Throughout the book, Ms. Woolever never claims that the guide is comprehensive, and the result feels incomplete and unbalanced. Ghana, Ireland, and Lebanon get three pages; the United States receives nearly 100. There is a chapter on Macau but nothing on Indonesia or Thailand. These are somewhat predictable shortcomings, dependent as the book is on voice-over transcripts spanning decades and the impossible task of stringing them together across time.
Some of the inclusions also feel at odds with Mr. Bourdain’s avoid-the-tourists approach to travel. In the Tokyo section, recommendations include the Park Hyatt hotel (made famous by “Lost in Translation”); Sukiyabashi Jiro, the restaurant at the center of the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”; the bizarre kitsch-fest that is the Robot Restaurant; and a bar in the tourist-clogged Golden Gai neighborhood. These may be all appealing attractions to a first-timer in Tokyo, but there is nothing in that selection that you wouldn’t find at the top of an algorithm-generated TripAdvisor list. When I asked Ms. Woolever about these recommendations, she agreed they were perhaps obvious choices but said Mr. Bourdain wanted to include them because of how much they meant to him after many visits to the city. “He wasn’t always (or, arguably, ever) about cool for cool’s sake or obscurity as its reward,” she said in an email.
If it’s a guide they are after, though, travelers may be left wanting. In Cambodia, you get recommendations for three hotels, two markets for dining, and a suggestion to check out the temples of Angkor Wat, the country’s most famous attraction, by a long shot. It isn’t exactly the list of hole-in-the-wall spots with no addresses that fans of Mr. Bourdain may be hoping for. What those fans will find, though, is Mr. Bourdain’s word-for-word rant against American military involvement in Cambodia (“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”) Having those passages — the no-holds-barred monologues that were a hallmark of his television shows — in one place might be the book’s greatest strength.
Over the decades that Mr. Bourdain spent traveling the world, there was a lot of talk of the “Bourdain Effect”: how a culinary gem, previously only frequented by those in the know, could be “ruined” by being included in his show. When I asked Ms. Woolever whether she thought this book could amplify that effect, she emphasized that most business owners knew what they were in for when approached by producers. “People call it the ‘Bourdain Effect,’ but Tony didn’t invent it,” she said. “It’s something that business owners have to weigh out for themselves.”
