Watch Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations Online

• Official Site: Anthony Bourdain
• Anthony's Official Blog
• No Reservations Crew Blog
• Michael Ruhlman's blog, on which Anthony Bourdain occasionally rants.

Besides the chef's hat, Anthony Bourdain wears many others: TV personality, best-selling author, public speaker, weary world traveler, gourmand, punk-rock aficionado, proud New Yorker and, most recently, newlywed and doting father. He's even kicked his lifelong smoking habit. That's right: Anthony Bourdain is no longer a chain smoker!

However, the fans that know him best can rest assured that the infamously grumpy, sharp-tongued host of "No Reservations" has become anything but pedestrian. As he continues to explore every corner of the globe on his Emmy-nominated Travel Channel series, now in its fifth season, Anthony Bourdain encounters the weird, wild and downright outrageous personalities and places that help define the international cultural landscape. Whether it's eating the raw eyeball off a bloody seal carcass on a kitchen floor, flying through the treetops of Vancouver on a zip-line, or hunting for lizards in the desert of Saudi Arabia, Bourdain refuses to yield to middle age or tar-stained lungs when adventure comes calling.

However, it's the foreign food that best captures our host's attention. In the world of a cook, an understanding and appreciation of how others eat is akin to discovering secret societies and cryptic subcultures. Cooks have special access. As always, the food is only the first glimpse of a wider view of how people live their lives in faraway lands and unfamiliar territories.

In the fog-shrouded highlands of Papua New Guinea, the last vestiges of a World War II cargo cult, or the jarring light show that is Las Vegas at night, "No Reservations" dives headfirst into life's colorful and rich pageant. Join Anthony Bourdain as he circumnavigates the globe on his conquest to discover the cities, villages and countries that provide life's truest surprises.

Anthony Bourdain is a 28-year veteran of professional kitchens, having worked as a dishwasher, line cook and chef in places good, bad and horrible -- most of them in New York City. In 2000, he published a memoir of his experiences in the culinary underbelly "Kitchen Confidential," which became an unlikely, but enduring, international bestseller.

He has since milked that lucky break for everything it's worth, following up with the gonzo-travel diary, "A Cook's Tour"; a historical account of the notorious turn-of-the-century cook and disease carrier, "Typhoid Mary"; the crime novels "A Bone in the Throat," "Gone Bamboo" and "The Bobby Gold Stories"; "The Les Halles Cookbook"; a collection of essays entitled "The Nasty Bits"; and the companion book to the Travel Channel series, "No Reservations."

Since embarking on a round-the-world trip for "A Cook's Tour," he has continued traveling for "No Reservations" (now entering its fifth season), for various publications, for public-speaking engagements and because he likes it. He lives in New York City with his wife, Ottavia, and his daughter, Ariane.