IT BEGAN as a lark. Encouraged by her husband, Saudi director Danya Alhamrani submitted a video for the “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations FAN-atic Special” casting call with the goal of convincing Bourdain to shoot an episode of the series in the Kingdom. Alhamrani’s video was selected as one of four finalists from a pool of over 1,300 video submissions. After a second interview process, conducted by Bourdain and the producers at Zero Point Zero, Alhamrani was chosen to guide the “No Reservations” team on a visit to Jeddah.
The Emmy-nominated Travel Channel series, “No Reservations” is now in its fifth season. In the series, Bourdain and the producers at Zero Point Zero travel the globe hoping to “encounter the weird, wild and downright outrageous personalities and places that help define the international cultural landscape.”
Most of Bourdain’s career has been in the restaurant industry so it is the foreign food that best captures his attention when he is out on the road. Bourdain believes that food is the first glimpse of a wider view of how people live their lives in faraway lands and unfamiliar territories.
When she was told that a “No Reservations” episode would be produced in the Kingdom, Alhamrani was initially apprehensive that the visas for the film crew could be obtained in time, but the Ministry of Culture and Information helped deal with that issue.
Alhamrani’s colleague at Eggdancer Productions, Dania Nassief, came through on logistics, with Eggdancer eventually being credited as a field coordinator on the episode. At the end of April, Bourdain’s production team arrived in the Kingdom and then in May, Bourdain himself flew in for the actual filming, guided by Alhamrani.
The episode has now aired to excellent reviews and overwhelmingly positive viewer response as evidenced by online message board postings. Blogs about the episode from the crew, Alhamrani and Bourdain (www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Anthony_Bourdain) provide perspective on the making of the episode. At the “No Reservations” Web page are also photos taken during the filming and a description of the episode in which Bourdain feasts on chicken, goat, lizard, sheep and camel — a carnivore’s delight.
It seems that Bourdain genuinely enjoyed his time in the Kingdom. On his blog he wrote: “If there was one really big surprise, it’s that so many Saudis we met had a sense of humor. This is not what you’d expect after watching ‘60 Minutes’ or ‘Dateline’ or various hard news descriptions of life in the Kingdom. Fact is we met a lot of funny, good-natured, very, very generous people over there. They actually had the capacity to laugh at themselves. They were all too aware of how they look to outsiders.”
The “FAN-atic Special” on Saudi Arabia won’t be available on satellite television in the Kingdom for a while, but it has already been posted on YouTube. My favorite clip is www.youtube.com/watch?v=n34vtukb8J0 where Bourdain can be seen reading the Middle East’s most popular English language daily.