Chef Anthony Bourdain Serves Up His Opinion on the Devils' Arena in Newark

For another writing gig, I had an opportunity to interview a personal hero this week: Celebrity Chef Anthony Bourdain, host of The Travel Channel's "No Reservations," author of the recently published "No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach" and simply one of the coolest cats on the planet. But there was something on my mind heading into the conversation, which was the continuing shock waves from my previous FanHouse piece on ESPN's Barry Melrose and his uninformed, and quickly retracted, comments about the New Jersey Devils' new arena in Newark.

The article stirred one hell of a debate. The Long Island Press pointed me in the direction of their column in support of Melrose's hack logic, in which Chick Dubinsky warns potential guests to the Prudential Center to bring their pepper spray because ... well, because he saw a hearse drive by him (boy, never see those in the suburbs) and was dumb enough not to take mass transit to a city arena.

Then there were some of the enlightened souls on the comments thread who called me an "idiot," a practitioner of "reverse classism" and, worst of all, that I was from Nebraska. Truth is I'm a Jersey boy, just like Bourdain -- he grew up in Leonia in Bergen County, roughly 16 miles away from Newark. Bourdain actually did a segment of his Travel Channel show in the Ironbound in Newark, so I decided to pick his brain on the controversy:

A lot of people in North Jersey don't have the stomach to go back to Newark after everything that's happened there over the years. What do you think about putting a sports arena in the city?

It seems like everybody's solution for every (bleeped) up town in the world. The first instinct is to spend a gazillion dollars to put a new stadium there, and instinct two is to pave over the street and put fake cobblestones and gas lamps to make a shopping district that nobody will go to. I wouldn't know where to begin.

Do you think it's a city that has the potential for rebound?

My god, yes. It's right by New York. It has a very cool ethnic thing [going on]. New Jersey lags seriously behind [culturally], and I don't know why it's so backwards in the food department.

Culinary potential aside, let's get back to the heart of Melrose's comments, which was that the area around The Rock was "awful" and dangerous. Rob Gebeloff of The Star Ledger eases those fears with things The Mullet probably hasn't paid attention to since he stopped coaching: statistics. As he writes:

Here, as you know, we like to stick to the facts. Yes, Newark has a high crime rate. But it has dropped significantly -- or at least the crimes that get thrown into the crime rate have fallen significantly.

But if the issue is whether visitors are going to be safe coming into the arena, then there's really nothing to argue about -- despite covering a large swath of the city's downtown, the arena zone has accounted for a very small percentage of the city's overall crime, our analysis of 2 1/2 years of crime data shows.

As you can see from the accompanying chart, we're still talking about an area with about 1,350 reported thefts and eight homicides in the last two and a half years. But that was before a new arena opened, bringing swarms of law enforcement and the strength in numbers from packs of fans walking the same streets. I will never pretend that the area around The Rock is Utopian, or that Newark isn't a dangerous city on the whole. But in my visit there, it felt safe, and I don't have a second thought about going back. The best advice I can offer those considering a visit is to check it out for yourself ... unless you're content to wallow in the fear-mongering and, thus, the safety of your television and sofa.