Upfront
Anthony Bourdain
by Russell Brown
Bad-boy chef whose life has inspired a TV sitcom.
It’s a curiosity that a rock-star chef should have published four works of fiction, two rollicking memoirs and an “urban historical” before he wrote an actual recipe book. But The Les Halles Cookbook lets home chefs in the door of the New York brasserie where Anthony Bourdain worked before writing and author tours took over his life. Next up? The sitcom. Seriously. Fox Network is widely expected to pick up the pilot of the Darren (Sex and the City) Starr-produced Kitchen Confidential, which is based around the character of Jack Bourdain, a bad-boy chef given one last chance.
How do you feel about your life forming the basis of a sitcom? Is it any weirder than anything else that’s happened to me over the past few years? I’m okay with it. If you sell your baby to Hollywood and you don’t end up as a Hasselhoff vehicle, you’re way ahead of the game. In the first episode there’s hardcore drug use, oral sex and a dismemberment. So it’s looking pretty good.
The Les Halles Cookbook is very easy to relate to, especially the introduction. Is there a sense in which none of this should seem forbidding? I certainly was looking to take the intimidation factor out, and I wanted you to sense that there’s someone standing next to you talking to you while you’re trying to cook this stuff, rather than this disembodied, removed, authoritarian voice. People should know that you’re probably going to screw up some of these things the first time out – and it’s no big deal. I thought of the cover first: brown butcher paper. I want you to smear food on it, and for it to be rude and utilitarian and useful. And not food porn. I just didn’t want it to be bullshit.
Do you see cooking as something that you can either do or you can’t?I think it’s a character issue. All my cooks are Mexicans who’ve never cooked before. But they come from a culture where they’re predisposed to enjoy food, where food is an intimate and important event. They have good character and a sense of humour and a good work ethic. I think that’s really all that’s required. There are a few geniuses in cooking, a few artists – but not many.
You talk a lot about Mexicans in Kitchen Confidential and A Cook’s Tour … God’s people.
And then there’s José, the owner of Les Halles. All these people are Catholics. Do Catholics make better cooks? The greatest cooks I’ve ever met are Confucian, so, no. But a history of poverty, oppression and struggle is always useful when you talk about good cooks. I think it’s no accident that the best cooks on Earth are the Basque and the Vietnamese. Where people are proud, food tends to be an expression of cultural identity.
There’s a notable difference in tone between Kitchen Confidential, which is full of bravado, and A Cook’s Tour, which is generally respectful. I was in chef mode in the first book. Cooking professionally is a dominant act – it’s about control. Eating well is about total submission. And I’m humbled by travel. You realise how little you know and how great and how big the world is. I like being in a country where I don’t speak the language, I don’t know anybody, I don’t even know how to order breakfast. Every little thing you learn to do is a triumph.
You also out yourself in the first chapter of A Cook’s Tour. You – the meat-eating guy, the anti-vegetarian – confess to being squeamish and disturbed at the sight of a pig being slaughtered. I’m a city boy! I would pass out if I saw a cow being milked. I’ve been a cook and a chef my whole life, but meat was meat, it wasn’t an animal. I’d never seen a 300lb pig stabbed in the heart and spraying blood and struggling and wheezing for two solid minutes. That was pretty goddamn disturbing. I still don’t like it – I’m a product of my environment.
Is there anything you won’t eat on moral grounds? I’m not going to eat a live monkey brain out of a screaming monkey’s head. Because I don’t think it’s food.
Did you ever go somewhere where the food was just awful? I thought you were pretty kind to Scotland. Oh, I like Scotland. I love that. I could be in the chippy, eating deep-fried crap all day. If you’re not enjoying a deep-fried Mars bar, you’re just not drunk enough.
The Hospitality Association here recently proposed compulsory drug-testing for waiters and kitchen staff. What do you think of that? It’s a bad idea. This business attracts people who have drug and alcohol problems, who are dysfunctional, who are misfits. And it inspires, ultimately, people to reach their own personal crossroads and say, “Do I want to be good at this? Do I want to be the sort of person my colleagues can depend on?” It’s the last meritocracy.
Page 1 2 
