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I saw that show a few weeks back and I enjoyed it. The Frito pie intrigued me and now I want to taste it! A long time ago the concession stands at the little league baseball park here in town sold those but I never ordered one. I stuck with the hot dogs. Anyways, love the show. Anthony Bourdain takes you to cultures and customs from all over the world and gives us his thoughts. The world is one big place.
What is there to aplogise for ? It looks like crap in a bag. If all it is is hornel(sp) chili from a can poured over a bag of fritos then I am sure it tastes OK for generic tasting stuff.
All those things that you say are precisely what he apologized for. He said that the chile they used was canned Hormel chile and the owners took umbrage because it is not. They say they make the chile they use on-site every day. He also said in so many words that the whole concoction in the bag felt like a bag of warm you-know-what. And he (with humor) intimated that the cheese they use isn't real. It looked like regular cheddar cheese to me, but I guess it could've been shredded Velveeta or actual fake cheese.
I think the business owner has every right to take umbrage to a characterization of their food as being something it is not. But since Anthony Bourdain's overall tone and take on the food even in the initial version of the episode was mostly positive (he said it tasted good), I think there's no need for a huge outcry or even for the episode to have been edited. I haven't seen the new, edited version of the episode, but I think all that would've been necessary to do is simply put a crawl during the segment saying that the store actually uses fresh-made chile and not canned.
I should say that in the Journal article it didn't seem as if the business owner was too upset himself, so who knows if the outcry has actually been all that severe. Perhaps the people with the show simply wanted to nip it in the bud quickly and so they did what they did in editing the episode and issuing the apology.
Location: northern Vermont - previously NM, WA, & MA
10,774 posts, read 23,924,495 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bongo
The frito pie at the plaza 5&10 should apologize to Anthony Bourdain
Agreed. People who had their feathers ruffled over this Frito Pie insult are acting as if Bourdain said "Green Chile Sucks"! Yeah...ummm they're just fritos. Moving on....
I like Bourdain, I like his honesty which is why I'm surprised to see him apologize over soemthing silly as Frito Pie at the Five and Dime. I like his shows, but I did expect a better show filmed here in NM, it wasn't bad but it wasn't great either.
Last edited by Champ le monstre du lac; 11-05-2013 at 08:05 AM..
I find it amusing that a guy who to a certain extent functions as a food critic is apologizing for his opinion. It's a good thing he didn't insult green/red chile otherwise he'd be doing a Mel Gibsonesque apology tour.
Hey, it's cheap food made with Fritos and served in the bag, for crying out loud. Does anyone think Frito Pie actually represents great New Mexican food? That, to me is like disputing the best corn dog or football stadium nacho...look where you are, look at what it is....who cares? Of course it feels like a bag full of warm c*&p.
I had occasion to meet Tony at the home of an old mutual friend, a food-centric novelist who spends winters near Patagonia, AZ, back in 2001. He had just written Kitchen Confidential, an inside-baseball look at the restaurant biz in New York and elsewhere. We all enjoyed some carne seca/ queso fresca tacos with Oaxaca mezcal, then grilled Pronghorn loin accompanied by too much great red wine, had a wonderful time, and I found him superbly knowledgeable and appreciative about food, from humble to high-end, but beyond it all was a sharp sense of humor, and one that did not exempt himself or his dinner companions that evening. As a chef and restaurant owner in the process of cutting loose from the biz myself, we had a lot to talk about and it was a lot of laughs.
He wasn't the least bit famous then, except in some culinary circles, had not appeared on TV, but was the real deal, food-wise and humor-wise. I haven't seen him since but he made a good impression.
I watched his piece on New Mexico, and think his emphasis on Frito Pie was in using it as a gasbag-deflating metaphor for the often self-important and pretentious Santa Fe foodie scene. As a veteran of the mega-fussy Manhattan restaurant world, he's probably a lot more tuned into this kind of thing that most people.
I laughed a lot, and enjoyed the show, though I certainly didnt agree with all of it. That said, he treated most of the rest of New Mexico with respect and grace, particularly given the need to make his show "entertaining".
The restaurant guy who was soooo offended about the FP criticism used it for his own benefit, as publicity. All well and good with me, all part of the biz. But I can't take it, or Frito Pies, or criticism thereof, seriously in any way at all.
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Anyways, love the show. Anthony Bourdain takes you to cultures and customs from all over the world and gives us his thoughts. The world is one big place. 
