The No Reservations Facebook Page Will Not Die

Earlier this year, something unusual began making its way into my Facebook feed. Or rather, it was not unusual at all—it was precisely the kind of content it makes sense to serve someone like me. It was Anthony Bourdain content.

Some of it featured Bourdain, the acerbic saint of travel media, in his younger days, with dark curls of hair just starting to silver—an imp, a punk, a rabble-rouser flipping off the camera. Other posts showed the older Bourdain, craggy and authoritative and, occasionally, shirtless and ripped. In both, he often wore leather jackets. There were photos, videos, memes, quotes, from just about every place where the guy appeared. All of it came from a single source: the No Reservations Facebook page, a blue-check verified page with, at the time, 2 million followers. (It’s over 2.1 million today.) The page was posting fervently, often five or more times a day, month after month after month, and yet, as I saw the posts fly by, often commented on by friends of mine, I wondered: Who the hell is responsible for this? What do they want? And why do I still care about this janky, over-the-hill social platform? Why does anyone?

Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations ran on the Travel Channel from 2005 to 2012, debuting with an episode about Paris and wending its way from there to Iceland, Vietnam, Ghana, Ireland, Brazil, Tuscany, Beirut, Colombia, and a dozen other countries before ending back in Brooklyn. The show made Bourdain, formerly the chef at the middling Financial District French restaurant Les Halles and the author of the best-selling Kitchen Confidential, not only a household name but a star and an icon. He could be hard-boiled but joyful, cynical but earnest, enthusiastic and intrepid but crabby; he seemed to make friends easily, wherever he went, and for every friend he earned a thousand followers. When he sat down for a bowl of bún chả with President Barack Obama in Hanoi in 2016, on his CNN follow-up show Parts Unknown, it was a crowning moment of cool, surprising but also inevitable. And when, two years later, he ended his life in a Paris French hotel room, it was the opposite, a crushing moment for his family, his friends, and his fans that threw into doubt everything we thought we knew about the guy. It was the end.

The No Reservations Facebook page, meanwhile, was created on December 3, 2007, making it among the first business-oriented pages on the social platform. If there were any posts from the very first years, none of them remain, but you can still see some from 2010, which have an early-Internet innocence about them:

And some read almost as if they could have been written not by a social media manager—the job didn’t really exist yet—but by Bourdain himself:

These posts are guileless, they’re experimental. They rarely link out to anything, and they barely even promote the show. They read like tweets from Bourdain as he watches along with the rest of us. And they end in 2011, well before Facebook launched its iPhone app and became the social juggernaut that swayed public opinion and politics throughout the remainder of the decade. The year 2013 saw a total of two posts, one encouraging followers to watch The Layover, Bourdain’s more service-y, less sexy show, the other hyping the Travel Channel’s new app. In 2014, two years after Bourdain had left the network in disgust over its insertion of product placement into his show, a handful of posts pushed followers to watch “the Asia Files,” some kind of montage of Bourdain’s Asian adventures. And then the page went silent for five years, saying nothing about Bourdain’s death until more than a year afterward.

From there, the page got busy again, posting links to ThoughtNova.com, a content farm you should definitely not click through to. There you can read about foods Bourdain insulted, restaurant secrets he revealed, travel tips he lived by. But you shouldn’t read them—this is web chum, not fit for human consumption. The content is bad, but at least it makes sense in a social media context: ThoughtNova, or someone associated with the site, was using this page—which they had somehow gained control of—to push traffic. That’s what Facebook is for, right?

By 2021, however, the No Reservations page had started hawking “Remember Tony” merch—which I am fairly confident Bourdain himself would not have appreciated—and this activity started to attract notice.

The newsletter Garbage Day—which is great and you should subscribe to—looked into this at the time and noted:

In the end, Garbage Ryan concluded the Travel Channel was “now using the page for Bourdain’s old show to sell shirts and promote viral garbage.”

I’m not so sure about that. Although the publicists for the Travel Channel—which is now owned by Warner Bros. Discovery—did not respond to my emails seeking comment, this social media strategy (if you can call it that) doesn’t feel like something cooked up by corporate. It’s too random, too amateurish, too undirected.

And too erratic! After July 7, 2021, the page stopped posting entirely until January 9, 2023¹. This is when the No Reservations page entered its current phrase. Gone are all the links to crappy websites and merch vendors. In their place is (almost) pure Bourdain content, heavy on the video, which ranges from grainy grabs from early No Reservations episodes to crisp HD supercuts of Bourdain’s wisest words and greatest moments. And oh my god, there is a lot of it. The page posts again and again and again. According to my tracker, which is likely missing a good chunk of data, the page has posted 2,379 times in 2024, and its audience of followers has grown by around 200,000 since May alone. (It did, however, lose about 5,000 in September.) The most popular post I can find is this one:

In some ways, I find this more disturbing than the earlier, crasser era, with its cheap links to a site no one remembers. That at least fit into our understanding of what social media does, how it evolves.

This current era is uncomfortably wholesome. The posts love Anthony Bourdain unironically, and want to show off his humanity, his way with words (although I question whether some of the quotes are really his), his cooking ability, and his humility and open-mindedness. They therefore lack the edge that made Bourdain so entertaining and so—I hate this word but I’ll use it just this once—authentic. This fundamental misrepresentation of a hero of mine, on such an industrial scale, makes me deeply mistrust the people behind the page, whoever they are.

Wait, Who Are They, Anyway?

Facebook will never tell you who’s truly behind a Facebook page. They’ll tell you when the page was created, when its name was changed (Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations became just No Reservations on November 14, 2019), and where the page’s managers happen to be. In this case, they are in the United States and France, though earlier they’ve been reported to be in the Netherlands. But that’s about it. When I message the page, I get this auto-response: “Hi, thanks for contacting us. We've received your message and appreciate you reaching out.” But never anything more.

I had hoped that months of tracking the page and emailing people connected to Bourdain in the No Reservations era would turn up something, but alas. The best I can figure is that ownership of the page somehow passed from the Travel Channel to an individual or individuals associated with ThoughtNova in the early 2010s, and may still be under their control. Why they’re doing this, I don’t know. And why they’re doing this so fervently, with such high-quality raw assets, I can’t even begin to guess. I keep waiting for the day when the posts are accompanied by crypto come-ons. I’ll hate it, but at least all this posting will then make sense.

Over the past several months, as I’ve watched this page flood my feed (and friends’ feeds), I’ve had time to appreciate its zombie afterlife. So many of us produce so much material for the Internet, whether we’re paid to or do it for kicks, and as the years go by, much of it gets left by the wayside. You create an Instagram feed for an employer, they lose interest, and where does it go? Who takes the reins? Maybe it’s not terrible that your work, or its desiccated husk, gets adopted by web randos who turn it to their own advantage, whether their goals are nakedly commercial or obscurely earnest. Or maybe it’s nauseating. I don’t know. I’m looking at someone else’s legacy here, and thinking of my own—of links gone dead and stories lost to the ether. Maybe I wouldn’t mind having a article of mine survive deep within a feed that’s been traded a thousand times over, that’s been renamed, that’s made money and lost money and become unrecognizable to its former self; I like the idea that a kernel of my creative DNA might remain in there, for anyone bored enough to go digging.

As I began preparing this piece, I checked in on the page and discovered something shocking: It had once again ceased posting. After October 22, when it posted six times, there was nothing at all, and of course no explanation. Not that anyone was looking for one—when you’re on social media today, and an Anthony Bourdain meme blips by your eyes, you might notice it, but if it doesn’t, you would never wonder where it had gone. Your life would continue, and nothing would change. No Reservations ended 13 years ago, Bourdain died 6 years ago; the past is written, sometimes in pixels, memories if you’re lucky.

And then, all of a sudden, the page posted again: a photo of Bourdain in aviator sunglasses and a wife-beater, a keffiyeh draped over his head. The one-word caption: “KHalas!” There was no link to anything. Almost 200 people have commented on it, and some of them are surely bots.

The page hasn’t posted since. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It

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Notes

1. It’s possible posts were deleted during the big gaps, but given the slapdash approach to posting in general, I doubt anyone has gone through this feed, carefully erasing whole years’ worth of content.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt