It’s been 10 years since the publication of “Kitchen Confidential.” Subtitled “Life in the Culinary Underbelly,” Anthony Bourdain’s collection of nonfiction pieces was a kind of muscular hybrid never seen before in the genteel world of food publishing: part misery-lit memoir, part expose, part travelogue and guide, part rant and manifesto, it gave a raucous cook’s-eye view of the restaurant business.
Before Bourdain, chefs’ life stories were usually confined to the introductions of their cookbooks. It was always the same tale: one or two childhood food epiphanies, mentorship by several kindly and powerful industry figures, then a career path marked by an unbroken rise to the top. Always mindful that they were writing for the gracious-living industry, chefs painted kitchen life in cheerful joie de vivre colors.
“Kitchen Confidential,” by contrast, told of a career derailed by drug use, arrogance and paranoia. And what happened behind the kitchen doors was not pretty.
The book’s impact was — to use a comparison Bourdain might appreciate — like the impact of “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” on a mid-’70s sonic landscape dominated by syrupy Carpenters ballads and Rick Wakeman triple LPs. “Kitchen Confidential’s” extraordinary success (it has sold over a million copies) probably resulted from a combination of circumstances: Despite its casual, slangy tone, it was painstakingly well- written, and it was published at a time when the memoir craze and reality TV made Bourdain’s uncomfortable confessions of petty larceny, porn consumption, chronic drug use and alcoholism more than welcome.
To cooks, Bourdain was a compadre, a bully-boy, a liberator; to the rest of the world, he was a canny guide to an unknown subculture.
When I reviewed the book 10 years ago, I noted that it had a heart. “Kitchen Confidential” is full of gratitude for the colorful characters and wonderful food the profession has brought him. What I notice now — now that I’m the same age as the Bourdain who wrote the book and like Bourdain at the time, am a working, middle- aged chef, with that same tendency to go on about my aches and pains as he does so humorously — what I notice now is that it has a backbone, too. “Kitchen Confidential” is full of gratitude, but also full of gratitude’s tougher twin, which is the absence of self-pity. When he wrote his book, Bourdain was an over-the-hill, downwardly mobile journeyman chef with bleak long-term prospects. But there is little of the expected moaning and complaining.
“Kitchen Confidential” changed a lot of things: It changed the way restaurants and chefs were portrayed and the way chefs portrayed and thought of themselves. Bourdain’s style — loose, profane, full of vigorous transitive verbs and a knack for the pungent behind-the-curtain detail — was as widely imitated by food writers as Hemingway’s prose was by midcentury American novelists. Bourdainese has become so prevalent in food journalism that’s it hard not feel that Bourdain should receive a royalty check every time a food writer drops the F-bomb.
“Kitchen Confidential” also changed Bourdain’s life. He quit cooking and became a TV personality (“A Cook’s Tour,” followed by the more successful “No Reservations”), a fixture on food-festival panels and a coveted writer of blurbs.
I worried that he might be showing the signs of creeping celebrity rot — the expensive haircut, the perpetual tan, the new, younger wife, and what seemed like a markedly more benign view of some of his egregious contemporaries (I mean, of course, his unforgivable volte face about Emeril).
His style, I also thought, was devolving into shtick. Would he become like latter- day Hunter S. Thompson, and turn into a parody of himself?
Well, not to worry. “Medium Raw,” his latest collection of essays, does have a fair amount of shtick, but it’s good, necessary shtick; sometimes, donning the garish costume of the court jester is the only way to get away with saying the unsayable.
“Medium Raw” is full of things everybody in the food world thinks but nobody will say, at least in print. Here is Bourdain on the James Beard House: “a private dining society for the soon-to-be- incontinent . . . gives jobs and power to the otherwise powerless and unemployable”; on superchef Alain Ducasse: “an arrogant f-wit” ; on critic John Mariani: “a professional junketeer . . . a one-man schnorrer.” Sandra Lee is the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.” I don’t think The Denver Post would even print the title of his polemic about the man they call the Dean of Food Writers, Alan Richman.
If “Medium Raw” has some of the same enjoyable features as Bourdain’s debut collection — skillfully done travelogues, painfully funny memoirs, the A Day in the Kitchen With a Great Chef Essay — its furious heart is his attack on Richman and its accompanying essay, “Heroes and Villains.”
Richman, GQ’s food critic, wrote was is probably the most gratuitous piece in the history of food journalism, an extended demolition job on the New Orleans dining scene — one year after Hurricane Katrina.
With one heartless wisecrack after another, Richman tries to make the case that not only is New Orleans’ food not that great now, but it was never that great, and perhaps the destruction of New Orleans is not tragedy everyone seems thinks it is.
Richman, as Bourdain points out, has also been comically skeptical about the ambitions of many of the big-name chefs and has questioned whether they belong anywhere but behind a stove.
For Bourdain, Richman’s jocularity conceals a contempt for chefs and a jealousy for their newly elevated status.
Richman is, as Bourdain calls food writer Regina Schrambling, part of a “vanishing breed of writer and ‘gourmet’, who claim to love food yet secretly loathe the people who actually cook it.”
Bourdain is right to call attention to this. Ever since A.J. Liebling, who wrote about chefs with the same humorous condescension with which he described black prizefighters, this kind of highhandedness has been a sad feature of food writing. If it is now disappearing, that is partly thanks to Bourdain’s mighty influence.
Bourdain has used his newly acquired superpowers — his unlimited access and now-global audience — for good; he is a true populist, as interested in celebrating the most humble wok-slinger as he is in extolling the superchef. If his sharp eye and his wicked tongue have brought him acclaim, what has kept him in the spotlight is his heart. Like Oscar Wilde, he is a moralist in the guise of a libertine. Long may he prosper.
