Anthony Bourdain hates -- OK, hate may be too strong a word here -- vegetarians, warthogs and certain Food Network personalities.

He loves Vietnam, street food and offal -- kidneys, brains, tongues, tails and other "nasty bits" of animals most Americans wouldn't dream of passing through their lips.

Mr. Bourdain has eaten a lamb's testicle in Morocco ("Tender, even fluffy. ... Delightful"), tripe-and-pork-belly soup in Romania, a spleen sandwich in Sicily. But the slice of fire-roasted warthog rectum he ate in Namibia, cooked and proffered by Bushmen, was, he later confided to the camera, "the worst meal of my life."

Of course, he's said pretty much the same thing about fermented shark in Iceland and Chicken McNuggets, but at least they didn't require antibiotics.

For Mr. Bourdain, who had, in his words, a "long and largely undistinguished career" cooking in Manhattan restaurants for almost three decades, the 21st century has been an extraordinary ride. Through his books and television shows he's taken us off the beaten path in China, Japan, India, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Iceland, Tahiti, Argentina, Brazil and beyond for refreshingly unscripted adventures in indigenous eating.

He may be stunt eating for the camera as he downs that bull penis soup, but he's reminding us that other cultures routinely use every part of the animal, and that Americans are blissfully, sometimes fatally, ignorant about where their food comes from. Mr. Bourdain, on the other hand, looks his meal in the eye.

In Morocco, "I watched the poor sheep's eyes -- a look I'd seen again and again in the dying -- as the animal registered its imminent death, that terrible unforgettable second when, either from exhaustion or disgust, it seemed to decide finally to give up and die," he writes in his 2001 book, "A Cook's Tour."

"It was a haunting look, a look that says, 'You were -- all of you -- a terrible disappointment.'"

Still, that was a mighty tasty testicle.

Tall and spaghetti-thin, Mr. Bourdain, as his legions of fans know, is everyone's worst critic, including his own, speaking with a candor and wit that have made him a hit on the lecture circuit (and earned him the Internet nickname Anthony Disdain).

On Monday, his travels take him to Pittsburgh, where his evening lecture at Carnegie Music Hall is sold out.

There may be no better way to get to know the heart and soul of a country than through its food, but with Mr. Bourdain it's never just about the food. It's about the landscape, the people, the smells, the history, the personal associations.

But in his search for the authentic culture of a place, sometimes the best-laid plans go awry: In the Transylvania region of Romania, a bored Bourdain partied on Halloween with a roomful of costumed Las Vegans (Vegans? No wonder he bailed) and spent the night at The House of Dracula Hotel, a building that looked "as if a Motel 6 had sex with a Renaissance faire."

Mr. Bourdain exploded on the culinary scene in 1999 with a provocative essay in the New Yorker -- "Don't Eat Before Reading This" -- that evolved the following year into the best-selling "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly," which might have been subtitled "Everything You Never Wanted to Know About the Restaurant Biz and the People Who Work There and What They Do to Themselves, Each Other and Your Food When You're Not Looking."

That uneaten bread (at least in certain New York eateries) is recycled from table to table is just the tip of the Baked Alaska. If "Kitchen Confidential" is the only chef's memoir you read, you'll never want to set foot in a restaurant again.

For the antidote, try Thomas McNamee's biography of the anti-Bourdain, Alice Waters. But if it's another unsavory, unsettling look at the dark side of the restaurant world you're craving, wade into Mr. Bourdain's 1995 mobster novel, "Bone in the Throat." Inspired by his days at a mobbed-up chicken joint and Sammy "The Bull" Gravano's testimony against John Gotti, it's peopled with scary-funny wiseguy characters and, as protagonists, a chef and sous chef who are Bourdainian Janus faces: the list-making, ducks-in-a-row chef and the two-pack-a-day Marlboro man and heroin addict.

"I love reading about crime. I like writing about crime," Mr. Bourdain writes in his most recent collection of food articles, "The Nasty Bits." "I like listening to wiretap recordings of gangsters, hearing the marvelously loopy, repetitive, elliptical and wildly profane patois of two semiarticulate career criminals who think they just might be being recorded by the FBI, but have business to conduct anyway. It's poetry to me."

Mr. Bourdain, who flirted with petty crime and drug dealing but didn't have the stomach for it, kicked his five-year heroin habit a long time ago and recently gave up cigarettes because, at the age of 51, he's a father for the first time. He married his second wife, Italian-born Ottavia Busia, in April, 11 days after she gave birth to their daughter, Ariane.

That bad-boy attitude -- frequently disarmed by a little-boy grin -- has made him America's most bleepable celebrity chef. Gordon Ramsay, the Scottish host of Fox's "Kitchen Nightmares," still holds the award -- let's call it the Effie -- for most f-bombs dropped in a single show, but the well-read Mr. Bourdain delivers them as bon mots, not shrapnel.

Speaking of awards: Mr. Bourdain and his sometime partner-in-crime, Cleveland-based food writer Michael Ruhlman, presented a dozen of their own, the spray-painted Golden Clogs, in Miami last month at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival. (For a hilarious account, see eater.com.) Worst career move went to Tyler Florence for his Applebee's commercials, beating out Rachael Ray for her Dunkin' Donuts ads. A surprising upset, considering Mr. Bourdain's previous comments to Outside magazine about Ms. Ray's doughnut dive: "Juvenile diabetes has exploded. Half of Americans don't have necks," he said. "It's like endorsing crack for kids."

Mr. Bourdain, whose paternal grandparents were French immigrants, was born in Manhattan and grew up in New Jersey; his father, Pierre, was an executive in the classical music recording industry and his mother, Gladys, was a stay-at-home mom who's now an editor at The New York Times.

When he was in fourth grade, a family visit to France provided his food epiphany: a raw oyster "dripping and nearly alive" and a bowl of vichyssoise, a "pleasurable shock." After prep school, he went to Vassar because his girlfriend, Nancy Putkoski, did (she became his first wife), but he and the school parted company after two years.

Fortunately, he'd found his life's work during a summer dishwashing job at a seaside restaurant in Provincetown, Mass. He entered the Culinary Institute of America in 1975 and after graduation got a job prepping and serving the lunch buffet at Rockefeller Center's Rainbow Room.

In "Kitchen Confidential" he recounts a litany of subsequent jobs -- at a seedy hotel, a lunch counter, an art gallery/bistro, a two-star place, a crab house, a shellfish bar and Mexican, Chinese and Italian eateries -- before winding up as chef at the Manhattan French bistro Les Halles in 1998.

The surprise success of "Kitchen Confidential," translated into 24 languages but now regarded by its author as "obnoxious and overtestosteroned," led to two more books and two eponymous television series, both now in reruns: "A Cook's Tour" on Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m. on the Food Network and "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations" on Mondays at 10 p.m. on the Travel Channel.

Mr. Bourdain was filming in Spain and unavailable for an interview; the fourth season of "No Reservations" is in the works. He's also visiting, among other places, Laos, Tokyo, Colombia, Egypt, San Francisco and Uruguay, the latter on the trail, with his brother Christopher, of their "mysterious" great-great-grandfather.

Mr. Bourdain has said that traveling the planet has made him more hopeful, despite having landed in Beirut just before the outbreak of war between Israel and Hezbollah, despite the encounter with the limbless people of Cambodia and the napalm-disfigured beggar in Vietnam.

He's genuinely moved by the "adorable" children of Vietnam, where "it's impossible to stay cynical," and the gift of a kente cloth from an Ashanti chief in Ghana.

It's those kinds of experiences that leave him, as he likes to say, hungry for more.