By Chris Wilson
I first met Tony Bourdain in the old Siberia, a wonderfully disgusting dive bar which at the time was buried near the entrance to the 1 and 9 subway station at the 50th and Broadway. It was sometime in late 2000, and I had just been hired as a reporter for the New York Post\’s Page Six gossip column, primarily because I was the kind of guy who happily drank up everything that New York nightlife had to offer, from bending elbows with my fellow degenerates at foul-smelling dive bars to awkwardly hitting on Eastern European models at all those overpriced bottle service swilleries that were popping up all over town. Tony was already a semi-famous author, thanks to Kitchen Confidential, but he shared my boozy bloodlust for Siberia\’s nocturnal allure, as well as an appreciation for a decent jukebox that played the Dead Boys. Now that he\’s a full-on TV star who spends most of the year traveling to exotic locales, I rarely run into him anymore (the fact that Siberia closed has cut down on our hang time considerably) so I was pleasantly surprised when one of his producers emailed me to ask if I wanted to be on No Reservations to talk about, you know, food and travel and stuff.
