Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown

Everything old is new again.

Maybe not.

I come close sometimes to believing

that nothing actually ever changes.

Back in the beginning, fresh out of the kitchen,

when I first went out in the world

trying to figure out how to make television,

I came to Northern Portugal.

Little did I know what I would find.

Up until then,

for 30 years spent working in kitchens,

meat had come wrapped in plastic.

I'd order it in boxes.

I had never seen an animal die

because I was making dinner.

Ooh.

Hi. How are you guys doing?

Oh, man, they can be so cruel.

All right, ciao.

Oh, man. Oof.

I had to call the crisis center.

Portugal, sandwiched between Spain and the Atlantic Ocean,

and tiny as countries go,

has had an outsized impact on the world.

During the Age of Discovery,

the Portuguese went to sea in great numbers,

and gained fame as navigators, ship builders, and explorers.

They conquered a large part of the world,

their empire stretching from Brazil,

to Africa, to the East Indies.

The city of Oporto is a reflection

and a creation of that relationship with the sea.

A lot has changed since I was last here.

Or has it?

When I decided to return

to take another look at this place,

I, of course, reached out to Jose de Meirelles,

my old boss and first entre to Portugal.

How you doing, man?

- You look good. - You good?

- Yeah, nice to see you. - It's been a long, long time.

Jose is from the area around Oporto,

and this time, just like back then,

he said "Come, see my country, meet my family."

We'll do a pig feast."

16 years later.

I came here in 2001, one of the first times

I've ever been on television, and here we are again.

There are only so many beautiful places left in the world.

Oporto is one of them. It's gorgeous.

Has it changed too much?

Eh, yes, especially in the big cities.

Especially Oporto, it change a lot.

It was never too rich town.

Now it's packed with tourists.

So that's... is that good news or bad news?

- Yeah, it's good news. - Good news.

I mean, it's good for the economy,

and especially it came up

during the big financial crisis and all that.

So it was a great job for the city.

I mean, it looks even prettier than it looked last time.

They seem to have fixed up a lot of buildings.

So what are we eating here? It's the specialty?

Oh, actually we're gonna start with.

That's small sardines.

You eat everything. The bones. You eat the whole thing.

You can eat a thousand of them,

and the plate is empty so that's a good thing.

Nobody can tell you how many you eat.

You ready for the tripes?

- Yes. - Absolutely, let's go.

- Tripeiros, right? - Tripas.

We are known as the tripas, that's tripe people.

Why?

Right.

The people from Oporto gave them all the meat they had.

- So they... - All they're left with...

Just with the tripes.

It's cheap food for the sailors.

It would last a long time.

And it usually is on Thursday.

That's the day with the tripes,

because being a Catholic country,

on Friday, they skip the meat.

A meal here is, generally speaking anyway, not light.

The Portuguese like pork.

They like it a lot.

So sausage, bacon.

- Sausage, pig's ear. - Cured pig's ear.

What do you do when left with nothing

but guts and hooves and odd bits?

You have the tripes here, some beans.

Figure out how to transform that

into delicious, delicious things, of course.

Oh, wow, look at that.

Oh, that's fantastic.

- It smells delicious. - Perfect. Yes, it does.

So I put a little rice on the side there to mop it up?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mmm.

That is good.

Mmm.

I mean, it's sort of incredible the story of the wines here.

I hear that because the soil

is so tough with flint and stones also,

the vines have to dig up to 30 meters down.

But it's a lot.

I think it gives the wine a special character.

Northern Portugal's Douro Valley

is where Port comes from.

If it's not from here, it's not Port.

It's just fortified wine.

I don't usually do wine scenes.

No matter how good the wine, on camera

it's just colored liquid going into a glass.

Wine nerds usually bore me.

Don't talk about your damn wine, drink it.

But I absolutely love cheese served

with a glass of Port wine,

and that's what most people, including my new friend Andre,

that's what they do around here.

I'm not a dessert guy, but a nice blue cheese

with a glass of port, for me, is, like,

the perfect thing to end a meal with.

Unlike wine, cheese porn is easy.

Just like shooting actual porn.

Start with an establishing shot, move in for a close...

Oh, yeah, there we go.

...cut away to a reaction.

Mmm.

Money.

Works every time.

Oh, that's disturbing. I mean, it's delicious.

What kind of cheeses are we looking at here?

These two over here, they're goat cheese.

They're aged ones.

Then all the other are sheep milk.

This is worldly known Queijo Serra,

so the buttery one.

This is what we call a Queijo Azeitao.

It's strong, intense to your palate.

Oh, I like this guy already.

Any cheese that are, like, you need a spoon pretty much.

Oh, then smell it. For me, the worse the smell,

the better the flavor.

- Mmm. - Huh? Like it?

Smells like dirty feet. Tastes like heaven.

This is a 30-year-old Port.

- Oh, that's delicious. - Yeah.

Put a little bit of that

and then some pumpkin jam on top.

Mmm. If I put on my Speedo and dive into this thing,

please stop me before I completely face plant.

Oh, no, no, no. I love Portuguese gastronomy.

The heart and soul of it, its simplicity.

Look, that's the thing

that makes me fall in love with it every single day.

Cheese is one of those things, it's always magic to me

because it goes into the cave one way

and then you go in and you pull it out,

and, I don't believe in God,

but somehow it went in like that,

and it came back like this.

Relying on time to cut his way through it and to change this.

Change the texture, even the smell,

and we have nothing to do with that other than enjoying it.

Portugal has got a lot of coastline

and a lot of history with the sea.

It's a close relationship,

one that's imprinted deep within the national character.

The songs. The poetry.

The state of mind.

I love this word, saudade.

Saudade means missing something. Nostalgic.

A word with no direct translation to English.

It connotes longing, being away from something,

and yearning to get back.

The Portuguese went out of the country

for years at sea, and he does not know

when he's gonna get back to his family.

During the cold gray months, it's lamprey season.

Oh, hell yeah.

So I'm here at just the right time.

What do you call this dish in Portuguese?

This is the lamprey eel?

Yeah, the lamprey bordelaise.

Awesome.

Lamprey are butt ugly damn creatures,

but delicious when cooked right,

and my man Pedro knows how to cook it right.

Very traditional. Cooked in its own blood.

Yeah, it's bordelaise style.

When it's bordelaise, it means it has the blood.

Mmm, it's good. Fantastic.

Saudad is going back to a moment

where you're happy.

It doesn't matter if it was through food,

through sex, through wherever.

You're making me sad already thinking about this.