The foundational gag of the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink—the McGuffin that moves the movie—is the “wrestling picture,” a made-up, preposterous genre that the audience is asked to believe was the cornerstone of every golden age Hollywood studio.
As genres go, “chef memoir” carries about the same level of plausibility. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, who cares how a cook got his first knife roll? Yet Anthony Bourdain made it real, and Kitchen Confidential is its Iliad.
To found a genre is no small thing for a literary man. Writers far greater than Bourdain haven’t managed it. Bourdain did it without even trying, and on his first try, no less.
Not to imply that he was a bad writer. To the contrary, he was very good—too good for his own good and, more importantly, for the good of others. The central irony of Anthony Bourdain is that he was a good writer and a bad chef, and his good writing made other cooks worse at the same time that it made food better.
I’ll explain.
But first let’s get this out of the way: Kitchen Confidential is a fantastic book. It deserves all its accolades, just as Bourdain earned its success. It’s rip-roaringly entertaining, picaresque yet with a real beginning, middle, and end, like Don Quixote or Huck Finn, and it takes you behind locked doors, inside forbidden sanctuaries. If that sounds like a grandiose way to describe a commercial kitchen, Bourdain shows why it isn’t. The success of the book—and of the cooking shows that it inspired and created an audience for—attest to the inherent fascination of the line, which outsiders didn’t know they cared about until Bourdain explained to them why they should.
The problems with Kitchen Confidential are twofold, and related. First, though it is billed as nonfiction, some non-trivial portion of the book must be made up. I am willing to believe that a great deal of criminal debauchery debased 1970s and ’80s professional kitchens, and even to savor some harmless, humorous exaggeration. But Bourdain too often takes the joke too far. A bride, on her wedding day, getting shagged behind the line, by a line cook, while out front her groom and in-laws slurp away at the soup none-the-wiser? Gun-running out of the bathroom?
Before Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain had tried his hand at fiction (twice, in fact). His novels sank without a trace, as most do, but one suspects that he never got over fiction’s infectious freedom. Still, to Bourdain’s (partial) credit, in an afterword written six years after Kitchen Confidential’s initial publication, he reveals himself to have been an unreliable narrator. He retraced a few of his steps, reconnected with old colleagues and found that at least some of what he recounted hadn’t happened exactly as written.
But he doesn’t take back any of the worst of it, which points to the second problem. Kitchen Confidential’s tales of debauchery—true and false—were taken by a large portion of aspiring cooks as a how-to guide. That, at any rate, is my unscientific impression from hanging around the fringes of this world from the mid-aughts to the early-teens, when Bourdain was still a demi-god on the line. He and I both noticed, and noted, that the demographics of cheffing were trending up the socio-economic ladder. The louts, drunks, stoners, bums, ex-cons and working-class grinds of Bourdain’s early years on the line were being replaced by middle and upper-middle class boys and girls from good homes, with good educations—Ivy League degrees, even—which some of them happily chucked into the compost bin in their rush to get on the line. But I also noticed a lot of young dudes (they were all dudes) who thought that the raison d’être of the line was to chain smoke, snort coke, booze up, shoot up, and chase waitresses just like Tony. I assume Bourdain noticed that, too, but if so, he didn’t write it down. The career prospects for those kids—already dimmed by a level of competition Bourdain never had to face—were not helped by their conscious emulation of his tales.
Nor did Bourdain’s own career serve as the cautionary tale it should have. Above, I called him a “bad chef,” which requires clarification. “Chef” is not synonymous with “cook.” Chef is a loanword from the French that literally means “chief.” A chef is a leader, a conceptualizer, a menu planner, a taster, a quality control officer, the boss.
I actually frequented Bourdain’s old restaurant, Les Halles (not that I knew at the time he was back there on the line, and in any case this was before Kitchen Confidential, before he became a somebody). To me Les Halles was just a place to eat conveniently located seven blocks from my apartment, fine for what it was—a “steak-frites joint” in Bourdain’s own words—but inferior, actually, to a bistro across the street. Which was much smaller and often full, whereas Les Halles’ cavernous space always had an empty table. Workmanlike is the best way to describe the Bourdain-helmed Les Halles. Executive chef, at age 40, at a steak-frites joint is not exactly a high peak to a cooking career. It wasn’t even back then (2000) and it certainly isn’t now, with our vastly more complex, exciting and ambitious restaurant scene. Neither Les Halles nor Anthony Bourdain contributed anything lasting or new to the food world or got even into the upper half of the Manhattan restaurant statusphere.
Bourdain may not have been a good chef—he was the first to admit it—but he was a good cook, who might have become a good chef had he not frittered away so much of his talent in booze, drugs and fornication.
But not all of it. Bourdain’s real talent was simmering there all along, dormant, waiting for a crack in the pastry crust to escape. Everyone knows the moonshot story about how he launched his second career with a spec manuscript sent to The New Yorker, so I won’t retell it but will instead skip to the moral: This will not happen for you. Whoever you are. It was a fluke even for him, and you’re almost certainly not as good as he was.
All those aspiring bad-boy chefs with Tony’s tat on their left arms would do well to internalize the fact that they’re not going to get Bourdain’s second act and so stop trying to relive his first. Instead, they ought to bear down, show up on time, stage in the hardest kitchens that will have them, and work the line as if their careers and happiness depend on it, which they do. Young cooks today—unlike when Bourdain started—have chosen a profession whose success pyramid is as tall, steep and ruthless as the NBA’s. For every spot on the line at or near the capstone—your own three-star, chef de cuisine at someone else’s, a cooking show—there are 10,000, no, 100,000 at the base. And the sides of that pyramid are treacherous and slippery. Reaching even the middle and remaining there is an accomplishment that requires focus and dedication.
As for the genre that Bourdain founded, we can’t blame him for this, I suppose, but his success prompted too many under-seasoned imitators to try to retell his same chefs-behaving-badly story with younger characters, like a reboot. When Bourdain did it, it was a breakthrough; now it’s just a bore.
But Bourdain also inspired other writer-chefs to bring to light new cuisines, ingredients, locales, personalities and angles. Reading the good ones, one is reminded of Miss Jean Brodie’s witticism that “for those who like that sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they will like.” I like them. A lot of others do, too. Only one of these books—Bill Buford’s Heat—has so far managed to surpass the master. We wouldn’t have that book, or many others, without Bourdain, for which we should be grateful.
We should also be grateful for what Bourdain did for food, and here is to be found his real legacy. I hesitated before using that noun made shopworn by politics to describe a reality TV star, but could find no other that would do. The food world today is as rich, complex, rewarding and exciting as it’s ever been. Bourdain was not the cause, but he was undoubtedly a catalyst. His writings, his travels, his insistence on trying everything, his illumination of hitherto unknown corners of the pantry and the walk-in helped to immeasurably expand the food world’s horizons. Bourdain was like a culinary bee, circumnavigating the globe, pollinating infinite flowers.
There is in the food world today more audacious experimentation going on, more creative melding of disparate ingredients, different cuisines and traditions, than ever. We should enjoy this while we can, before it all gets banned as “cultural appropriation.”
Anthony Bourdain was a man of the Left, to be sure. But I am confident that, for this particular leftist enthusiasm, he had no patience. The world in its variety and wonder fascinated and enchanted him. He wanted to taste the best of everything, wherever it was from. He wanted you to, as well. And he helped make that possible.
RIP.
