Anthony Bourdain Slams Houston Writer For ‘Race-Baiting’

It’s been a while since Anthony Bourdain touched down in Houston, but the roving gourmand is still stirring up controversy in Space City, albeit unwittingly.

Yesterday, PaperCity published a piece by writer Chris Baldwin that made note of a February profile in the New Yorker in which Bourdain said that he had “banned white people” from the Houston episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown. In the long and wandering essay, Baldwin posits that Bourdain’s goal was arguably controversial. Check out this excerpt from the bizarre missive below:

As PaperCity’s own Jailyn Marcel pointed out when the Houston Parts Unknown first aired, none of the city’s celebrity chefs even sniffed a bit of air time. It turns out most of them never had a chance to get on. Foodie power players such as Chris Shepherd, Bryan Caswell and Ronnie Killen were out from the moment Bourdain issued his “no white people” command.

Via Twitter, Bourdain expressed his thoughts on the piece, calling it “race-baiting” and “clickbait.” Put simply, the chef is pissed.

It’s unclear exactly why PaperCity decided to publish Baldwin’s piece now, a full two months after the original New Yorker profile appeared in print. Perhaps it is, as Bourdain suggested in his tweet, an attempt to drum up fake controversy for clicks.

Anthony Bourdain Bans White People from His Houston Show: Mission Accomplished [PaperCity]