ABSTRACT
Leave it to food and travel raconteur Anthony Bourdain to sum up the city’s identity struggles with precision and pith. The TV personality featured Buffalo in a 2009 Rust Belt episode of No Reservations, a wintry road trip that also included stops in Baltimore and Detroit. The show hinged around nding the bright spots within the rust, and celebrated the dogged characters of and in these cities, cities he describes as “the losers in the last round of free-market roulette.” Bourdain and his producers did not set out to create a new narrative per se, but rather to present to the large Travel Channel audience, cable viewers across the nation, a reconsidered authenticity. Or in the case of Buffalo, a considered one. To continue Bourdain’s voice over: “Buffalo. All the way out at the frosty most-forgotten end of New York State. My state. But who knew? Frankly, Buffalo was not a place I thought about a lot.”
