The Stew: A letter of welcome to Anthony Bourdain

Dear Anthony Bourdain, (May I call you Tony?)

So, you're coming to the area in January as part of the Lakeland Center's visiting Chef Series. Very cool.

Who'd have thought that listening to a cook, author and culinary TV stud would command as much as $259 a ticket? In Polk County, no less.

First, let me say that I'm a great admirer. Your book "Kitchen Confidential" was a revelation for me. Mostly because it confirmed that the time I spent working in a kitchen was just as dirty, nasty, mean and fun as I remembered.

And I religiously watch your "No Reservations" series Monday nights on Travel Channel. It's a landmark culinary travelogue, in my opinion, and has remade the landscape of how food is depicted on TV. You are the viewers' culinary concierge, traveling the globe to share each country's native cuisine and introduce us to people proud of their culture who we'd otherwise never meet.

That time you sat on the floor of a home in an Inuit village and ate a raw seal eyeball after a traditional hunt made for awesome television. I even drank at your favorite dive bar, Club Deuce in Miami Beach, just to get a whiff of Bourdain essence. (My liver says "Hi" and "Ouch," by the way.) If Indiana Jones and Keith Richards had offspring, you'd be cooing and guzzling in their bassinet.

Sometimes, Tony, I daydream that I check my voice mail to find a message from you asking about the best places to eat and drink. We go off to skulk our way through great eats and toxic cocktails as we plant the culinary flag for Tampa. Take THAT, glitzy and delicious Miami! (shaking fist)

Hey, a boy can dream.

A friend the other day told me your producers were in her restaurant awhile back to have a meal and scout local places for a possible episode. I was excited to hear this. Now, I'm not so sure I want it to happen.

See, I watched the "Rust Belt" episode you did a couple weeks back that lumped together Baltimore, Detroit and Buffalo. Having been born in Baltimore, I was excited that Charm City would be getting at least one-third of an hour's attention. The place has an amazingly rich, authentic working-class culinary life of crabs, crabs and more crabs, one that continues to evolve from the base of Chesapeake Bay. I was willing to overlook that, although it once was home to Bethlehem Steel, Baltimore isn't technically part of the traditional Rust Belt.

It should have been my tip-off something was askew.

Instead, Tony, your show framed Baltimore through the gritty lens of HBO's fictional crime drama "The Wire," a fictional TV show. The results were not pretty. Yes, some of the city's fine establishments - Chaps Pit Beef, Mo's Seafood and The Roost - got a pass-through. But showing Ballmer as "one seriously expletived-up city" you once lived in clearly was the goal. Food was treated like an after-dinner mint.

"He ignored any sense of the real diversity of Baltimore's rich ethnic mix to try and imitate a narrow slice of it found in a TV show," Baltimore Sun critic David Zurawik wrote. "What viewers were left with was TV imitating TV and a hot dog host acting like he was getting down with the nitty-gritty, hard core reality of urban America."

It would be like judging your cooking and writing abilities from the 13 sitcom episodes Fox made of "Kitchen Confidential." Not exactly a fair or accurate shake, was it?

Listen, Tony, Tampa is as expletived-up as anywhere else. We've got a grinning, sex-obsessed teacher; a divorcing reality-show wrestler, and more strip clubs than actual naked bodies. If there's a white-trash petit crime in America, all investigative roads eventually lead to here. "Cops" has us on speed-dial.

But the area has a rich and ever-changing food story to tell your viewers, one that goes beyond the town's buffet and chain restaurant stereotype and the chamber of commerce's pretty picture. We're no Miami or Orlando or Lakeland, for that matter, but that's a good thing. We'd be good TV.

If you're interested, call me. We'll do lunch. And dinner. And after-hours adult beverages. And then breakfast. My treat.

But if you want to Baltimore us, we'll pass.

Cheers,

Jeff.