Nasty bits

The bad boy of cuisine never fails to entertain and educate with exotic tales of travel. He tells Mathures Paul it’s impossible to live a full-time bohemian lifestyle and also be a good chef

‘There’s usually a moment when we’re shooting, most often near the end of a long meal. The crew has all the shots they need: plenty of ‘content’ (meaning me, babbling about the food ~ and someone local, who presumably knows what we’re eating, describing it), lots of long, lingering ‘food porn’ close-ups, plenty of footage of kitchen prep (which Todd who had arrived hours earlier to get) and the final assembly. As an exhausted silence settles over the table, well into my cups, I’ll look straight at the camera and sarcastically say, in my most unctuous, television ‘host-sums-up’ voice, ‘So... What have we learned today?’ This is a cue to producer and shooters that I’m f****** done. That it’s time to ‘get some wides’, meaning, the crew steps way back and shoots some generic ‘wide shots’ from a distance. Audio is no longer a factor in these, so the mikes come off and those of us at the table can pretty much forget about the cameras, and act naturally, secure in the knowledge that the presumed ‘working’ part of the day is almost over...’
Few TV hosts, if any, have injected life into the usually drab television cookery shows like Anthony Bourdain. He never boasts of chopping cucumbers at the speed of light or speaks about heritage and cooking in the same breath. The Indiana Jones among gourmets takes viewers to far-flung places to taste the adventures that unfold in kitchens big and small. And he doesn’t care about mincing words.
Discovery Travel & Living is bringing back Bourdain in a new season of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. The best-selling author, traveller, culinary adventurer is once again out of the kitchen and on the road ~ no holds barred and as feisty as ever. His travel experiences ~ the good, the bad and the ugly ~ are once again presented in “unfiltered” vocabulary.
Perhaps the only time he had some control over his “raw” viewpoints was when was born in 1956 in New York City. Bourdain studied at Vassar College and graduated from the Culinary Institute of America. His exposé of New York restaurants ~ Don’t Eat Before Reading This ~ was published in The New Yorker in 1999 and attracted attention in America and the UK, forming the basis of his bestselling book, Kitchen Confidential.
Anthony Bourdain’s book A Cook’s Tour was published in December 2001 to accompany a 22-part television series, which aired on Discovery Travel & Living and featured him travelling around the world on an unconventional culinary tour.
The celebrated chef has also penned several mystery novels, including Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo and The Bobby Gold Stories. The 28-year veteran of professional kitchens, Bourdain is currently executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan and lives in New York City. He speaks to The Statesman.

Another season of No Reservations. Some of the places you visit...
In my new season of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations I have travelled all over ~ from Vancouver to New Orleans and Scotland to Greek Islands. My quest for the perfect bite has taken me to Romania, Jamaica, Hawaii and Tokyo.

Do your travels ever influence the menu at your restaurant?
Not really. What I eat on my journey to various places is reflective of that place and its specialty. I think the two ~ food and travel ~ are inseparable. I don’t think you can have any understanding of a country or really enjoy it or really even see it and experience it fully without eating the food.
So many of the things I’ve seen in the countries around the world I never would have been allowed to see and so many of those experiences I never would have had if I hadn’t shown a willingness to sit down with local people and eat and drink whatever is offered. I think when you start with the food, with the markets, what people eat in their everyday lives, those countries open up to you in ways that a normal tourist would never see.

You never say “no” to any food. And on the shows you are always smoking. Do you worry about cholesterol? And doesn’t smoking dull your palate?
Well thankfully not. I coped quite well with the food though I must admit that I have a relatively strong constitution.

We don’t see you eating vegetarian preparations...
I’m a rather vocal proponent of eating meat. I have, generally, a very carnivorous diet and have taken a dim view of vegetarian cuisine. I was very impressed by the quality of vegetarian food in India. That was a very pleasant surprise. I have to say that India was the first time that I felt entirely comfortable eating vegetarian everyday. I went many, many days eating vegetarian food and I was very pleased and surprised at how good it was.
I think there’s a much more sophisticated and long-standing tradition of vegetarian cuisine in India. People tend to cook vegetables well here, whereas vegetarian cuisine in America has been unpleasant for me. It was a much more enjoyable experience here and more exciting and interesting.

There is obviously a craze surrounding celebrity chefs...
I guess I don’t try to be an authority or an expert. It is not a priority for me to describe the entire history or give a definitive overview of the subject. It comes easily to me to just tell people as best I can what it felt like, what the experience was like in a very immediate way. I think I come from an oral storytelling tradition in the kitchen. We tell stories to one another and in much of the same way.
I’m having fun. How bad can it be? It’s no big thing for me. I’m lucky to be in a place. If people tell me something is good in their country, I’m going to try it. I’m not looking to shock anybody. If I show up in Vietnam and they say, “Well, you have to try the cobra heart,” I’ll try it. Why not? Again, I don’t take it that seriously. I like to eat whatever people are enthusiastic about in a particular place. It’s not difficult for me.
I’m grateful to be able to do what I do. I was never a great chef. I was never an artist as a chef. I don’t see myself like Gordon Ramsay or Thomas Keller. I mean I’m very aware of the fact that I’m lucky. I was a mediocre chef and I’m lucky enough to be able to go anywhere I want to go in the world and make television shows about it. So I try to keep that in mind.

Do you ever want to go back to cooking full-time?
It is impossible to live a full-time bohemian lifestyle and also be a good chef in New York. It will catch up with you eventually. Chefs may party hard after work but their habits on the job have to become much more responsible with increased media attention and responsibilities. Cooking professionally is hard, repetitive, intensely physical, high-pressure work ~ no matter how much fun it may be. It’s a team activity ~ with great camaraderie. It is indeed very, very difficult to succeed as a New York chef. The odds are already stacked against you no matter how good you might be as New York is probably the most competitive market in the world. And tough? You better be.
I’m almost never in my kitchen in New York (at the restaurant) and on the few days when I’m back in New York, I’m as likely to call out for pizza as anything else. When I get back to New York, I’m tired. I’m lazy. I have just a few days. Also to escape, I write about myself. I make television about me and what happens to me. So it’s a nice escape to disappear into a world of the imagination from time-to-time. Of course, I’ve always loved crime movies and crime books. So it’s an interesting diversion for me and I hope for the reader as well.

Managing time between shows and writing novels is difficult.
I write about my experiences as I travel. I think that’s the best I can hope for, for my aim is to give people a sense when they watch the show or read my books of what a place looked like, tasted like and smelled like and felt like at the time. I’m working on a crime (fiction), my fourth crime novel now.