"Ten years from now, this is gonna be American food," pronounces celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain towards the end of the hour-long Houston episode of his globetrotting CNN culinary series, "Parts Unknown."

He's talking, among other local discoveries, about the unstudied commingling of Vietnamese and Salvadoran dishes he ate in the suburban Pearland backyard of Lee High School principal John Trinh and his Salvadoran-born wife.

Pupusas, jellyfish salad, Viet-Cajun crawfish simmered with Sriracha, orange juice and beer...it's the kind of crosscultural family feast you'd love to share, and to which you may well have been invited to if you're lucky enough to live in the freewheeling, easily misunderstood city we call home.

Bourdain confesses right up front that he wasn't expecting Houston to be the fascinatingly diverse place he found. " He'd bought into the Texas stereotypes. anticipating a populace "intolerant, invariably right-wing, white, waddling between the fast-food outlet and the gun store."

We've all heard the rap, felts its sting. I flashed on a long-ago dinner at the tapas bar of Casa Mono in New York City, when my chatty seatmates asked me where I was from. "Houston," I answered innocently. Their faces fell, closed off. "Sorry," the woman said pityingly as she turned away.

When the story you've tried to tell about Houston's variety and complexity has fallen on mostly deaf ears for decades, it feels almost miraculous when an outsider not only grasps it, but revels in it for 60 bright, shiny minutes like a wriggly pup. Especially when that pup happens to be Bourdain. Until now, I haven't been a fan.

Oh, I loved his restaurant tell-all, "Kitchen Confidential," when it was published in 2000. The irreverence, the inside look at restaurant kitchens, the respect accorded to the Central Americans who were unheralded backbone of operations: all struck a chord, especially the hat tip to the immigrants who I saw working the line at just about every Houston restaurant I covered, then and now.

But as Bourdain's fame grew, I wearied of the macho swagger and schtick. Well, all is now forgiven. His Houston episode is that insightful. It opens with staccato bursts of radio chatter from Indo-Pakistani, Vietnamese and Mexican stations, cut with freeway bursts of traffic and strip malls and signs in many languages. And basically the program never stops driving Houston's multicultural tapestry home.

Some of it's a bit too sentimental; some is contrived for better television, like the choreographed Bollywood dance scene staged in the Keemat Grocers store, emceed by a manic Masala Radio host and witnessed by gobsmacked shoppers whose baffled, sheepish expressions are priceless. Still, the color and motion and pace of that segment set a bright, happy tone that's borne out by the Houstonians Bourdain interviews and the food he eats.

Time after time, unprompted, Houstonians from all over the globe tell him that the city is a welcoming place where they feel that many things are possible. "You get a chance to be a new you" here, Sunil Thakkar, the owner of Masala radio, tells Bourdain over a meal at Himalaya, Karachi-born chef-owner Kaiser Lashkari's Indo-Pakistani restaurant that Bourdain correctly describes as "beloved."

I wish Lashkari had had a speaking role, but I loved Bourdain's focus on Himalaya's galvanic garlic naan, snatched hot off the tandoor; the idiosyncratic Hunter's beef with mustard sauce; the sprawling, aromatic goat biryani; the sainted chicken hara masala, its green sauce a spirited Houston blend of tomatillos with cilantro, green chiles and South Asian spices.

I adored the bright, shiny colors and elaborate ritual of segments set at a Pasadena quinceanera, all foofy gowns and endearing adolescent awkwardness; and at a MacGregor Park slab parade, a precessional of candy paint and glittering Swangas, those protruding tire rims that look like they belong on a Roman battle chariot. Quinces and slab culture are urban art forms indigenous to the city, set to the Norteno music and screwed and chopped rap that sounds like home.

Bourdain hopscotches from a cricket-match tandoori cookout at Sardar Patel stadium in Richmond to a semi-formal African picnic set in the Fondren-area garden of Plant it Forward, the urban farm where the dignified Congolese refugees Gertrude and Albert Lambo, among others, grow produce for local farmers markets and restaurants. I was struck that everywhere he went, Bourdain comes off as a respectful and even deferential guest. He's not about picking the food apart: he seems more about enjoying each dish in situ, and putting it in context with everything else he encounters.

I could feel my ancient irritation that Bourdain has touted the unremarkable Mai's as his favorite Houston restaurant dissolving as he ate his way all way down to Palacios and its Vietnamese shrimping community. There he chowed down at The Point, a convenience store and restaurant of the sort immediately recognizable to Texans, where the Vietnamese owners had sought out the "best Mexican cook in town" to augment their menu of banh mi and pho with ceviche and migas-style tacos. As the extended family eats and talks, it seems like the most natural combination in the world. And of course here on our corner of the Gulf Coast, it is.

Occasionally, Bourdain's voice-over narration takes some liberties with the nuances of Houston history, as in the segment where he pronounces that the mid-80s bust "more or less killed the city's oil business." Well, not exactly. But it did provide, for a time, a lower-cost-of-living environment in which more immigrants could establish themselves, which is the point the show was making.

And just as occasionally, some local context gets lost. i was delighted to see Bourdain feasting with Houston rapper Stayve Jerome Thomas — a.k.a Slim thug — on Burns barbecue at a picnic table in front of the Acres Homes landmark. Oddly, I had just written about the keen sensual joys of that particular experience the day before, and it seemed like a brilliant choice of venue for the show. But then Thomas began extolling the virtues of Houston's black women, and Bourdain let him skate, perhaps unaware that the musician famously put his foot in his mouth on the subject some years back, and still seems to feel the need to do damage control. It's one of those savory subtleties that a pell-mell, hour-long romp can't possibly elucidate.

Mostly, though, I bought in to the show's narrative with my whole heart. I was overjoyed to see Bourdain shove one of Burns' loaded baked potatoes toward Slim Thug with the joke that his mother told him never to eat anything bigger than his head, and to hear the rapper praise the potato as "marvelous." For just that split second, over that stupendously cheesy, mountainous potato, I felt like I could out-macho Bourdain.

And reader, I teared up. It happened in a segment about an English as a Second Language Class at Lee High School, where my new hero, John Trinh, is principal, where 40 languages are spoken and the student body is the most diverse in the city.

The students are practicing the American style of introductions — "Hello, I'm so and so, pleased to meet you," and so forth. Watch the scene and you may guess where my tears welled up, and why.

It's a moving moment in a show that Bourdain himself seems to know comes as a tonic during this strongly nativist election season. In that sense, tonight's broadcast is exceptionally well-timed. "This is the best of America" is the message that rings throughout the hour, and Bourdain finds it in what he calls, finally, "a wonderland of the strange and diverse."

That's us.