Anthony Bourdain - The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Useable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

BYTHE SAME AUTHOR

Nonfiction Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook A Cook's Tour Typhoid Mary Kitchen Confidential

Fiction The Bobby Gold Stories Gone Bamboo Bone in the Throat

THE NASTY BITS

Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

ANTHONY BOURDAIN BLOOMS BURY First published in Great Britain 2006

Copyright 2006 by Anthony Bourdain

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Most of these essays originally appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following publications: Best Life, BlackBook, Chow, eGullet.com , Esquire, Face, Financial Times, Food Arts, Gourmet, Independent, L.A. Times, Limb by Limb, Lizard and Town & Country Bloomsbury Publishing Pic 36 Soho Square London W1D 3QY A CIP catalogue record is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7475 7981 4 9780747579816

10 987654321

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed by Clays Limited, St Ives pic

All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable, well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

To Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee

CONTENTS

Preface

SALTY

System D The Evildoers

A Commencement Address Nobody Asked For

Food and Loathing in Las Vegas

Are You a Crip or a Blood?

Viva Mexico! Viva Ecuador!

Counter Culture

A Life of Crime

Advanced Courses

SWEET

Name Dropping Down Under

My Manhattan

Hard-core

When the Cooking's Over

(Turn Out the Lights, Turn Out the Lights) The Cook's Companions China Syndrome No Shoes The Love Boat

CONTENTS SOUR

Is Celebrity Killing the Great Chefs? 125
What You Didn't Want to Know About

Making Food Television 131

Warning Signs 136

Madness in Crescent City 140

A View from the Fridge 143

Notes from the Road 149

The Dive 154

BITTER

A Drinking Problem 163

Woody Harrelson: Culinary Muse 166

Is Anybody Home? 171

Bottoming Out 176

Food Terrorists 179

Sleaze Gone By 183

U M AM I

Pure and Uncut Luxury 191

The Hungry American 195

Decoding Ferran Adria 203

Brazilian Beach-Blanket Bingo 211

The Old, Good Stuff 224

Die, Die Must Try 231

A TASTE OF FICTION

A Chef's Christmas 241

Commentary 271

PREFACE

I went seal hunting yesterday. At eight a.m., swaddled in caribou, I climbed into a canoe and headed out onto the freezing waters of the Hudson Bay with my Inuit guides and a camera crew. By three p.m., I was sitting cross-legged on a plastic-covered kitchen floor listening to Charlie, my host, his family, and a few tribal elders giggling with joy as they sliced and tore into a seal carcass, the raw meat, blubber, and brains of our just-killed catch. Grandma squealed with delight as Charlie cracked open the seal's skull, revealing its brainsquickly digging into the goo with her fingers. Junior sliced dutifully at a kidney. Mom generously slit open one of the eyeballs (the best part) and showed me how to suck out the interior as if working on an oversize Concord grape. From all sides, happy family members were busily dissecting the seal from different angles, each pausing intermittently to gobble a particularly tasty morsel. Soon, everyone's faces and hands were smeared with blood. The room was filled with smiles and good cheer in spite of the Night of the Living Dead overtones and the blood (lots of it) running across the plastic. A Bonanza rerun played silently on the TV set in the normal-looking family room adjacent as Mom cut off a piece of snout and whisker, instructing me to hold it by the thick, strawlike follicles and then suck and gnaw on the tiny kernel of pink buried in the leatherlike flesh. After a thorough sampling of raw seal brain, liver, kidney, rib section, and blubber, an elder crawled across the floor and retrieved a platter of frozen blackberries. She generously rolled a fistful of them around in the wet interior of the carcass, glazing them with blood and fat, before offering them to me. They were delicious.

Words fail me. Again and again. Or maybe it's me that fails the English language. My depiction of the day's rather extraordinary events is workmanlike enough, I guess... but, typically, I fall short. How to describe the feeling of closeness and intimacy in that otherwise ordinary-looking kitchen? The way the fifteen-year-old daughter and her eighty-five-year-old grandmother faced each other, nearly nose to nose, and began "throat singing," first warming up with simultaneous grunts and rapid breathing patterns, then singing, the tones and words coming from somewhere independent of their mouths, from somewhere... else? The sheer, unselfconscious glee (and pride) with which they tore apart that sealhow do I make that beautiful? The sight of Charlie, blood spread all across his face, dripping off his chin... Grandma, her legs splayed, rocking a crescent-shaped chopper across blubber, peeling off strips of black seal meat... How do I make them as sympathetic, as beautiful, in words as they were in reality?

"Without the seal, we would not be here," said Charlie. "We would not be alive." A true enough statement, but not an explanation. You'd have to have felt the cold up there, have seen it, hundreds and hundreds of miles without a single tree. You'd have to have gone out with Charlie, as I had, out onto that freezing bay, a body of water nearly the size of an ocean, watched him walk across a thin, tilting layer of ice to drag the seal back to the canoe. Heard, as we did, the resigned calls from other hunters over Charlie's radio, stuck out in a blizzard for the night, realizing they would have no shelter and no fire. You'd have to have been in that room. A photograph wouldn't do it. I know. I take them in my travels, look at them laterand they're inevitably, woefully flat, a poor substitute for the smell of a place, the feeling of being there. Videotape? It's another language altogether. You've turned what was experienced in Greek into Latin, edited places and people into something else, and however beautiful or dramatic or funny, it's also... different. Maybe only music has the power to bring a place or a person back, so close to you that you can smell them in the air. And I can't play guitar.

Fragments. Pieces of the strange ride, the larger, dysfunctional but wondrous thing my life has become. It's been like this for the last five years. Always in motion, nine, then ten, then eleven months out of the twelve. Maybe three or four nights a month spent in my own bedthe rest in planes, cars, trains, dogsleds, sailboats, helicopters, hotels, longhouses, tents, lodges, jungle floors. I've become some kind of traveling salesman or paid wanderer, both blessed and doomed to travel this world until I can't anymore. Funny what happens when your dreams come true.

My pal A. A. Gill once suggested that the older he gets, and the more he travels, the less he knows. And I know what he means now. Seeing the planet as I'm seeing it, you are constantly reminded of what you don't knowhow much more there is to see and learn, how damn big and mysterious this world is. It's both frustrating and addicting, which only makes it harder when you visit, say, China for the first time, and realize how much more of it there isand how little time you have to see it. It's added a frantic quality to my already absurd life, and an element of both desperation and resignation.

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, lifeand travelleaves marks on you. Most of the time, those markson your body or on your heartare beautiful. Often, though, they hurt. When I look back on the last five years since I wrote the obnoxious, over-testosteroned memoir that transported me out of the kitchen and into a never-ending tunnel of pressurized cabins and airport lounges, it's a rush of fragments, all jostling for attention. Some good, some bad, some pleasurableand some excruciating to remember. Much, I suspect, like the pieces in this collection.

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