Free A Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain

head soon felt like I had a drill bit lodged behind my right eye. The rain whipped and lashed our faces, even at our reduced speed, and soaked us to an ambient, dispiriting damp.
         But we were cruising past the boarded-up villas, shuttered restaurants, and businesses we’d so often passed in our youth. This was a bold and heroic venture, wasn’t it? A noble attempt to reconnect with our past, to bond, however foolhardy it was to be trying this in January. The trip took about two hours, maybe a bit more, given the frequent pit stops to unhelmet and allow our aching brainpans some relief. We finally arrived at a sandy turnoff, drove slowly down a scrub pine-lined road, parked, dismounted by a dune fence, and began the half-mile walk to the beach. There was nothing but wind, the sound of our heavy hiking boots in the sand, the distant thudding of surf.
         ‘I recognize that one, I think,’ said Chris, pointing out a graffiti-covered blockhouse in the distance, midway between beach and pine forest, just visible in the rolling dunes.
         ‘Picnic site?’ I suggested.
         ‘Plan!’
         We trudged over dunes, berms, hillocks, slow going in the sand, then finally clambered up a thick, sloping concrete wall and sat atop the thing, exactly where we’d played as kids. I laid out a blanket and our little picnic lunch and we chewed silently, our fingers stiff in the cold wind coming off the sea. The saucisson tasted the same, the cheese was good, and the wine proved serviceable.
         I produced a package of firecrackers, and soon two men in their forties were playing army, as they’d done three decades or more ago: dropping explosives down rusted vents, jamming them into discarded bleach bottles, the dull bang of the explosions whipped immediately away by the wind, to disappear into the sand. We chased each other around the blockhouse for a while, and when we got tired of blowing stuff up – or, more accurately, when the firecrackers ran out – we nosed around inside, exploring the stairwells and doorways where we’d played Combat and Rat Patrol those many summers ago.
         We ambled awkwardly down to the beach, stepped over driftwood and debris that once, as children, had promised untold possibilities for construction projects and play but now appeared sad and dreary. My brother and I stood by the water’s edge looking out at a violent surf, neither of us saying anything for a long while.
         ‘Dad would have loved this,’ I said.
         ‘What?’ asked Chris, snapping back from his own thoughts.
         ‘The whole idea of this. That we came back. That we came back here again – just the two of us. He would have liked it. He would have liked hearing about it.’
         ‘Yeah,’ said my little brother, no longer littler, taller than me now. The mature one.
         ‘Fuck . . . I miss the guy.’
         ‘Me too,’ said Chris.
     
    I’d been looking to hook into the main vein on this stretch of my around-the-world adventure. I’d thought everything would be instant magic. That the food would taste better because of all my memories. That I’d be happier. That I would change, or somehow be as I once was. But you can never be ten years old again – or even truly feel like ten years old. Not for an hour, not for a
    minute. This trip, so far, had been bittersweet at best.
         I hadn’t, I realized, returned to France, to this beach, my old town, for the oysters. It wasn’t the fish soup, or the saucisson , or the pain raisin . It wasn’t to see a house in which strangers now lived, or to climb a dune, or to find a perfect meal. I’d come to find my father. And he wasn’t there.
    Reasons Why You Don’t Want to Be on Television: Number One in a Series
    ‘While you’re in the area, let’s see where foie gras is made,’ said the creative masterminds of Televisionland. ‘We’re making a food show, remember? All this trip down memory lane is nice and all