Another Cook’s Tour

I wish I had an edgy story to tell you about the first time I encountered Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.

But no, the book was not gifted to me by a desiccated old man staffing a weird, dusty curio shop – a shop that wasn’t there the day before and was gone the day after.

It was not wrapped in red and blue cloth, nestled inside a space craft that had crashed onto my backyard.

I did not find the book resting atop a plinth, bathed in mysterious light, after conquering both the labyrinth and the minotaur that patrolled it.

No.

My mum gave it to me.

She’d read about it in the insert of the weekend paper and thought it sounds like something I would dig.

At that point I was a dedicated kitchen beast. I’d gotten a job at a local pub (full disclosure: my mum also got me the job) washing dishes and, over time, had worked my way onto the line.

I’d survived the initial few weeks of extreme horror and intimidation, evolving to love the completely insane circus mosh-pit that was now my life. The chefs were an unholy troupe of foul-mouthed, tattooed miscreants who had an insatiable appetite for drugs, alcohol and bravado. The kitchen was like working inside a U-Boat. It was cramped, noisy and searingly hot. The air crackled with anticipation bordering on panic, and the pallid, hollow eyed crew screamed at each other incomprehensibly and constantly. It took me a while to see that beneath what appeared to be total bedlam was a well-oiled and sophisticated machine. A machine run by total lunatics, but well maintained nonetheless. Amongst the shouting and the fire and the smoke of service, the chefs danced around each other like hellish ballerinas with terrifyingly sharp knives and bad teeth and worse attitudes. Their work ethics were unparalleled, their dedication to their standards unwavering, and their ability to turn anything into an innuendo unstoppable.

They were terrifying, mesmerising and I loved them. I wanted to be them. And, after a few chefs went AWOL on drug benders and I was dragged terrified in front of a fryer to cover for them, I was one of them.

Then I opened Kitchen Confidential. I devoured it in one night. I read it again the next day. I was stunned to discover that the little U-Boat of crazies I called my kin were not alone. That our lives, our deeds, our bad behaviours and social disgraces were replicated across the world. With gusto and aplomb, no less. I showed the book to my chef and he began passing the book around at work like it was a religious artefact. We read it. Discussed it. We worshiped it. It wasn’t just a memoir, not just some dude telling a story, it was ALL our story, it was a document that legitimised our existence, an expose that ventured behind closed doors and shone a weird, new light on a world that I knew intimately but didn’t know anyone else did. It was a book written about us. For us. And, most importantly by one of us.

Tony wasn’t just a chronicler. He explored kitchen dwellers, their lives, their loves, their meanings and motivations with an anthropologist’s eye for meaning and the glee of a kid sneaking into the adult magazine section of a sleazy petrol station.

He exposed the weird underbelly, the absurd lives, exploits, rituals and adventures of those in the hospitality industry, and showed us that we had a culture all to our own – and not just the one growing in the hard to reach corners of the cool room.

The same way you would take a sinewy, gristly piece of beef shin and caress it into meltingly, ethereal Osso Bucco, Bourdain captured the brutal, relentless and unforgiving life of a cook and turned it into a poem.

There is power in representation and Bourdain reflected so many of my own key life experiences in his work of art. His first experience of an oyster mirrors mine. His directionless teen years void of ambition: me. Finding comradery and family in a hot room full of ne’er do wells and miscreants: me as well. Crucially, you weren’t being lectured by some Michelin starred dandy, saucing plates with an eye dropper. You knew Bourdain’s boots were as crud studded as his prose. And what writing it was – a beautiful amalgam of Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo ribaldry, CBGB bathroom graffiti and the colourful patois of a kitchen in full flight. It was joyous, harmonic and sing song but with an overzealously applied edge – it had a grainy, grimy, smear lovingly spread over it, not unlike the music of the Ramones, who he endlessly championed.

Here was someone, on the other side of the world, telling the stories of a “thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths” that eerily matched my own roster of fuck ups, screw heads, mad geniuses and other weird denizens. Anyone who has worked with a gifted, but difficult pastry chef has worked with ‘Adam Last Name Unknown’ – a literally creation and foil on par with Kerouac’s Neil Cassady.

More importantly his love for this menagerie of human refuse and debris oozed off the page. By loving us as we were and giving value to our hitherto thankless and unglamorous work, Bourdain gave us pride. He made every cook, dish pig and prep drone in every kitchen realise their work was noble and just. He gave is permission to walk tall even when our feet were on a low road.

He also changed the way we cooked for the public. He empowered us to push the prime cuts to the side of the menu and scratch the dishes of our childhood on the chalkboard. He changed the soul of the kitchens I worked in. Slow cuts appeared, and fad dishes vanished as me and my fellow chefs began channelling our grandparents as we coaxed magic out of scraggly bits and off-cuts. We joyfully dustbinned the Cajun blackened bullshit and mango fucking salsa that was everywhere then and re-introduced liver, kidneys and bubble and squeak. Do you like pork belly, shreds of duck meat slow cooked lamb filaments falling from the bone? Tony did that. He gave us the guts to put it on the menu.

We hear constantly from the great chefs of the world that the key to great cooking is to get your hands on phenomenal ingredients and have the skill and restraint to do as little as possible to them. Bourdain reminded us that real cooking happens when people have no choice but to find a way to make lesser ingredients shine. Great cooks transfer someone else’s garbage into gold – the squiggly refuse into magic – and this applies to the cooks around the world toiling in kitchens as well.

We read between the lines. We knew the recipe was just an allegory. if you can resurrect this cheap, tired cut of second grade beef, with ingenuity, patience and a hint of desperation you could do this with your life as well.

Bourdain wasn’t just telling us how to cook better, he was showing us how to live better, how to be better.

Bourdain was a goddamn oracle. He may as well have chiselled the words of his book onto stone tablets.

He was instantly our patriarch. The mad Chef/King.

Our North Star.

And then he became greater. He became Capital ‘I’ Important.

Bourdain left the confines of his sweaty kitchen, ventured out into the world and, despite the growing fame, accolades and fawning, remained resolutely and stubbornly One of Us.

And I loved him for that.

Bourdain devoured the world. He championed the humble food of the poor and downtrodden – the regular, workaday innovations and ingredients of regular people.

He valued wizened cooks from remote villages with the same sense of awe and reverence as the Manhattan chefs with stars next to their names. He talked to housewives, fishermen, cooks in shithole towns and chefs from every country you can imagine. Crucially, they were the star of the show. Bourdain never tried to make their food, their histories or their tales about him, he was just the conduit, the man with the resources to get their stories out.

Bourdain understood intrinsically that food, in its cultivation, preparation, transformation and dissemination, acts as an archive, a chronicle of our personal memories, cultural identities – an historical testimony – that history has been written by the passage of foodstuffs as much as by the passage of ink, that the human story is written in recipe books as much as it is in tomes of history.

Tony explored food as a metaphor for human bonding, joy, misery and struggle. He showed us how eating can be both a deep bow to tradition or a rebellious dismissal. Bourdain used people’s tastebuds to excavate their memories, venerated their cooking techniques as cultural performance and read their pantries like a map of human exploration and ingenuity.

The old adage goes ‘you are what you eat’ but Bourdain knew, and knew how to transmit and translate, that this idiom did not just apply on a crude nutritional or chemical level, but on a deep psychological and soulful one as well.

He changed the way we write about, prepare and consume food. He is this century’s biggest culinary icon. He is the spearhead. He is our generations Escoffier or Bocuse.

Bourdain was relentlessly curious, insatiable in appetite and determined to find the nutritious core of any situation. He should have died in an orgiastic explosion of pork fat, organ meat, demi glace and booze, not strung up by his dressing gown chord in a fucking hotel bathroom.

I can’t make sense of it.

Tony escaped The Life. He Got Out. He accomplished the secret fever dream of every grease-splattered, burnt-knuckle cook and kitchen worker. No matter where we cook, how much we love it and how far into our service we are, every kitchen rat, like a character on Hogan’s Heroes, spends an exorbitant amount of time simultaneously revelling in their predicament and hatching bizarre plans to escape it. Bourdain not only Got Out, but spectacularly so.

He somehow managed to escape the ridiculous grind of high volume bistro cooking, become a highly saturated celebrity and icon and never once leave us behind. He took all of us with him, every step of the way and always looked back at us with knowing and pride filled eyes.

He never stopped being one of us and we never forgot it.

Tony was living, breathing, profanity spewing proof that not only was there a freedom in being a cook, there was freedom to be had from it.

We were all following Tony into somewhere weird, wonderful, uncharted and unknown. Some fantasy el dorado where the average grunt could be a hero. What do you do when the head of the vanguard, the carrier of the torch we all followed like a swarm rapacious moths, suddenly snuffs out their light? What does a ship of fools do when the lighthouse blinks dark? Where do you turn the rudder? How do you know where the rocks are? Are there booby traps? Is this journey doomed?

What do you do when the guy leading the pack finds the way ahead doomed?

Maybe instead of El Dorado he founds something worse.

Maybe Tony was so busy keeping that light held high for all of us that he forgot to keep himself illuminated.

Like Ye Olde Mapps say, ‘There Be Monsters’, kids. They nibble away at the edges where the light meets the dark.

They got in and ate him whole.

I don’t know what to do and how to process this loss. A large chunk of who I am was moulded from his words and deeds. For now, I’ll light a candle, try to keep those monsters at bay, at least for a time. Give me some space to digest this.

Light a candle for Tony. Hopefully he will see it from wherever he went.

The chef has left the building