More Nasty Bits from Anthony Bourdain
Dave Weich, Powells.com
Since his first full-length interview at Powells.com, Anthony Bourdain has published "a rude, unpretentious, utilitarian — and hopefully entertaining — field manual to classic French bistro cooking," a crime novel, and now The Nasty Bits, a book of previously uncollected essays. 
And all the while he's been globetrotting from the Kalahari to Quebec, documenting culinary culture for the Travel Channel.
During a recent Oregon stopover, Bourdain returned to discuss culture shock, maple bacon donuts, how to read restaurant menus, and more.
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"Fantastic: as lip-smackingly seductive as a bowl of fat chips and aioli." Daily Telegraph (UK)"[Writes] the kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages." USA Today
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"The best book I have ever read about the nuts and bolts mechanics of running serious restaurant kitchens...brilliant on the tumult of running a kitchen that might turn out anywhere from two hundred to four hundred serious meals a night." Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard
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"Bourdain shows himself to be one of the country's best food writers. His opinions are as strong as his language, and his tastes as infectious as his joy." New York Times Book Review
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"A thrillingly alive, somewhat out of control, mad, swirling bacchanalia of a book....No one (except maybe the great Ms. Fisher or Elizabeth David) writes about food like this ? food as love, as passion, as life." Adrienne Miller, Esquire
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"With a few short, sharp strokes, [Bourdain] delineates fully fleshed, deeply flawed, powerfully sympathetic characters....The chef wields his pen with the same murderously winning flair as he does his knives." Kirkus Reviews
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"A prodigiously self-assured first novel...the author's comic vision goes beyond original. It is deliciously depraved." The New York Times Book Review
Dave: When last we spoke, you were here to promote A
Cook's Tour, your first travel book. I asked about the destinations you chose,
and you said, "I was looking for places where my enthusiastic ignorance might
prove a plus on occasion." Now that you've been doing t.v. for five years, how
has that changed?
Anthony Bourdain: I've found the virtues of actually knowing where
I'm going. Frequently, when I arrive in a place, I've been there before or I
know people there. As the show airs all over the world and the books are translated
elsewhere, the list of my acquaintances has grown, particularly among chefs.
But there's still a lot to be said for showing up ignorant and enthusiastic,
for learning on the ground. That feels good. Indonesia is the most recent example.
Every day that you're forced to learn, even simple things, to feed yourself,
to find cigarettes, to get around; overcoming discomfort, the language barrier,
a sense of shyness, intimidation, unfamiliarity... The first day you can go out
and get yourself breakfast without help, that's a small triumph.
Dave: Do you still experience culture shock?
Bourdain: It's not like I feel culture shock. No, okay, I have a clear
example. I spent some time with the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. That was
real culture shock.
They're tiny. They don't grow anything. They don't raise anything. They hunt
and gather. They don't even have feathers on their bows; that's how primitive
it is. They have to get within thirty feet or so of their prey, shoot it with
little poison arrows, track this beast for up to two days, often at high speed.
They sit there and talk to the animal for hours as the poison takes effect,
apologizing for taking its life. And then they eat it. All of it. They don't
store food. If they have a lot of meat, they eat a lot of meat. If they have
no food, they don't eat.
They sleep outdoors. They don't even really hang out with other tribes. Each
group of Bushmen is an immediate family, and they marry within that family —
no brothers and sisters, but anything beyond that is okay.
Their cooking skills are dubious. I don't think I ate a single mouthful of
food the entire time with them that didn't have either sand, fur, or shit in
it. Really. They cook the beast... they scoop it out and throw it in the fire,
fur and all.
That was culture shock.
Dave: The Nasty
Bits is dedicated to three of the Ramones. Have you listened to Marky Ramone's
show on Sirius radio?
Bourdain: I haven't heard the radio show, but one of my many pinch-me
moments was in New York when I got a phone call from the restaurant saying Marky
Ramone had seen me on the earlier series wearing a Ramones t-shirt. He's a bit
of an amateur gourmet, or at least an enthusiastic eater, apparently. He asked
if he could come to dinner with some friends and hang out. So I spent an evening
talking with him.
My passion for the Ramones is enormous. If there was a great moment in my
personal musical history, it was when I saw the Ramones for the first time at
CBGB. This must have been 1975.
As has been pointed out — now that they're all dead except for Marky
— music was so bad then. Everyone noodling away on guitars, country rock,
easy listening music... if I heard "One Way Out" by the Allman Brothers
one more time I was going to take my own life. So to see three chords, no pause
between songs, nice simple lyrics about... nothing really. Aggression, violence
— that's what rock and roll should be about. It was a moment of Thank
God, there's music in my life again.
Dave: In The Nasty
Bits, you asked Gabrielle Hamilton, "How has kitchen culture changed since
you got into the business?" How would you answer the same question? How have
things changed since you wrote Kitchen
Confidential?
Bourdain: I travel all over the world, and invariably, whether I'm
on book tour or making a show, I end up hanging out at a bar at three o'clock
in the morning with the local chefs and cooks, so I'm pretty tuned in to what's
going on. I think Gabrielle's answer was right on the money. The glamorization
of chefs has been very good for the business and probably very good for diners
and customers, too.
Back when I started, there was no hope for any of us. There was no expectation
of any kind of prestige being attached to what we did, no hope that we would
have financial security or any kind of success. It was a job you did between
other jobs or because you were so dysfunctional that it was the one workplace
that would have you.
Now there is real hope. There is real prestige. People are willingly coming
into the profession wanting to better themselves, and that might well happen
given the current environment. There is real pride in the kitchen now for the
first time, certainly in the West, in this country. Where spitting in the soup
might have been thought of as funny, acceptable, and even an appropriate response
to a troublesome customer back in 1974, now that would be seen as a total betrayal
of your coworkers, your chef, and your craft.
The same kind of people are attracted to the business as have always been.
Certainly they are sensualists and like to feel good, but snorting cocaine in
the kitchen, that's looked down on now. So food is better. Expectations have
grown in the kitchen, and cooks feel a greater sense of pride and hope.
Dave: What exactly makes a sushi dinner at Masa worth $350?
Bourdain: And it's a deal at that. He pays $300 a pound, himself, for
tuna. It's the most pristine, buttery, lovely, unearthly good fish you've ever
dreamed of. Whatever the best stuff in the world is, at whatever price, that's
what he pays, that's what he gets. Prepared simply by a complete master: the
rice perfect, the wasabi the freshest and of the highest quality, the seaweed
toasted by Masa himself, every order made by him.
It's just perfection, the most pornographic meal I've ever had in my life.
Dave: You were in Powell's just a few minutes tonight and already you're
lugging around a few books from our Mystery section. Who are your favorite writers
these days?
Bourdain: I've been reading the Alan
Furst espionage novels. That kind of oblique, moral gray area really appeals
to me, especially with an accurate historical background.
I like crime novels where the dialogue
and the characters are sharply drawn, where I can smell the room. I think the
perfect crime novel is The
Friends of Eddie Coyle, which I reread every couple years. Favorites? Daniel
Woodrell. He owns the Ozarks the way George
V. Higgins owns Boston, the way early Ellroy
nailed L.A. or Pelecanos
Washington D.C. I like that, when I writer draws a territory so perfectly that
you know they come from there.
Dave: When I go to an unfamiliar bookstore, I usually check to see
if they have books by Donald
Antrim or Aimee Bender.
They're not popular enough that every store stocks them, but they're good enough
that stores should. Approaching a restaurant, do you look for similar cues when
you walk in?
Bourdain: I look for someplace that's the best at what they do, whether
it's the roast duck guy in a back street in Taipei or the vendor with the best
fish taco in Mexico, a place with a lot of locals stacked up waiting to get
in.
If you're talking about a place where I just walk in cold off the street,
I like to have a sense that someone is talking to me, in much the same way as
reading fiction, in fact. I want a sense of who's talking.
You can tell a lot from a menu. Certain menu items will pique my interest
right away. Offal of any kind. If they're confident enough in their abilities
to highlight things like liver and sweetbreads, or pork belly, I'm already interested.
If they have something quirky or interesting like duck's tongues or chicken
feet, or some really old school French or Asian or American dish, for that matter, I want to know more. You don't see that every day.
Or somebody who's clearly telling you from a small menu, "I'm really good
at fish in this style." A menu that's all over the place — they've got
teriyaki chicken, spaghetti and meatballs, a sushi section — how good can
they be at all of those things? So, tight focus, a sense that the kitchen has
an identity they're expressing, a certain confidence. I'm wary of fusion. If
it's a long, elaborate description of a menu item, if it takes longer to read
it than it does to eat the damn thing, I'm losing interest. Pretentious menus,
I'm already halfway out the door.
Dave: How often do you cook these days?
Bourdain: Almost never. I travel all of the time. When I'm back in
New York, it's pretty much kick back with a beer and call out for pizza.
Dave: Your life has radically changed in the last six years. What might
you be doing six years from now?
Bourdain: I just want to keep doing what I'm doing.
Not giving a shit has turned out be a great business model for me. I never
would have written Kitchen
Confidential had I believed that it would sell or that anyone would
read it. Had I known that so many people in so many different countries would
read it, I would have been intimidated. I don't know that I could have written
the book.
I was smart enough after that came out to realize what was working, which
was not trying to ask myself those questions, like what people want. Winging
it has worked out really well for me. As opportunities present themselves, if
they're interesting to me... It's a quality of life issue. Will it be fun? Is
it going to be a waste of my time? Those are the questions I ask.
Dave: What is on the horizon?
Bourdain: I'm just going to keep making this
t.v. show. I have the best job in the world. Who gets to do what I do? I
sit in front of a map and say, "Wow, Laos sounds cool. I want to go there and
make a forty-two-minute independent film about it with my friends."
We're like a traveling band, and then we go back to New York and play in the
editing room and set it to some cool music, make it look like early Robert
Rodriguez or an early Antonioni
film. And then we go to another cool country that I heard about in a barroom
conversation or read about in a book or saw in a movie.
It's an incredible gift. I'd be foolish to do anything else. I'll keep doing
it as long as they let me. I'll write a book a year as long as I have something
to say.
End of the rainbow, I'm looking to do a big book about living in Asia. When
they cancel the show someday, I hope to live principally in Vietnam and perhaps
some time in other parts of Southeast Asia, and write about that experience.
I hope to write well and at length about it.
Dave: You've riffed on Apocalypse
Now and Fear
and Loathing. Do you have another target out there?
Bourdain: I'd love to do a riff on Get
Carter, the original British version.
A lot of those style cues come when we're on location. We'll be someplace
and think, Let's rip off the opening scene from Sexy
Beast. Or Vienna: Got to do The
Third Man. Need some zither music! It's boys with toys, and we've
seen too many movies.
Dave: What are some underrated eating destinations around the world?
Bourdain: Barcelona.
San Sebastian in Spain. Singapore. Kuala
Lumpur. Those are wonderlands.
Singapore
is the perfect place to slide into Asia slowly. It's Asia-light. Everybody speaks
English. The infrastructure is super modern. There's no crime. It's very clean.
And yet it is bursting with this incredible mix of Malay, Indian, and Chinese
permutation cuisines, much of it readily available at hawker stands, street
stands, cheap, accessible. And anyone in Singapore would be all too happy to
tell you which is the best place to go. That's really a Mecca for foodies, especially
if you're interested in Asia.
Dave: What about in America?
Bourdain: I would think Portland
and Seattle.
They come to mind first, on the basis of the incredible cook scene. The chefs
and cooks are really jacked up. They're ambitious and proud with very high standards
and strong ideas about what they want to do. And of course the ingredients are
amazing here.
L.A.:
overrated. San
Francisco: a great food city, the cradle of the revolution. New
York: obviously the best. Chicago:
coming up very, very strong. I don't want to pick on New
Orleans. We'll see what happens, but I'm not a big Creole food fan. I think
it's kind of limited. I don't think anyone ran with it in an interesting way.
Dave: Tell me about the episode of No
Reservations that you filmed here with Chuck
Palahniuk.
Bourdain: We were inspired by his book on Portland [Fugitives
and Refugees]. I was looking at the book, running down things, thinking,
We should do this and this and this. And I thought, rather than just
rip off all these ideas, why don't we just call him up and see if he'll show
us around?
He did, and he was great. He jumped right in. He brought us to Velveteria,
the black velvet painting museum, which is awesome; Movie
Madness for the bizarre film props and the incredible selection of cult
DVDs; to the novelty store where he buys his severed limbs and novelties for
readings; and to the amazing Voodoo
Doughnut. Is there anything better than a maple bacon donut? I don't think
so.
Anthony Bourdain visited Powell's City of Books
on June 14, 2006.
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