Tonight on Anderson Cooper 360, Anthony Bourdain will cook budae jjigae for the CNN anchor, who apparently doesn’t like Korean food. “What about Korean food is so good?” asks Cooper. Here’s Bourdain’s reply:

These are flavors—a spectrum of flavors—and a level of heat that’s new to us. It’s spicy, there’s a funk to it; I mean, that thing that you recoil about, that fermentation aspect of kimchi. This is deeply satisfying and interesting to people who’ve spent their lives cooking or eating french food, for instance.

It’s the next—it was long ago the next thing—but to a great extent, the chefs that are driving the development of what we would call american cuisine are, to a greater and greater extent, Korean American. And what chefs want to eat and increasingly everybody (except you) is Korean food.

Shout out to David Chang, Roy Choi, Ed Lee, Corey Lee, Danny Bowien, Hooni Kim—and shout out to kimchi.

Be sure to catch the first episode of Parts Unknown season 5 this Sunday, April 26, on CNN. In the season premiere, Bourdain heads to South Korea and eats Korean BBQ with salarymen.

[via Facebook/AC360]

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