In an extensive post-election interview with Eater, TV personality and renowned chef Anthony Bourdain vowed to boycott Donald Trump’s Washington D.C. hotel restaurant, and said he does not see evidence that America is a less racist country than it was in the 1960s.
“I will never eat in his restaurant,” the Parts Unknown host said when asked about chef Alessandro Borgognone bringing a new sushi restaurant, Nakazama, to the new Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital. “I have utter contempt for him, utter and complete contempt.”
Bourdain said the chef doing business with Trump is “not helpful.”
“I’m not asking you to start putting up barricades now, but when they come and ask you, ‘Are you with us?’ You do have an option,” he said before comparing chefs working with Trump to Germans becoming Nazi soldiers. “You can say ‘No thanks, guys. I don’t look good in a brown shirt. Makes me look a little, I don’t know, not great. It’s not slimming.’”
Bourdain — who told The Wrap in October that he’s “absolutely f*cking not” ever dining with Trump, as he has previously with President Obama — also shared his views on the presidential campaign in the sprawling interview.
Asked if he voted in the election, Bourdain said yes, adding that he’s “no fan of the Clintons.”
Ironically, though, Bourdain said that “nobody wants to hear some successful Hollywood actor or TV person’s opinion on politics. I certainly don’t. It’s enraging.”
Bourdain also lashed out at the left’s mocking of people who live in red states, calling it “both ugly and counterproductive.”
“But I think to mock constantly, as so much of the left has done — to demonize, to ridicule, to treat with abject contempt people who live in a very different America than they live in — is both ugly and counterproductive,” he said. “There are a lot of people who are pissed off, they’re tired of being talked to like that. There are a lot of people in this world who, when an Applebee’s moves to their town, it’s a big deal — and I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. Where somebody coming to take your guns away is a big concern.”
Still, despite his personal feelings about Trump, the celebrity chef says he plans to “stick it out” in America, as opposed to fleeing the country as so many other celebrities have vowed to do.
“I’m not gonna run away to Canada. I’m gonna pay my f*ckin’ taxes, I’m gonna vote, I’m gonna do all of that. But I’m not going to be taking it to the streets any time soon — well, we’ll see,” he said.
Read Bourdain’s full Eater interview here.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson
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