How Lebanon Transformed Anthony Bourdain [View all]

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In 2006, he found himself in a country falling into war—an experience that forever altered how he would understand people, culture, history, and conflict.

Growing up in Beirut during Lebanon’s 15–year civil war, I wished for someone like Anthony Bourdain to tell the story of my country: a place ripped apart by violence, yes, but also a country where people still drove through militia checkpoints just to gather for big Sunday family lunches, or dodged sniper fire to get to their favorite butcher across town to sample some fresh, raw liver for breakfast. Bourdain, the legendary roving chef and master storyteller who committed suicide on Friday in France at the age of 61, would have approved of such excursions in search of the perfect morsel—he probably would have come along.

Coming of age during conflict made me want to become a journalist. I hoped to tell the story of my country and the Middle East—a place rife with conflicts, sure, but also layered with complexities, a place of diverse peoples full of humanity. In the summer of 2006, I was the BBC’s Beirut correspondent when war erupted between Israel and Hezbollah, the pro-Iran Shia militant group. Hezbollah had kidnapped three Israeli soldiers, triggering the month-long conflict. Within a day, the Israelis had bombed Beirut’s airport out of action. I worked 34 days in a row, 20 hours a day, reporting live on television and radio, alongside dozens of colleagues who’d flown in to help cover the conflict.

I didn’t know it then, but Bourdain was there too, filming an episode of his show No Reservations. And perhaps he didn’t know it then, but Lebanon would change him forever. In the episode, he talked about how he had come to Beirut to make a happy show about food and culture in a city that was regaining its reputation as the party capital of the Middle East. Instead, he found himself filming a country that had tipped into war overnight. Filming on the day the violence broke out, he managed to capture that split second where people’s faces fell as they realized their lives had been upended.

After a few days in Beirut itself, Bourdain and his team moved to a hotel just north of the capital, closer to their eventual evacuation spot. By then, Israeli jets were bombing not only areas with a Hezbollah presence, but bridges and power plants across the country. Yet the show never became about the experience of a terrorized American stranded in a scary place. Bourdain never made it about Bourdain—Lebanon was the story. And even during the dramatic scene of his departure, on a ship surrounded by Marines and hundreds of other evacuees—Americans and dual citizens—his focus remained on Lebanon and the distraught faces of its people, leaving behind country and family, uncertain of whether they’d ever return.


More: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/how-lebanon-transformed-anthony-bourdain/562484/



Anthony Bourdain at the 2015 Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California. DANNY MOLOSHOK / REUTERS