"Culinary Holy Grail"...?

        Before "A Cook's Tour", I'd never read anything by Anthony Bourdain, let alone seen one of his cooking shows -- I knew literally nothing about him, and in this book the voice he uses really lets the reader get to know who he is. I don't know if this book is necessarily what I would look to to actually find the "perfect meal", seeing as it is merely the search for this meal according to Bourdain alone; his point is that what makes a perfect meal is the experience and feelings that went with it. His perfect meal could very well be just another decent plate of food for us, it could mean absolutely nothing and we'd never remember it -- but to him, it would mean something completely different. This trip isn't just about finding the "perfect meal", if that even exists, but it's also a memoir of self-discovery through travel and food.
        He really hooked me in at the introduction, and I think that the general consensus is that he's either a huge jerk, or a hilarious genius. I think I've gotten past the jerk-ish qualities; I can deal with a reasonable amount of snarkiness and I don't think he goes over the top. It just adds to the humor most of the time, and his brutal honesty keeps the mood light in situations that may have been less than desirable. One thing that I connected with was in the beginning, when he states his innocent, childlike desire for the places he'll visit to be exactly like they're depicted in the movies. Rather than be informed about what the reality of the place is, he'd rather just go with his imagined sense of it, and in this way his viewpoint is changed at almost every place he experiences.
        I'm not really sure if he's writing this novel for himself, his family, or the world in general as an audience; I'm leaning more towards the idea that he's writing it for us, whoever chooses to read this book, because he describes food to us in ways that we can understand it. When he uses the foreign word for something, he'll take time to tell us that it is "an amazing soup of bread, stock, fresh cumin, bits of pork, and blood". I think that one of the parts of the book that held real raw emotion was the chapter with his brother in France, as they tried to, in a sense, find their father. In this section, the way I saw him completely changed -- he seemed much more vulnerable and innocent than in other sections. I also really liked how he separated himself from TV, and anything else that made him look like he was just doing this for the public eye or for money. He kept describing how much he hated posing for those cheesy, deep-in-thought scenes and having to repeatedly backtrack and re-do scenes of him entering restaurants. I liked the sections telling us why we "don't want to be television", and the one part when he actually questions whether or not he should describe the beauty of San Sebastian to us  -- he then responds, "Nah, I'll leave that to Lonely Planet or Fodor's". He's clearly trying throughout the book so far to really separate himself from the media, to make this book less of a generic tour guide and more of a look into his real, raw personal experience and trek of self-discovery.