Snake bile tests tough guy image

By LINDA HERRICK

New York chef Anthony Bourdain seems to lead a charmed life. Not only has he made a long career out of the thing he loves doing most, cooking, he's created a hugely successful later-life persona as a gastro-punk writer.

His Kitchen Confidential autobiography hurled him into the headlines, and he followed that with two kitchen-themed thrillers, and a book based on this TV series, A Cook's Tour (TV One, 10pm).

Here, Tony, as he prefers to be known, trots around odd corners of the globe in search of what he calls gastronomic epiphanies.

Now, I'm not sure what drugs Tony, unashamedly a former junkie, was on in tonight's location of Ho Chi Minh City - I'm sure he quips to camera something about speed at one stage - but the sight of him slurping down the alleged delicacy of foetal duck egg first thing in the morning made this viewer wish there were anti-nausea pills in the bathroom cabinet.

It's a rare feeling to be watching a food programme, normally such a painless activity, which makes you feel queasy.

Actually, Tony doesn't like it either - beaks and feathers first thing in the morning was a little ambitious is his summation as he flashbacks to the pleasures of Special K and coffee.

His visit to the market isn't sanitised either. Here, the food is still alive and looking at you - "a panorama of cruelty" Tony calls it, but more honest than westerners who get their meat and poultry in packages. Elsewhere, Tony dines out in more conventional style, welcomed at two cafes run by formidable Vietnamese women, one of whom specialises in a smashing crockery rice dish.

So far, so innocuous. But then, oh no, Tone's off to the Flavours of the Forest restaurant, where you can literally eat any poor creature of the forest like, gulp, minced bat. Or worse.

Now this is where it gets interesting, in behavioural terms. As Tony prepares to consume cobra heart, cut from the live snake right next to the table, the New York wide boy becomes visibly hyped, aggressive.

Bring it on he shouts as he swallows the revolting heart, still beating and ticking as it goes down. He does turn his nose up at a glass of green cobra bile though, musing that his wife thinks he's already toxic enough.

Although Bourdain's tough guy persona does occasionally veer into self-parody - the steady patter of hip vernacular and references to his bad boy past - he's got more than enough laidback charisma and intelligence to entertain.

Can you imagine pretty-boy Oliver trying to articulate the sensation of chewing snake tripe, let alone give it a go? Bourdain finds it akin to chewing a packet of condoms all day - and that's got to be a first in culinary vocabulary.

Odd that spurt of pre-snake aggression, though. Maybe he was nervous.

Maybe his physiology was reacting to the fundamental reasoning behind Vietnamese male consumption of snakes: that it makes you strong. Nudge, nudge. Burp.