Whether you want to admit it or not, Anthony Bourdain has left an irreplaceable spot in cooking literature, if there is such a genre. The success of his debut, Kitchen Confidential was unprecedented for anybody who had written books on cooking who didn’t write recipes, or extended food criticism. It is autobiographical and it was the better for it. Who can forget the seeds of Bourdain’s ambition to be a chef, when as a teenager he saw his head chef boinking a freshly married bride in the kitchen alley?
Medium Raw is still off the vein of its predecessor. Each chapter stands on its own and barely sync save for its reference to food. It is a collection of Bourdain’s essays about anything and everything he has gripes about or things that he feels strongly about. And his opinions are loud and strong — calling out chefs and food critics as either heroes or villains. But in the end of the day they are just one man’s opinions, though he justifies why Jamie Oliver is a hero and Alain Ducasse is a villain.
The food industry is a fickle industry at times and Bourdain is not there to provide a level-headed opinion on how things should be, but he certainly has his views on how things should be run. His advice to young chefs is a kick in the ass reality check: you’re probably not going to make it if you’re too old, lazy or educated. Only the crazy ones somehow will keep going, spending fourteen hours a day standing in a fiery kitchen, constantly barraged by returned orders and waitstaff seldom on your side, so why start a career in the kitchen? Culinary education from reputable school it seems, is not a substitute for working your backside off almost for free. Man, cooking is tough.
The names that Bourdain write about are household names and if they’re not, he tells you why you should know about them. He wrote about Dave Chang in this book before Chang was a media personality and it is a compelling read. I loved reading about Justo Thomas, the head of Le Bernardine in New York who only sharpens his knife once a week so that he can still feel the fish bones with the sharpness of the knife. Having too sharp a knife, you won’t feel the nuance of a soft bone in a fish fillet. Every fish is different and in preparing the fish, he does the job of three people.
But there is the overarching question of really, what should restaurants be? Are restaurants and haute cuisine really for the elites who don’t know any better and eat terrible food anyway, and willing to pay exorbitant amounts for burned fish (read his chapter “The Rich Eat Differently Than You or Me”). But asking these questions allows Bourdain’s own self-introspection as he asks himself “Am I selling out?” Chefs are always under pressure to keep their restaurants fresh, popular, holding to their talents before they open their own restaurants that it’s sometimes silly not to take the extra money on the table. Besides, who are we to judge?
Bourdain offers a unique voice in non-fiction. He is eloquent, well-read to the point that he can borrow from the repertoire of classic literature to explain his analogies on food and he doesn’t shy away from name-shaming. Writing about food is hard (as he said, how many times can you write about pork-belly before you come back to the word “unctuous”?) and as an amateur Google Maps reviewer I recognise this. How many times can you describe the coffee “solid”, you tend to sound like a wanker towards the end. But Bourdain’s books are always wholesome, and though it’s not fine dining like you might pick up Faulkner, it’s still easy to digest and packs a flavour.
