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Anthony Bourdain: Garbanzo Gonzo
by M.G. Wood I am fairly certain that were I to meet Chef Anthony Bourdain, he would consider me quite the pussy.
Not only am I a vegetarian (Bourdain hates vegetarians), but after spending years working my way up from dishwasher to prep cook to Head Chef, I “screwed the pooch” on my first and only big night as Executive Chef of a “fine-dining” restaurant. Thirteen years. To be exact. From the time I swam about in the sweat, slop, and suds, as a teenage dishwasher, scrubbing to the beat of Eye of the Tiger, 1982 (the infancy of Reagan America), all the way up to the early days of Clinton and the O.J. trial, 1995 (scene of the crime: the Crash and Burn of a young man ill-prepared to run a kitchen thrust into the limelight), until now, another thirteen years rolled away, and another crossroads, and I ponder a return to the kitchen. Anthony Bourdain is a chef and a writer. He has commandeered a well-respected French Bistro in New York City, and of course written a cook book. But, what Mr. Bourdain is most famous for, is his scathing memoir KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL. This no-holds-barred telling of a life of adventure, sentimental education, and sex, drugs, and rack of lamb, will leave you hungry, for food, and for life. Currently, Bourdain is basking in the glow of television stardom as the host of his highly-acclaimed, and highly viewed show NO RESERVATIONS on The Travel Channel. The show, now in it’s 4th season, combines all of Bourdain’s passions: cooking, traveling, eating, drinking, writing. And Bourdain does all of them very well.
Having never eaten at Bourdain’s restaurant Les Halles, I can only speak to his writing. And if Chef Bourdain cooks as well as he writes, then he must be one hell of a cook. Bourdain admits, or rather, confesses, or has the honest nuts to tell us, his heroes are Hunter Thompson and William Burroughs. Which is quite clear, if you read his blog, his books, or his many pop culture essays. Bourdain writes in a very free-flowing, verbally-profane, and quick-paced fashion, only occasionally lapsing into celebrity chef recipe mode. Back to me. You see after years of contaminating my body with all manner of impurities, I chose to cleanse my system. And one very dramatic way of doing so, was to give up meat. We learn from KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL that Bourdain himself knows a thing or two about self-abuse. Sidetracked away from the culinary arts by a taste for coke and crank in his 20's, he was able to rehabilitate himself with the help of a Chef/Mentor in New York, eventually leading to his landing a Head Chef position at Les Halles. One of the more entertaining aspects of Anthony Bourdain's TV persona is his stubborn insistence on exploding all previous caricatures of the "celebrity chef", often slicing and dicing the phonier aspects of the business personified by Emeril "Bam-Bam" Lagasse and Rachael "Yum-Yum" Ray. The 1st celebrity chef that captured my imagination, and many Americans, was The Frugal Gourmet Jeff Smith. He hosted a highly popular cooking show on PBS in the 1980's, and sold millions of copies of his cook books. He was right up my alley: pretentious, literate, and quirky.
Sadly, The Frugal Gourmet’s empire was brought down by a scandal involving former male employees of Mr. Smith’s who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by the chef.
Bourdain lays all his cards on the table in his books and his television show. He smokes, drinks, reminisces about the pussy he’s had, the drugs he’s taken. "Tony" Bourdain's travels on NO RESERVATIONS take him all around the world in search of unusual and exotic cuisine from varying cultures, often landing him in fairly precarious and unexpected places. I suppose this gets at the very core of our celebrity culture: we all seem to find an icon to latch onto, to live vicariously through; someone who may be living the life you wished you had. Sort of the way Gods are created.
While my dream of being a world-class Chef was long ago buried, as you can clearly see, my ambition to be a world-class Author has not been completely extinguished. I continue to limp along.
Being a writer is a lot like being a junkie. Once the craft gets in your blood, no matter the setbacks or rejections, it becomes impossible to stop. It becomes a madness. Ink mixes into your blood creating a cloudy cathartic blot soaked up by the white sheet of paper.
One of my favorite episodes of NO RESERVATIONS is actually the very first episode, entitled “Why The French Don’t Suck”. Bourdain indulges in absinthe and blood sausage, eats a roast beef sandwich with a glass of red wine at 6 in the morning, and sleeps in room 16 of the Hotel d’Alsace where Oscar Wilde died.
I understand why Anthony Bourdain hates vegetarians. Because you can’t expect to grow and expand as a human being without getting your hands dirty, or bloody; unless you challenge yourself in ways that may run the risk of causing you illness and/or death, you’re not really living. And not just in body, but in mind: you can’t truly appreciate the beauty of Monet or the poetry of ee cummings without indulging in the grotesque beauty of William Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH.
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