Cook's Tour by Anthony Bourdain

[bourdain]

Quote: from Bux on 3:58 pm on Dec. 27, 2001

An interesting aspect of the story is the number of situations where a major aspect of the gathering is to imbibe as much alcohol as humanly possible!

How are these stories related to the appreciation of food in those countries. I can well imagine a book devoted to drunken parties in the U.S. and I can imagine it being interesting, but I can't imagine the relationship to food. Or better yet, I can imagine a European coming over and making the rounds of sports bars in NY and then returning home to write a book about dining in NY, but perhaps I'm missing the point of the book.

You seem to have missed the point of the greater part of the history of dining, feasting and eating since Roman times. Alcohol--and lots of it--would appear to be a regular feature. One could--I guess--be rude to one's hosts in Russia, for instance--and decline the sixth or seventh--or tenth teary, sentimental toast.  One could, as well, decline tequila at a feast on a ranch in Mexico, refuse to "pour back" sake in Japan, turn up one's nose at the cloudy--probably lethal--rice moonshine offered by one's host at a duck farm in Vietnam--and there's no reason to stick with your Spanish pals on a typical; tapas crawl. After the morning glass of "marc", and French lunch rolls around: the  aperetif--and the white wine and the red wine, maybe a Tokay with dessert, one could, of course, decline the cognac. One could simply stay in one's hotel and order room service and bottled water. But then, why travel? I'm not suggesting lurching across the world in a Buckfast-fueled stupor--but it seems to me that local beverage--and local custom and practice--and the earnest generosity and goodwill of one's hosts--are as integral to the experience as the local food itself.

[Bux]

Missed the point or looking for the apreciation of a another level of food? I'm not sure the point of history is to be a defense for repeating history. Nevertheless, I haven't read the book and was merely responding to someone else's comments for more insight as to what I might get out of the book.

Every culture has varying ways to be sociable. There's a world of opportunity between the extremes of staying in one's room and ordering room service, and getting blotto with strangers. To some extent, after a certain amount of alcohol, there's little difference between the two. History is a matter of "been there, done that" as well as reading. Nevertheless I suspect many enjoyable books could be written about the middle ground as well as the two poles or behavior. You seem to present a narrow view in your post. I still wonder how illuminating the book might be.

[Andy Lynes]

Anthony - welcome to eGullet on behalf of the UK.

From a personal point of view, I always look forward to downing a good few glasses of wine etc with a meal. I sometimes think that I am all to eager to use food as an excuse for indulging my enthusiasm for alcohol. Then again, I am British after all.  

[mamster]

Bux--

First of all, the book is not simply a string of drunken misadventures.  Neither is it a compendium of wise cultural observations.  Bourdain eats a lot of good food and is sober enough to describe it to my satisfaction.

There have been an endless number of books written about the "middle ground" between going native and going Hilton.  My own travel writing--and yours, I think--is very much in this vein.  When I travel, I want to learn things I couldn't from the guidebook, but I'm not particularly wild and crazy even though I'll eat anything.  Calvin Trillin, Jeffrey Steingarten, and many others seem to fall into this same category.

For me, travel is largely about the food, and "adventure travel" books that don't go into detail about the meals bore me.  What is there for the food-obsessed reader who wants a little vicarious adventure?  There's Richard Sterling, who I disbelieve most of the time and whose main goal seems to be impressing the reader.  Then there's Bourdain's book, which avoids Sterling-style self-involvement by never straying far from the dinner table.  And I think the book is much weirder and less macho than one would gather from reading this topic.

As for the booze, I can recall one time that I've been in a cultural context where alcohol was being foisted on me endlessly.  It was the first time I went to London, and I had friends there who took me to a string of pubs.  I could have stopped drinking or gone home at any time, but pub culture was something I'd heard a lot about, and here was my opportunity to experience just a little slice.  It was something best experienced drunk, and there are other bits of the world best viewed through the same blurry lens.  I doubt I'd want to experience most of them, but if they involve great food, I certainly want to read about them.

[Lord Michael Lewis]

Anthony Bourdain's honesty is refreshing. His book(s) achieve EXACTLY what they set out to do. It's unlikely that many of us will get to eat in the places he visits. I veered from murderous jealousy of his soujourn in Japan to an pipe and slippers appreciation of home comforts whilst reading his depressing Cambodian tales.

Bux, if you don't get the alchohol thing then there's just no explaining it to you. Bourdain's just open about it. I'm sure the Jamie Olivers of this world get up to far worse than smoking some 'rocky in it's place of origin the difference is that they do it off camera so as not jepoardise their advertiser friendly profile.

Finally, Bourdain's fire over England is a bit curate's eggy I understand him entirely but he's completely wrong.

[Jinmyo]

Anthony Bourdain, if that is you: I've enjoyed Confidential so much I've passed it around to many friends. While that's like coming in at 7 and ordering a salad and some warm water in terms of filling your coffers, it's still a measure of my enjoyment.

Oh, yeah. Get Food Network Canada to run your new show. That'll be like someone coming in to use the washroom financially but, hey, when you gots to go...

[Bux]

mamster:  I think the book is much weirder and less macho than one would gather from reading this topic.

That's the sort of comment that might make me jump to pick up a copy and read it. Perhaps with some good luck, we'll get to see more that particular insight from the author here. Anyway, your comments both prepare me for the shortcomings and potential rewards of the book. LML also offers good reason to take a look at this, but I find the last sentence curious. I suppose one might have to be English to understand "curate's eggy," but to find the author is completely wrong in the one situation that's familiar and understood by the reader is to question the value of the parts where he's on unfamilar ground.

As for "getting the alcohol thing" or not, it's true that I don't drink as I used to for a number of reasons, but I think I still remember enough of not remembering the night before to get it. I've no doubt, as I noted earlier, that sort of journal can be a good read. What I doubted was that it would also offer a good description of the food as well as the sociability of the culture. These are not value judgements, just areas of interests.

[=Mark]

The Show "Cooks Tour" will be debuting next Tuesday night at 10:30pm Est on the Emeril/Flay network.  From what I've read of the book it has the potential of being fairly entertaining.

[Lesley C]

From what I've read in the book, it has the potential of being wildly entertaining.

I haven't laughed out loud at a book like this for a long time. I think this is a GREAT book. Good fun.

[jayrayner]

As this review appears in the Observer in about 48 hours time and as I think it's going to take a bit of a cut I thought I'd post the whole thing here. As ever with a review it's just one guy's opinion.

A Cook’s Tour

by Anthony Bourdain

Published by Bloomsbury, price £16.99

274pgs, hb.

In his latest book the New York chef Anthony Bourdain travels the world in search of the perfect meal, meets lots of interesting people and gets grotesquely drunk with them. As with any account of drunkenness in which you were not involved it can be terribly tedious. Around page 100, when he arrives in Morocco, there is finally cause for a deep sigh of a relief. At least here, in an Islamic country (however moderately Islamic it may be), the opportunities for hitting the bottle must be limited. No problem. Bourdain simply sends out a lackey to score some hashish for him and then gets monstrously stoned instead.    

It’s all a terrible disappointment. Bourdain’s previous book, Kitchen Confidential, was a remarkably assured and funky description of what life was like back stage in restaurant kitchens. His vivid, testosterone-sodden style, suited his subject matter. He was able to take on the role of spokesman for a  sub-culture not known for its articulacy. That book only stuttered and stumbled when, running out of material about the gonzo furies of kitchen living, he began writing about his life outside it. This book is almost entirely about his life outside it.

It might have worked were Bourdain himself not so terribly unconvinced about the project. In the introduction he announces simply ‘I needed something to do. I needed another idea for a book - preferably while I was still in good odour from the last one.’ Well yes, that is indeed how publishing works, but at least have the grace to finesse it a bit. Try to pretend that you want us to be interested, not that you are merely trying to fulfil a contractual obligation. He then compounds the insult by announcing, two pages later, that he agreed to have his entire travelogue  filmed by the US television’s Food Network in a deal which both publishers and TV people agreed would be good for sales, if not for the authenticity of the trip.

Or, as he himself puts it ‘I sold my ass. When I signed on the dotted line, any pretence of virginity or reluctance - of integrity (I don’t even remember what that is) - vanished.’ I know why I read beyond that line. I was being paid to do so. There is no good reason why any other reader should bother to do so. The rest of the book is punctuated by morose and thoroughly tedious diatribes about how awful it is being Anthony Bourdain and, especially, Anthony Bourdain being followed by a television crew. Maybe that’s why he felt the need to get so pissed.

The tragedy is that, buried here beneath the accounts of inebriation and self-hate and depression, there is some very good stuff. Bourdain understands, better than any chef need, that great meals are not about the food on the plate, or the service - although those things do matter - but about the moment. It is a curious alchemy of location and emotion and incident. His account of the slaughtering of a pig on a family farm where, pace John Berger, every scrap of the beast is used - intestine small and large, liver and heart, even the bladder which is inflated to make a child’s toy - is pungent and rich with the smell of the land on which it lived. Here he is happy and it shows in the prose. Likewise, hopping between stalls in Vietnam grazing on street food, he is at peace.

But for all the efforts he is willing to make in pursuit of the great meal - he goes into the Cambodian jungle and across the Moroccan deserts; he eats a geriatric iguana, the still beating heart of a Cobra and a sheep’s enormous, roasted testicle - he is actually happiest right back where he began, in top class restaurants. His most reverential, gilded praise is reserved for dinner at Arzak, the great Michelin ranked joint in Basque country, and for the 20 course affair he enjoyed at the French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley, which is now regarded as one of the very best restaurants in the world. ‘It was far and away, the most impressive restaurant meal I’d ever had,’ he says simply. Bourdain is a man with a hunger for hyperbole.

That said the French Laundry is not his favourite restaurant in the world. His favourite restaurant is not in Ho Chi Minh City or Phnom Penh. It is not in Fez or San Sebastian or San Francisco or Saint Petersburg. It is - pause for moment of National Pride - in London. Bourdain’s favourite restaurant, it transpires, is St. John, the nose to tail, offal-fixated, meat-eaters heaven no more than a five minute stroll from  the offices where this newspaper is produced. Now I like St. John. No I would go further than that. I love St. John. I think Fergus Henderson is a brilliant chef and his food, beautifully thought out. But I suppose I hoped that, having travelled the world, and eaten in some of the darkest most shadowed corners that it has to offer, Bourdain might have had something a little more exotic than that to offer as a top tip. Like so much of this book, it is a big let down.

ends

[Andy Lynes]

Jay - thanks for posting this.

I can't help admiring Bourdain for his candour. It would have been so easy for him to claim the trip was a dream of a lifetime, something he had always planned to do. Bourdian is Mr Cynical and we should expect him to tell it like it is.

I kind of like the fact that he crosses jungles to eat the beating heart of a snake, only to find that it's all so boring he just wants to get pissed.

Bearing in mind that this will be a TV series as well as a book, I find this a much more attractive proposition than say Jamie Oliver's "everything is fantastic and boootiful and my misses is up the duff and I'm so excited about everything, look at all the mates I've got, blimey misses,  the ideas are just tripping off my over-large tongue, you could use lemon, parsley, tarragon, rabbit droppings, sump oil" approach.

[Jinmyo]

Wow. Devestating review, Jay.

Having now read the book I can't say I'm disappointed. I knew I wouldn't enjoy it as much as Confidential because weird food in locales and contexts I'll never encounter are only remotely interesting to me because the chance that I can somehow use this in my cooking and dining is remote.

It was fun in the way that reading William Burroughs writing from within the Interzone of hash and just typing alot can be. Some nice lines, some grins. Put it down. Eh. So now it's time to start marinating the four giant shrimp in oil, cumin, chiles, and lime zest before grilling them with Shanghai bok choy.

(Edited by Jinmyo at 8:52 pm on Jan. 4, 2002)

[Bux]

Jay Rayner, My personal thanks. I enjoyed reading your review and am grateful that you posted it here. I'm curious about one thing. You say:

- he is actually happiest right back where he began, in top class restaurants.

Do you mean to say that his book begins with a meal in a first class restaurant or that there's an indication his career included work in top class restaurants?

[jayrayner]

Sorry if it's not clear. I simply mean that he's a restaurant chef. The introduction describes him deciding to leave the kitchen at Les Halles to make the trip. Should ahve made it clearer. Unfortunately it's now gone to bed for publication tomorrow.

Jay

[Bux]

Thanks for the clarification. It was important for me because I suspect many people assume he is speaking of the great, and often, French kitchens in New York when they read his work. His name alone, helps in that regard.

[Lord Michael Lewis]

Unsurpisingly, Rayner misses what Bourdain is all about. A middling chef cooped up for twenty years in commercial NY kitchens scores big, and suddenly editors and producers spread themselves before him offering as much he wants, to do whatever he wants. True to himself he doesn't shirk from doing exactly that.

This book has to be read a codicil to Kitchen Confidential, there are no glossy pages of dewy produce photos and smiling natives, because this is Anthony Bourdain's unique, personal, take on global cuisine. Important is his complete lack of pomposity, meaning that he never passes judgement on anyone least of all himself. This is no encyclopedia or work of reference, this is a book for those who enjoyed Kitchen Confidential. At no point does Bourdain presume to criticize, in fact he is smart enough never to step outside himself and pretend to be someone he isn't.

Pseuedo intellectual Londoners look out, this is journalism as Hemingway envisaged it, writer as reality filter.

I am put in mind to forward Bourdain Rayner's next Zionist romp for review, although Bourdain would certainly be kinder and gentler, less pompous, less superior and less of a know all in his treatment of this unknown's work.

[Blue Heron]

Has anyone read his novel 'Bone in the Throat'?  Any comments?  I just checked it out from the library thinking it would be a mystery combined with food...perfect, since I love mysteries.  However, after reading the jacket flap, it seems like more of a comedy, but an amazon review said it was a story of mob murder, dismemberment, and torture...ugh, sounds grisly.  Just not sure now if I still want to read it.  Is it a food mystery comedy horror novel?  Any recommendations or clarifications appreciated.  Thanks.

[Andy Lynes]

I loved "Bone...". It is part comedy, part crime thriller, set to a culinery backdrop with some cooking and seriously gruesome stuff. It does fall away a little towards the end in terms of plot , but is a great read, and will take little or no effort to finish. Recommended.

[Andy Lynes]

Bourdain has not struck me so far through his writing as "kind and gentle". I would imagine he would take great delight at ripping the #### out of any book forwarded to him for review. However, it does sound like an excellent idea. Jay, Anthony - can this be arranged?

[helenas]

Andy, your mistake here. At least, i know one very positive review (foreword) he wrote, and it was for my favorite dessert book "Just Desserts" by Ramsay.

And he uses there such words as sensitivity, delicacy  and gentleness...

you can find the foreword here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec....8008613

( i think only one paragraph is missing)

(Edited by helena sarin at 12:48 pm on Jan. 6, 2002)

[jayrayner]

just for accuracy's sake, Anthony could not review my 'next zionist romp' because my last book was not a zionist romp. It was about Jews in Britain which is a rather different thing. My next book - my first non-fiction -  is also not a zionist romp: it's about a plane that disappeared in the Andes in 1947.

[Bux]

LML, most of us will read a book, eat a meal, see a movie, etc. and report back through our perspective. I'm most suspicious of those who claim either an unbiased perspective or that they alone, "got it." I read your post and jayrayner's and have no trouble reconciling them to the same book.

"Suddenly editors and producers spread themselves before him offering as much he wants, to do whatever he wants. True to himself he doesn't shirk from doing exactly that" does not appear contradictory to the statement that "It might have worked were Bourdain himself not so terribly unconvinced about the project. In the introduction he announces simply ‘I needed something to do. I needed another idea for a book - preferably while I was still in good odour from the last one.’ Well yes, that is indeed how publishing works."

Having questioned jayraynor about the implication that Boudain's career led him through the kitchen of the finest restaurants and that Bourdain speaks for the restaurant world at large--the fact is that the media has let him do that unchallenged and we have to accept that perception--I find his review reasonable. I thank you for additional insight that would make Rayner's review more meaningful, but I have to question how much you are responding to this particular review and how much to some real or imagined unrelated past offense. It's all too easy for online posts to cross the line and appear as personal attacks even when unintentional. Lord knows, I've been guilty of offending without meaning to be offensive. I've offended friends and made friends out of those I've offended. However, Rayner's supposed "Zionist romps" are unknown to this reader and to the large body of members here as well as off topic. Such comments should be seen as irrational in regard to what's been posted here. I hope your political agenda leaves the board, before it also becomes a subject of debate here. I can think of no better way to undermine this site than for you or anyone else to pursue this.

[Lord Michael Lewis]

Bux, seeing as you know little or nothing of what is being discussed it may be a good idea if dismount from the moral heights of your horse and inform youself. Because until you have your comments are based on little more than thin air and pomposity.

[Jim Dixon]

Blue Heron,

I liked 'Bone' and Bourdain's follow-up, 'Going Bamboo' (at least I think that's the title...got Bamboo in there anyway).  Fulfilled my insatiable jones for crime fiction (note to James Lee Burke, Michael Dibdin, and ghost of Raymond Chandler: write faster) with nice tastes of food writing.

Haven't gotten around to 'Kitchen Confidential,' but one of my kids is reading 'Tour,' so I may pick that up when he's done.

Jim

ps....if you haven't read any of Dibdin's books with Italian detective Aurelio Zen, they also have good food descriptions along with great plot and characters.

[Andy Lynes]

Helena, thanks very much for putting me right. I based my posting soley on his first book and knew nothing of his reviewing activities. That'll teach me to judge a book by it's cover, or indeed what was written in it