I really like anthony bourdain. who fuckin doesn't. but frankly i don't care why you like him. in that way i'm a prick like tony. it's similar as how i really really really don't want to hear about what weird ass tattoo your gonna get. i hate hearing people tell me about their sleeve plans. fuck that. in any case i am a cook, and as such, he is a patron saint of sorts to my brood. a figure we all know in our hearts had, at least on some abstract level, love for us, was rooting us all on. he told us we were fighting the good fight. waking up and slinging hash or washing dishes and godbless us for it. and for me he painted a picture of a path up. planted an ambition in me to make it to the bigs. he told me there were bigs. i blame him for not being able to sigt still in a shitty reasturant. if some place feels like it doesn't suit me i just gotta get the fuck out of there. no, me, i'm gonna be cooking good food. if i could be a prep cook in a thomas keller kitchen i would. a david chang joint. of course. i have sky high aspirations on some level. and i blame tony for that. reading his shit some part of me knew that if i grinded out and worked hard and had just a pinch of luck i could get closer than a dish pit in some grocery store kitchen.
All this to say i think he is probably the greatest chronicler of food culture that ever lived (certainly the most famous), comparable to the titan ray bradbury in the world of genre fiction. bradbury was marked by his poetics, fine and delicate understanding of the vast exsistention mechanics which inhabit all of us. to paraphrase someone else writing about bradbury, he didn't write about rocket ships he wrote about the people in them. all the evidence one could need is the harrowing and heartbreaking short story 'rocketman' from the illustraded man book. fuckin hell. it gave us the elton john song! enough said right! or the one he wrote about those space explorers who land on a planet just after some great devine being (an unamed jesus i assume) was there and brought a great unending peace to the people and the captain of the mission can't believe it and loses his mind and races off to catch this great being knowing that he will always be just a few moments too late.... come the fuck on! a space story about faith and greed. and like that tony wrote about cooks. but also he wrote about all of us. about society and the canon of our collective thought. our anger and greed and our. he was so deeply a hypocrite it made his writing a sterling charm, an illuminated manuscript.
My great example of this is how he ends kitchen confidential, his peice on scott bryan and veritas. by that point the book had wound down. you had imbibed tony's intoxicating prose-cocktail of bravado, machismo, piratical tales of the kitchen. and you drank heartily. letting that shit run down the corner of your lips over your chin and onto your shirt. i know i did. it's why i'm in the game right now. why i own fancy german, french, and japanese knives and i keep them in a handmade leather knife roll. because i drank the potion and bought the line of bullshit he was selling... and then he procedes to discredit and undo all the grand wisdom he's been laying on you like your dads friend who smelt kinda like weed and would tell you about cars and drugs and girls but you later relies half of what you said was utter bullshit. well tony does the work of time for you and basically calls himself on all his self mythological bullshit. a classy motherfucker.
Scott bryan was a chef from my moms hometown of brookline mass. he came up poor, like my mom and unlike tony. a fact which he highlights, pointing out his own lily white upper-middle-class-i-not-just-upper-class origins. bryan learned to cook in a vocational class at his technical college, deciding between cooking or being an electrician. a choice tony points out he never would had to make, believing in his rich upbringing, believing that the world would supply him with gainful and enriching employment. those realities did not penetrate the projects of boston jack. and so bryan went to work in kitchens, working under impressive chef after impressive chef. upon tony's observence of the veritas kitchen his story of pirate crews in basement kitchens start to crumble. it all comes down. pretty much everything tony said in the whole damn book become accutley knows as contingent on a certain set of circumstances. mainly that you don't work in the bigs. that in fact you are in a luke warm middle of the kitchen world, working the kind of places you work when you never worked under a world class chef, as tony never did, admitting he was too attracted to the title of chef, and the money it brought, to swallow his pride and take the pay cut needed to work a lesser station in one of the countries great kitchens. with this one piece he shows you the wizard behind the curtain. it takes a lot to basically call yourself a peddler of myths and half truths and still maintain your credibility. and for that tony is one of the all-timers.
not everything tony wrote was a lie or a half truth or a myth. his tone was one of authority and by the end he essentially undercuts the two hundred odd pages that came before it. a ballsy and all time move. a book length poem about reality about perspective and honesty. you can't beat that can you. rest in peace tony. i hope i get to meet you when i die and tell you all this.
