“A building’s exterior reveals nothing of what’s inside.” – Anthony Bourdain, ‘A Cook’s Tour’
Maybe I’m 37 years old. Maybe I’m a dad. But I was reading this week’s book while traveling (touring!), and it finally hit me how much I wouldn’t like a job that had me on the road for 200 days a year. Don’t get me wrong, I love traveling. I crave going somewhere new, trying new foods, exploring new bookstores, seeing other bodies of water, the whole experience of orienting yourself around a new place. I look forward to future book tours. I remember my two weeks touring with Since Forever in 2011 fondly, even if it was a personally brutal time period. Not touring more is one of my big regrets of my late teens/20s.
Still, somewhere around page 50 or so of reading this book—only the second nonfiction book I’ve read by this author, but fourth overall—it hit me how much it must truly suck to be asked to drink a Cobra heart shooter, assist in pig butchering, or take a dunk in a frozen Russian lake. You’re asked all of these things, not just with television cameras rolling, but with a reputation as a fearless explorer following you everywhere. While that job might also yield some really delicious meals, unforgettable adventures, and seeing more of the world than maybe anybody, ever? It maybe makes sense, extremely not wanting to do that after a while.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
A book written by a true Romantic, who just happens to have all of his sensibilities seasoned with a healthy dose of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, a couple of morning beers, and a few decades of working in kitchens. A book by one of more descriptive, witty, and curious writers we had in the 1990s-2010s. A true writer’s writer, you ask me, in the sense that he clearly loved crafting a sentence that would feel just great rolling around your mouth. I’m talking, of course, about A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain.
A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain: let’s do a little scene-setting. Kitchen Confidential was 2000 (Bone in the Throat was 1996). This book comes out in 2001. Tony is still working at Les Halles, but he’s also doing enough TV hits that his kitchen crew is busting his balls for wearing makeup all the time. He’s 44 years old and slowing down in the kitchen, calling “fire table eight” only to have a colleague correct him: “table seven, chef.” He doesn’t initially pitch a TV show. This was before the War on Terror, and people bought books. Tony Bourdain pitches A Cook’s Tour solely as a book. Food Network wants a show, his agent pitches him on a show being good for the book, and then the next 17 years happen the way that they do.
All of that is to establish that this is a different Bourdain than we’re used to seeing, even, like, a couple seasons into No Reservations. He might already think food tastes better with sand between your toes, but he’s falling in love with Vietnam in real time. He’s still got his negative opinions of vegetarians, but he’s killing his own meal for the first time. Both of those things are interesting entries to the complicated politics of Tony Bourdain: very much a cheerleader for the poor and downtrodden, champion of workers, hater of authority—but his obsession with Apocalypse Now, Graham Greene, and his simmering Frenchness risks any discussion of Vietnam veering into Orientalist territory, or at least some inadvertent foot-soldiering for the colonialist project. Yet when he talks about wanting to beat Kissinger to death, I fully believe him—and that was a less popular position then than it is now. He ends the chapter on Vietnam with a scene where he sees a beggar, skin burned behind recognition, face burned beyond recognition, and the self-revulsion in Tony wells up hard. “What am I doing in Vietnam?” he asks repeatedly, unable to answer the question or shake his disgust for the United States military machine, and the way its sins has made his very presence ugly. That goes for all of us, abroad—anyone who was there remembers joking about pretending to be Canadian if they traveled abroad during the Bush II administration. It’s worse now.
The scene with vegetarians in Berklee gnaws at me, with regard to Tony’s half-formed politics at this time. He is clearly a Romantic. Passionate. He might call it a chef’s quality, being exacting and demanding and often failing to understand what you perceive as others half-assing it or being hypocrites around you. I don’t think that’s a chef thing, because I often feel that way myself. I’ve had to work on it, letting other people go about their lives without me bothering them, even while doing things I find repulsive, like moving to the suburbs or ordering well-done steaks. When he’s railing against vegans and vegetarians for trying to enforce their lifestyle on others, I’m reading like, “yeah dude PETA sucks but I think you just have a Special Interest in foie gras.”
When he talks about various chefs being “the best”—an extremely nebulous term for literally anything other than sports—there’s never the The Menu acknowledgement, that the only people who can afford to eat “the best” are the very worst people in the world. That Gordon Ramsey fired a waiter for drinking water in view of the dining room not because it was an actually offensive gesture (“the help needed water! imagine!”), but because deep down, Gordon Ramsey is afraid of offending the sensibilities of some investor who could decide the fate of Gordon’s career with one phone from his private jet on its way to Little Saint James. The Thomas Keller section of the San Francisco chapter is an excellent portrait of a fascinating man who has built an absolutely fascinating place out in Napa Valley. Except, there’s never the slightest bit of awareness of how many Silicon Valley dweebs probably view The French Laundry as a Monday Morning Brag and couldn’t tell you the color difference between red and white wine.
All that said—and I know I’m going super long here—I loved this book. I want to live life with as much passion and curiosity and adventurousness as Anthony Bourdain. I want to write sentences like him. I want to care as deeply for what I’m writing about as he does. A blurb on Ross Gay’s The Book Of Delights calls Ross “a truly free Black man,” which is a wonderful encapsulation of Ross’s whole voice in that book. Tony’s drinking and smoking and literal suicide prove that he was never free. But he wrung what he could out of life, and his way of embracing the world is aspirational. I’d read this book again next week if I could.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Bourdain was a big punk fan, let’s listen to some punk. Also, this is book is the source for Tony’s famous “once you go to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your fists” quote. That’s an interesting sentiment to have about a huge, unrepentantly bloodthirsty political figure from the U.S. Here’s my very dear friend and former bandmate, Spencer Blake, and his band, Pinch Hitter, with a song that has nothing to do with any of that.
- In honor of the world being big, and in honor of Tony Bourdain’s mission of showing how the coolest stuff is firmly off the beaten path, every link is going to be a Secretly Incredible Fascinating episode I’ve enjoyed recently. I’m going to link to the SIF website, and you can listen on whatever podcast service you like from there. The world is big. Learn about it. Start with something we take for granted as being plentiful everywhere: salt, and salt mines.
- You know your man the shipwrecked sailor is going to recommend the episode about the Northwest Passage. There is depressing climate stuff here, but it’s not all gloom and doom.
- Does this one qualify as secretly fascinating if I’ve been fascinated by it for years? And still don’t super understand it? Anyway, definitely check out the episode about roller derby.
- Hey, stay current, here’s this week’s episode about Bastille Day.
- SIF Pod frequently comes with Simpsons references, and you better believe there’s a reason Mr. Burns answers the phone with “ahoy hoy.” Check out the episode about hello.
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you know that Micah and Brendan have a show?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Bourdain never stopped talking about how the best cooks in his kitchen, the hardest-working people by a mile, were Mexicans and Ecuadorians. I’ve never understood much of what to do with the knowledge that so much of the most unpleasant labor in this country—food service, handyman work, house and hotel cleaning, etc—is done primarily by a group of people that the U.S. has time and again retrenched as an underclass. This country’s government refuses to post signs in English and Spanish, refuses to teach its public school children Spanish, and refuses to grant or even acknowledge the citizenship of many of these people. Our presidents—even and maybe especially Obama and Biden—openly brag about how many people they violently uproot from their lives to ship them back to countries where they’ve previously fled poverty or violence. All of that is before this Full Fascist version of the Trump Regime came into power, with a concentration camp set up in the Everglades (a place that should be a holy site, FTR), before the President’s alleged Mar-A-Lago-faced mistress was tweeting genocidal fantasies about Latino/a/x people, before people were afraid to leave their fucking houses because unidentified masked goons might come kidnap them and send them to a U.S.-sponsored concentration camp or sell them into slavery. How do I do this benediction for service workers this weekend, with all of this on my mind? Do I praise the service workers soldiering on, doing honest work for dishonest pay in the horrific face of ICE? Do I call for revolution and rock-throwing in the streets?
Sorry you got an email,
Chris