RIP, Anthony Bourdain
The writer, food expert and television has died, reportedly a suicide. I was a fan of his book "Kitchen Confidential," and of the short-lived TV series it inspired. And Bourdain himself was a cool guy when I met him in 2005. He was wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt, which led us to talking about music, including his admiration for bands from Akron. Of course, the Pretenders came up. In 2012, he would have the Black Keys on his show, even if he also called Akron "a breeding ground for serial killers." Still, I enjoyed our meeting, and his amiable edginess. Below is my 2005 interview.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Anthony Bourdain has put aside his apron, but not his fork.
The star chef became a sensation in the food industry with the book "Kitchen Confidential," a behind-the-scenes expose of the restaurant game. Bourdain as well was a revelation - a chef with a nasty sense of humor and a rock 'n' roll sensibility.
The book and the attitude led to other books, a 2001 TV series called "A Cook's Tour" and a new series called "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations," which premieres Monday on the Travel Channel. There's also a "Kitchen Confidential" sitcom due on Fox this fall.
"I'm a consultant to the show," he said, "which means they pay me to stay the hell away from the set." He expected it to be mild compared to his real life. "It's network broadcasting, man!" he said.
The real work of being a chef has been left behind. Bourdain's official biography says his title of executive chef at a Manhattan restaurant means "he gets to swan around in a chef's jacket taking credit for others' toil."
"I don't serve any useful function at my restaurant anymore," he said. "I wander through and say, you know, thanks for coming."
He blames the change on outside projects like "No Reservations." "As a chef, if you have any outside hobbies, interests, even love affairs, you're hemorrhaging credibility," he said. "You have to give 120 percent to run a kitchen."
Besides, he thinks restaurants began to improve even before he wrote "Kitchen Confidential."
"As annoying as the celebrity chef phenomenon can be - and it can be pretty annoying - it's been good for the world, it's been good for chefs. Kitchens tend to be proud now," he said.
"When I started out in the bad old days, in the '70s, this was something you did between other jobs. You weren't looking forward to any prestige at all. … So spitting in food and things like that were acceptable to do in front of other cooks," he said. "To do that now would be to let the team down in a really fundamental way."
Celebrity chefs have an upside, too.
"I may not like Emeril's show," he said. "But that guy put in his time. That's a real chef, who worked his way up, who knows how to run a kitchen … who has changed eating habits and expectations. What you find in your supermarket now is probably better and more varied because of people like him."
Still, Bourdain has not lost his interest in food, even if it leads to some shocks.
For "No Reservations," he encountered a putrefied, pickled shark in Iceland that was the worst thing he had ever eaten.
"If your childhood turtle died, and you revisited him 30 years later, and ate him, it would be the same textural experience," he said. "The food in Iceland is pretty good, but they do celebrate all the food that they used to have to eat when they had, you know, nothing. It's sort of a rite of passage."
But "No Reservations" goes beyond eating. "The Travel Channel has given me a much wider berth, and more latitude, to visit countries and cultures," he said. "I don't have to jam food in every scene. … There are long, long stretches of the show where it's other cool, fun stuff."
The series has shot in Paris, Iceland, New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Borneo, Las Vegas and Bourdain's home state of New Jersey, with more to come.
"I jumped out of an airplane strapped to an Elvis impersonator," he said. "Got to drive around in a stock car in Malaysia. Got tattooed by some tribesmen in Borneo."
The tattoo, of a snake eating its own tail, was a way of ingratiating himself with "these former headhunter dudes deep in the jungle. … They kind of appreciated that I had taken the trouble." That fits in with Bourdain's belief that the key to traveling is to be a good guest.
"I will eat or drink whatever is offered in whatever quantity it is offered, and I'm grateful for that," he said. "I've found a direct relationship between how willing I am to do as the locals do, and how much more I'm then able to see of a culture."
Bourdain likes to get to the odd place. "I have a deep and instinctive loathing for the tour bus, and the whole notion of the tour bus," he said. "I have an instinctive aversion to going to another country … and then basically eating in the coffee shop every day because you're afraid you might get sick. … My happiest moments have been eating street food, you know, wandering around."
Not that he was always a happy wanderer. He once stayed in a hotel in Cambodia where "there was blood and hair on the walls. That's never a good thing. And footprints, halfway up the wall, and I'm thinking, how did those get there?"
Comments
Post a Comment