Eric Ripert's First Time Eating in China | Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown

Anthony Bourdain says it plainly in the first thirty seconds. He loves Sichuan, he loves the food, and he also loves torturing his friend Eric Ripert. Ripert runs Le Bernardin in New York, holds three Michelin stars, is a serious practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, and is so relentlessly polite that Tony reckons you could pull his toenails out and he would still find something kind to say. He has also never set foot on mainland China. So Tony brings him to the one province in the country built to undo him. Sichuan food works on two axes: la, the straightforward heat of the chilies, and ma, the floral, tingling, mind-scrambling numbness of the Sichuan peppercorn. Over one week Ripert gets both, repeatedly. Dan dan noodles before noon. Pickled chicken feet and la zi ji, a dish that is less a plate of chicken than a search party through a mountain of dried chilies. Mapo doufu, Tony’s favourite dish in all of Sichuan. Green peppercorn fish finished with a pour of boiling oil. Somewhere in the middle of it Ripert puts down his chopsticks and reports that his face appears to be changing shape and that he feels, as far as he can tell, high. He says he likes it. Then it escalates. Rabbit heads from a street stall, split open for the brains. Hot pot with a table of local friends, the kind that runs four hours while the broth at the bottom cooks down into something closer to lava. There are quieter hours too. At Leshan, two hours south of Chengdu, the pair stand under the largest stone Buddha in the world, carved into a cliff in 713, and Tony steps back and lets his friend pray. And at Yu Zhi Lan, writer Fuchsia Dunlop — the first foreigner ever to train at the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine — shows them what chef Lan Guijun does when peasant dishes are rebuilt as banquet cooking. Chinese food, she argues, is the most underrated cuisine on earth. It ends the way Tony warned Ripert it would, at a distillery that has been making baijiu for over five hundred years, where refusing a toast is not an option and the toasts come one guest at a time. Ripert, undone, raises his glass and tells his friend he will remember this forever. The next morning they take a train to the countryside, eat pig intestine, and argue about which CNN anchor would look best in a Speedo. Subscribe here to discover all of Anthony Bourdain's adventures and watch full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCffagYQTThJx4N55UKdr5ew?Sub_confirmation=1 Travel the globe with the legendary chef, author, and storyteller Anthony Bourdain as he uncovers the soul of a destination through its food, culture, and politics. Far more than just a cooking show, Parts Unknown dives deep into the corners of the world rarely seen on TV—eating with locals, exploring diverse culinary rituals, and asking the hard questions. #AnthonyBourdain #PartsUnknown #TravelDocumentary #culture #cuisine