blood sausage, better than the French and whatever other I have tasted, particularly the sweet. I tip my hat to societies like yours that don’t pay attention to cholesterol and the crazy idea of healthy eating. Even more, when I don’t see anywhere the @#$% fast food chains like Burger King, Starbucks, Chicken McNuggets, or Wendy’s. All that I see speaks well of the country. I like countries that aren’t in love with American fast food.”

This little ditty tells you all you need to know about food in the Land of the Sun.

Stay Tuned!

Steve Bowman