Bourdain’s Field Notes
Samuel Johnson said “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” but I consider myself a patriot. The fact that the United States of America is the birthplace of the blues, jazz, rock-and-roll, and Muhammad Ali is argument enough for me that we are a place worthy of pride.
Texas, however, was for most of my life a foreign land — a place and a culture far from the one I grew up in in New York City and suburban New Jersey. And I will shamefacedly admit that for most of those years I entertained the same lazy prejudices and assumptions about what Texas was like — and who, I believed, lived there.
But judging from Houston, it ain’t like that at all, is it?