BIG DEAL: Anthony Bourdain’s series, “Parts Unknown,” starts Sunday night — signaling a new start for aging CNN.
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Anthony Bourdain is very amused.
He has just come back from having lunch with Anderson Cooper, a famously picky eater, at Yakitori Toto, the second-floor Japanese place on the West Side that specializes in chicken. Raw chicken.
‘I didn’t realize what I was eating until after we were done,” Cooper said.
“I’d say, ‘This tastes like . . . knuckles.’ And Anthony would say, ‘That’s because it is knuckles.’
“The whole thing was, like, an inside joke on me,” Cooper sighed.
The meeting between Bourdain — the rugged TV host and food writer — and Cooper — the last recognizable face on CNN these days — was for the cameras. It’d been planned for weeks.
The tape will be cut up a dozen different ways to create promos for Bourdain’s new weekly show, “Parts Unknown,” which starts Sunday night at 9 on the once-dominant cable news channel.
But it was also, symbolically speaking, the hand-off of CNN from the old order to the new.
Cooper, 45, is younger than Bourdain by more than a decade.
But it is the bad-boy ex-chef (“The only cooking I do anymore is making eggs with my 5-year-old daughter,” Bourdain says) who is the new face of CNN.
Much has been made of a new regime at CNN — now the No. 3 news channel behind Fox News Channel and MSNBC — that arrived with ex-NBC boss Jeff Zucker in January.
In fact, Bourdain — who became convinced more than a year ago that his days at “No Reservations” and the Travel Channel were “not going to get any better” — was hired last summer.
It represented a sea change for the news channel, which has been concerned more about preserving what it saw as the integrity of the news than in what people wanted to watch.
“I am an opportunist,” Bourdain says.
He is coming off what is widely seen as his first misstep in an enviable TV career — a shiny-floor game show for ABC called “The Taste” — last winter.
The show got poor reviews, never caught on with viewers and failed to produce a single YouTube moment — a rarity for Bourdain.
“I’m not worried,” he says. “I went into it with eyes wide open. I sort of suspected my fans were not going to like it.
“But know what? Not giving a sh-t has been a very successful business plan for me.”
It has been 13 years since Bourdain wrote the “Ball Four” of the cuisine business, “Kitchen Confidential,” about the unseen and unseemly side of restaurants.
He says he does not miss his former life.
“The only thing I can get sentimental about is that first beer after your shift is over,” he says.
“Parts Unknown” features the Bourdain who will risk a lot to taste food made by others.
The new show mixes misery with the main course.
On next Sunday night’s show about LA’s Koreatown, the opening 12 minutes is about the still-angry son of a restaurant owner talking about losing everything in the Rodney King riots 20 years ago.
It’s two commercial breaks before anyone sits down to eat.
“People. I find, tend to be more comfortable talking about their lives when they’re sitting at a table,” Bourdain says.