Bourdain - Medium Raw

MEDIUM

RAW

A Bloody Valentine to the World of

Food and the People Who Cook

ANTHONY BOURDAIN

To Ottavia

CONTENTS

1 Sel ing Out

3 The Rich Eat Dif erently Than You and Me

5 So You Wanna Be a Chef

6 Virtue

7 The Fear

8 Lust

9 Meat

11 Im Dancing

12 Go Ask Alice

13 Heroes and Vil ains

15 I Lost on Top Chef

16 Its Not You, Its Me

17 The Fury

18 My Aim Is True

About the Author

THE SIT DOWN

ALSO BY ANTHONY BOURDAIN

Stil Here

Copyright

About the Publisher

Sel ing Out

Iwas so supremely naive about so many things when I wrote Kitchen Confidentialmy hatred for al things Food Network being just one of them. From my vantage point in a busy working kitchen, when Id see Emeril and Bobby on the tube, they looked like creatures from another planetbizarrely, arti cial y cheerful creatures in a candycolored galaxy in no way resembling my own. They were as far from my experience or understanding as Barney the purple dinosauror the saxophone stylings of Kenny G. The fact that peoplestrangers

seemed to love them, Emerils studio audience, for instance, clapping and hooting with every mention of gah-lic, only made me more hostile.

In my life, in my world, I took it as an article of faith that chefs were unlovable. Thats why we were chefs. We were basical y bad people

which is why we lived the way we did, this half-life of work fol owed by hanging out with others who lived the same life, fol owed by whatever slivers of emulated normal life we had left to us. Nobody loved us. Not real y. How could they, after al ? As chefs, we were proudly dysfunctional. We were mis ts. We knew we were mis ts, we sensed the empty parts of our souls, the missing parts of our personalities, and this was what had brought us to our profession, had made us what we were.

I despised their very likability, as it was a denial of the quality Id always seen as our best and most distinguishing: our otherness.

Rachael Ray, predictably, symbolized everything I thought wrong

which is to say, incomprehensible to meabout the Brave New World of celebrity chefs, as she wasnt even one of us. Back then, hearing that title applied to just anyone in an apron was particularly angering.

It burned. (Stil does a lit le.)

What a pitiable fool I was.

But my low opinion of the Food Network actual y went back a lit le But my low opinion of the Food Network actual y went back a lit le further in time. Back to when they were a relatively tiny, sad-sack start-up with studios on the upper oors of an o ce building on Sixth Avenue, a viewership of about eight people, and the production values of late-night public-access porn. Before Emeril and Bobby and Mario helped build them into a powerhouse international brand. (In those days, such luminaries of the dining scene as Donna Hanover [then Giuliani] and Alan Richman, Bil Boggs and Nina Griscom, would sit around in tiny, o ce-size rooms, barely enough room for the cameras, showing pre-recorded promo reelsthe type of crap they show on the hotel channel when you turn on the tube at the Sheraton.) You know the stu : happy customers awkwardly chawing on surf and turf, fol owed by Chef Lous signature cheesecake with a avor that says

Oooh la-la! After which, Alan or Donna or Nina or Bil would take a few desultory bites from a sample of samewhich had been actual y FedExed from whatever resort or far- ung dung hole they were promoting that week.

I was invited on to cook salmon. I was working at Sul ivans at the time, and ogging my rstborn (and already abandoned by its pub lisher) book, a crime novel cal ed Bone in the Throat. I arrived to nd a large and ut erly septic central kitchen/prep area, its sinks heaped with dirty pots and pans, refrigerators jammed with plastic-wrapped mystery packages that no one would ever open. Every surface was covered with neglected food from on-camera demonstrations from who knows how long ago, a panorama of graying, oxidizing, and actively decaying food beset with fruit ies. The chef in charge of this facility stood around with one nger jammed up his nose to the knuckle, seemingly oblivious to the carnage around him. Cast and crew from the various productions would wander in from time to time and actual y pick at this once-edible land l and eat from it. Once in the studio, cooking on camera was invariably over a single electric burner, which stank of the encrusted spil s left by previous victims. For my salmon demonstration, I recal , I had to scrub and wash my own gril pan, after retrieving it from the bot om of a sink as multilayered as the ruins of ancient Troy.

This unimpressive rst encounter in no way made me actively hate

the Food Network. It would be more accurate to say I was dismissive. I the Food Network. It would be more accurate to say I was dismissive. I didnt take them seriously. How could one?

And, to be honest with myself, I never real y hated Emeril, or Bobby, or even Rachael, as much as I found their shows ludicrous and somehow personal y embarrassing.

My genuine contempt for FN came laterafter Kitchen Con dential.

After I was making a nice living making fun of Emeril and Bobby and Rachael. When I went to work for the bastards.

I was stil cooking every day and night. The book was on the New York Times bestsel er list, but a healthy distrust, a strong suspicion that Id bet er keep my day job, was stil very much the order of the day.

This couldnt last, I thought. It was surely a uke. A ash in the pan.

What possible appeal could my storysomething Id writ en with no larger audience than New York-area line cooks, waiters, and bartenders in mindhave beyond the tristate area? And if twenty-eight years in the restaurant business had taught me anything at al , it was that if things look good today, they wil most assuredly turn to shit tomorrow.

While I doubted the longevity of my time in the sun, I was aware that I was put ing up some nice numbers for my publisher. I may have been a pessimist, but I was not an idiot. So, striking while the iron is hot, as they say, I went in and pitched a second book and a decidedly fat er advancequickly, before the bloom was o the rose and I faded inevitably back into insolvency and obscurity. I brashly suggested a book about me traveling al over the world, to al the cool places Id ever dreamed of going, eating and drinking and get ing into trouble. I would be wil ing to do thisand write about it, I suggested. If my publisher would pay for it.

Shockingly, they were wil ing to pay for it.

Shortly after that, two unimpressive-looking men walked into Les Hal es and asked me if Id be interested in making television. They had Kitchen Con dential in mind, no doubt, a property I had already sold o to Hol ywood (to end up as a very short-lived sitcom). Undaunted by this news, they expressed interest when I told them Id be unlikely to nd time in any caseas I was about to embark on a year-long bounce around the world to ful l my childhood fantasies of the exotic East and around the world to ful l my childhood fantasies of the exotic East and elsewhere.

I have to tel you that even at this early point, stil wearing my kitchen whites, I was already dubious of anyone who claimed to be o ering a TV deal. I had very quickly learned that when TV or movie people tel you were al big fans over here or were very excited about this project, it usual y means nothing more than that theyre planning on paying for lunch. I was even more skeptical when they mentioned Food Network as a prime candidate for acquiring the project. This notion alone suggested these two goofs had no idea what they were talking about and no juice with anybody. Id been savagely trashing the Food Networks principal earners for some timeit was already shtick, part of a stand-up bit that would live on long after I stopped performing it. The fact that these two would even suggest Food Network hinted at problems far beyond the usual lack of imagination.