HE’ S BAAAAACK…
Medium Raw, A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. By Anthony Bourdain
Harper Collins Canada 281 pages
In 2000, Anthony Bourdain became the kitchen’s Dennis Hopper, a counter culture hellraiser who ripped open the seamy underside of fine dining. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain spilled his guts on a career of drugs, sex and booze behind the swinging doors that divided customer from cook. At a time when most food writing was adulatory , Bourdain raged against the system and himself. A cook is a craftsman and like all craftsmen, writers, painters, composers , a cook is dependent on a middleman to get to the public, a filter as fickle as the public itself. It isn’t necessarily the best who succeed but often those who know how to game, who have the right temperament, as much as talent. As Bourdain struggled, he wrote a couple of novels. Still no traction. Then he found a story that only he could tell. Anger is a wonderful spur to exciting writing - Kitchen Confidential is one of those books which sinks its teeth in you and never lets go.
Ten years on and Bourdain is assaying the current scene in a collection of essays, Medium Raw, a Bloody Valentine to the world of Food and the people Who Cook.
He’s Baaaack. He hasn’t softened, he still sees the world through dystopian eyes, profanity-laced prose squeezed out with Maileresque finesse – – who else could just drop feculent into a sentence without sounding like a horse’s ass?
Of course he is subtly different now because he’s an insider and easy with fame, a bigger star than most celeb chefs and arguably the most influential food writer of the 00s. He turned diners off white tablecloths and biddable waiters and on to scruffy-chic kitchen -insider joints where they’re treated like dogs. The ultimate democratization of eating. Example: David Chang’s Momofuku Ko which gets some of Bourdain’s kindest words. Customers lust to get into Momofuku Ko, with its twelve seats awarded by lottery – You have to log onto the website at precisely the right second and hope you’ve beaten out every other logger for a seat six days hence. The lucky stiffs get short order service from charmless help but the food, Bourdain assures us, is sublime. “The loathsome sounding black pepper ganache, black-pepper crumbs, macerated blueberries with creme fraiche and olive oil ice cream is….a shockingly unexpected joy.” Sounds like food for “the tastes of the slightly stoned, slightly drunk chef after work” which is how Bourdain described Ko not so long ago in the New York Times.
Enough of Bourdain’s big heart and his great review of Chang which pretty well fits his own put down of food journalists’ prose as “punchy, entertaining.” I prefer the old unregenerate attack dog, tossing hot coals at the tormentors, TV chefs, sham, hypocrisy, pretentiousness . Watching Minimalist Mark Bittman preparing paella on TV, Bourdain snarls “I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face” Love it.
He uses a slower, Torquemada technique for Alice Waters, tattooing the mother of Slow Food with lethal little pricks.. Not just for her shameless duplicity in preaching the gospel of local and then ordering veg for her restaurant Chez Panisse from a producer 12 hours drive away, but, among other peccadillos, for her “whiff of the jackboots” tendency. “ While It was excessive of me to compare Alice to ‘Pol Pot in a muumuu” it is useful to remember that he was once a practicing Buddhist and later, attended the Sorbonne. And that even in his twisted and genocidal “back to earth” movement, he might once have meant well too.” Love it.
Sometimes Bourdain goes OTT. And why not? That’s what’s expected. I don’t hold a brief for Alan Richman, the GQ restaurant critic. Sure, I have wondered how, year after year,the James Beard award for magazine restaurant critic has gone to Richman and his Broadway Danny Rose style, shutting out such worthy contenders as Toronto Life’s own James Chatto. But a whole chapter on Richman as douchebag?
Seems that Bourdain nominated Richman douchebag of the year at the South Beach Food and Wine food festival. Gross! Richman didn’t throw a punch. Instead he riposted with a searing review of Les Halles, once Bourdain’s stamping ground in New York. Dirty dishwater , considering a, that Les Halles was a 16-year-old steak/frites joint and b, that the review sailed over Bourdain taking collateral damage among his co-workers. Most of all, Richman didn’t tell his readers what he told the Village Voice last week, that he wrote the review in revenge for the douchebag insult.
As fans know, loyalty is a Bourdain core value. I don’t know him, but he kindly gave me a shout out for my book Last Chance to Eat and he didn’t stop there. After a twit of a Brit called Paul Levy, whose claim to fame is that he coined “foodie” , took me down in the NYT, Bourdain galloped to my defense on e-gullet.com. Made me feel even better than the subsequent news that Levy was so off the reservation that he once trashed the incomparable Elizabeth David.
I’d better stop here before I wreck Bourdain’s rep as mad and bad and dangerous to know and get called something worse than douchebag.
Gina Mallet is the Post’s restaurant critic and author of Last Chance To Eat, The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World.
