Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

by Anthony Bourdain

And if twenty-eight years in the restaurant business had taught me anything at all, it was that if things look good today, they will most assuredly turn to shit tomorrow.

I ended up with a show titled, like the book, A Cook’s Tour. Something that necessarily and despite our best efforts quickly evolved into a sort of gonzo-travelogue of vérité footage and thrown together voice-overs. I had assumed my involvement with television would last no longer than the time it took me to write the book. And yet, amazingly enough, the show was picked up for a second season. Even more incredibly, the network, from the beginning, let me do pretty much whatever the fuck I wanted—allowing me to take the show anywhere I pleased, smoke on camera, curse as I needed—and, even more remarkably, along with the camera people/field producers, whom I became increasingly close to over many miles and many months of traveling together—tell stories any way I cared to, making, as it turned out, pretty good television.

I turned to find myself staring into the face of Sandra Lee. Ordinarily by now, a woman’s hand up my back, Ottavia would have been across the table with a flying tomahawk chop to the top of the skull—or a vicious elbow to the thorax—followed immediately by a left-right combination and a side kick to the jaw as her victim was on the way to the floor. But no. Such are the strange and terrible powers of television’s Queen of Semi-Homemade that we, both of us, stood there like hypnotized chickens. The fact that Sandra was standing next to New York’s attorney general—and likely next governor—Andrew Cuomo (her boyfriend), added, I thought, an implied menace. “You’ve been a bad boy,” Sandra was saying, perhaps referring to casual comments I may or may not have made, in which I may have suggested she was the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.” The words “pure evil” might have come up as well. It is alleged that the words “war crimes” might also have been used by me—in reference to some of Sandra’s more notorious offerings, like her “Kwanzaa Cake.” Right now, I have no contemporaneous recollection of those comments. Nor do I have any recollection of how I responded to the feel of Sandra’s icy, predatory claws working their way up my spine and around my hips—like some terrifying alien mandibles, probing for a soft spot before plunging deep into the soft goo of my kidneys or liver. Looking back, I imagine myself doing that Ralph Kramden thing: “Homina homina homina…” Act...

this is sexual assault tbh

There is no debating that it’s “better” to cook at home whenever—and as often as—possible. It’s cheaper, for sure. It’s almost always healthier than what you might otherwise be ordering as takeout—or eating at a restaurant. And it is provably better for society. We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m interested in whether we should cook as a moral imperative—as something that every boy and girl should be taught to do in school and woe to him or her who can’t.

But I do think the idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

Everyone should be able to make an omelet. Egg cookery is as good a beginning as any, as it’s the first meal of the day, and because the process of learning to make an omelet is, I believe, not just a technique but a builder of character. One learns, necessarily, to be gentle when acquiring omelet skills: a certain measure of sensitivity is needed to discern what’s going on in your pan—and what to do about it. I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make them a proper omelet in the morning. Surely that kind of civility and selflessness would be both good manners and good for the world. Perhaps omelet skills should be learned at the same time you learn to fuck. Perhaps there should be an unspoken agreement that in the event of loss of virginity, the more experienced of the partners should, afterward, make the other an omelet—passing along the skill at an important and presumably memorable moment.

BREAKFAST WOOOOOO

“I may have money to pay for this white truffle fettuccine,” one imagined them to say, “but fuck me if I’m paying for the restaurant to buy that flower arrangement over there!”

If there’s a new and lasting credo from the Big Shakeout, it’s this: People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit. The new financial imperatives—accompanied, perhaps, by some small sense that ostentatiously throwing a lot of money around unnecessarily might not be cool right now—dovetailed perfectly with the rising hipness of the more casual Momofuku and L’Atelier fine-dining models (which had been around for some time), as well as other, more mysterious forces, long simmering under the surface and just now bubbling to the top to be acknowledged and identified.

Will anybody give a fuck about the Versaces of the restaurant business ten years from now?

And Dubai, which briefly presented itself as the new Valhalla for chefs, has revealed itself as the mostly empty, half-built construction site it always was. It is remarkable that the geniuses of high finance are still unable to see what any small-business owner would immediately have recognized: they’ve been building a lot of structures out there—and selling a lot of land. But nobody has actually moved in yet. And, by the way, it’s a fucking desert. So, it’s doubtful that Dubai can be counted on to be handing free money over to chefs anymore… Chefs and restaurateurs will have to go back to their original business model: sell people food they like and make money doing it.

For that kind of money, one can afford to do a lot of drinking at home.

that's the spirit!!!!

But fuck it. Who doesn’t like a good wank now and then?

But now it’s all about ass. You got the last six of them and you’re pretty pleased with yourself about that.

lmao

You don’t know what he’s griping about to the chef—who’s heard it all before—but you suspect that he’s complaining that the lone gaijin in the room got the last pieces of ass. You buy him a sake.

Sichuan hotpot is where you find out some very dark things about yourself. You look around at the others in the crowded, painfully bright dining room in Chengdu, wiping the backs of their necks with cold napkins, their faces red and contorted with pain. Some of them hold their stomachs. But they plow on, as you do, dipping chopsticks loaded with organ meats, fish balls, and vegetables into the giant woks of dark, sinister-looking oil. It’s like that Victorian brothel in London you’ve read about, the one that had a spanking machine—could paddle forty customers at a time.

I believe that the great American hamburger is a thing of beauty, its simple charms noble, pristine. The basic recipe—ground beef, salt, and pepper, formed into a patty, grilled or seared on a griddle, then nestled between two halves of a bun, usually but not necessarily accompanied by lettuce, a tomato slice, and some ketchup—is, to my mind, un-improvable by man or God. A good burger can be made more complicated, even more interesting by the addition of other ingredients—like good cheese, or bacon … relish perhaps, but it will never be made better.

We are not, however, designed to eat shit—or fecal coli-form bacteria, as it’s slightly more obliquely referred to after an outbreak.

If you are literally serving shit to American children, or knowingly spinning a wheel where it is not unlikely that you will eventually serve shit—if that’s your business model? Then I got no problems with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I’ll hold the spoon.

Regular pizza may be on the endangered list, “artisanal” pizza having already ghettoized the utility slice. Even the cupcake has become a boutique item … and the humble sausage is now the hottest single food item in New York City. Order a Heineken in Portland or San Francisco—or just about anywhere, these days—and be prepared to be sneered at by some locavore beer-nerd, all too happy to tell you about some hoppy, malty, microbrewed concoction, redolent of strawberries and patchouli, that they’re making in a cellar nearby. Unless, of course, you opt for post-ironic retro—in which case, that “silo” of PBR will come with a cover charge and an asphyxiating miasma of hipness.

There was a time at which this would make me feel personally attacked, but no longer.

“Look how nice and thin that Miley Cyrus is” are not words that shall leave my lips, as such notions might drive a young girl to bulimia, bad boyfriends, and, eventually, crystal meth.

There is nothing cool about “used to be cool.” All of this, I think, is only right and appropriate. Too much respect for your elders is, historically, almost always a bad thing. I want my daughter to love me. I don’t necessarily want her to share my taste for Irish ale or Hawaiian bud.

Here, the true stewards of the earth are neither chefs nor grandmothers nor slow-food devotees. They’re the Naples-based fraternal organization, the Camorra. And the old man growing olives in his backyard in Chianti probably doesn’t make a living selling olive oil. He gets by renting his house to Germans.

More to the point, what if I’m one of the vast numbers of working poor, getting by in the service sector? What should I do? How can I afford that? Asked this very question directly, Alice advises blithely that one should “Make a sacrifice on the cell phone or a third pair of Nike shoes.” It’s an unfortunate choice of words. And a telling one, I think. You know, those poor people—always with their Nikes and their cell phones. If only they’d listen to Alice. She’d lead them to the promised land for sure.

Just because the counterculture, the “revolution,” all those ’60s hopes and dreams were corrupted, co-opted, and eventually crushed by the overpowering weight and impermeability of “the system”—as we should have known they always would be—that doesn’t mean it wasn’t, at least for a while, sometimes, a beautiful thing, right? Something got better for all that, right? I can’t think now what, exactly, but I’m sure the world improved in some way in spite of all the nonsense and self-indulgence. In spite of the way things turned out.

What makes Alice Waters such a compelling character is her infectious enthusiasm for pleasure. She’s made lust, greed, hunger, self-gratification, and fetishism look good. When Alice shows you a bunch of radishes, you fucking want them. Where have those radishes been all my life? I need them!

I stood silently in the rear, trying not to start blubbering like a fucking baby. It was like the end of Pride of the Yankees (and I do start weeping when I see that shit).

lol

There’s been no sign since, by the way, that Ducasse has gotten much smarter. Other than having the wisdom to close ADNY. After initial reviews of a new “brasserie” concept were negative, he suggested publicly that New Yorkers were unfamiliar with this kind of food and that it was up to critics to educate them to the complexities of exotica like blanquette de veau and choucroute. Which came as news, I’m sure, to the many, many distinguished French chefs who’d been doing exactly that—to great acclaim—for decades. For being an arrogant fuckwit who nearly ruined it for all of us, Alain Ducasse is a villain.

The lazy and the foolish compare him to Hemingway—which is a terrible injustice, as Jim is both a better writer and a better man.

What he came up with was a soufflé only in the most liberal interpretation of the word. It did come in a soufflé mold—intended, I could only guess, as an airier version of cornbread or corn pudding. But like a dog trying to cover its shit with leaves or dirt, Erik had literally piled on every trick—or trope—in the faux-Mex, Southwestern cookbook. The plate looked like the last shot of a bukakke video—filmed at Chili’s. There was some kind of awful avocado jiz squirted all over the plate. Some other squeeze-bottled madness … and, worst of all, the “soufflé” itself had been buried under a fried garnish either crushing the fucking thing or ineptly concealing the fact that it had never risen in the first place.

dying

Throughout the entire process of his elevation to Culinary Godhead, Chang has continued, in his public life, to curse uncontrollably like a Tourette’s-afflicted Marine, rage injudiciously at and about his enemies, deny special treatment to those in the food-writing community who are used to such things, insult the very food bloggers who helped build his legend—and generally conduct himself as someone who’s just woken up to find himself holding a winning lottery ticket. If there was a David Chang catchphrase written on T-shirts, it would be “Dude! I don’t fuckin’ know!”—his best explanation for what’s happening.

“I mean … Larry Bird was a terrible coach.”

he weren't that bad

The famous French mantra of “Use Everything,” by which most chefs live, is not the operative phrase of a three-starred Michelin restaurant. Here, it’s “Use Only the Very Best.”

make sure that no part of the animal is wasted like dengler sez

It’s a central irony of fine dining that, unlike the waiters who serve their food, the cooks are very rarely able to afford to eat what they have spent years learning to make. They are usually not welcome, in any case. They don’t have the clothes for it. Many, if not most, expensive restaurants specifically prohibit their employees from coming as customers—at any time. The reasoning is part practical and part, one suspects, aesthetic. One doesn’t want a bunch of loud, badly dressed cooks laughing and talking in an overfamiliar way with the bartender while trying to maintain an atmosphere of sophistication—of romantic illusion. There is also the temptation to slip freebies to people one works with every day. From the point of view of any sensible restaurateur or manager, it’s generally believed to be a bad thing. Once you let employees start drinking in their own place of work—even on their days off—you’ve unleashed the dogs of war. No good can come of it.

“Delicious,” says Justo, closing his eyes. “It’s like … a dream. I don’t want to wake up.”

WE CANNOT HAVE CAPITALISM WHEN IT MEANS COOKS CAN ONLY EAT WHAT THEY PREPARE DUE TO CELEBRITY CHEF INTERVENTION

“I think in life, they give too much to some people and nothing to everybody else,” he shrugs without bitterness. “Without work we are nothing.” We linger over chocolate pot de crème and mascarpone creams and pistachio mousse. Not visibly affected by the generous pourings of wine, Justo orders an espresso. Sits back in his chair, pleased. “I got a good job. A good family. I live in peace.”

i think i gonna cry

cocaine and stopped smoking crack—like everybody tells you to, right? And yet there I was, still broke and still frightened and in a deep financial hole I knew I would never climb out of. And I was angry about that. Very angry. I was angry with my wife—very angry, a long-festering and deep-seated resentment that year after year after year she didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t work. Strong, smart as hell, with a college degree from a Seven Sisters school, solid white-collar experience, and she’d long ago just … stopped looking. In nearly two decades, after a promising start, nothing but a couple of short-term, part-time gigs stocking books and sorting in-house mail for near-minimum wage. It made no sense to me and I resented it bitterly. To be fair, it consumed me out of all proportion, with the kind of smoldering, barely repressed passive-aggressive anger that poisons everything around it. And that, sure as shit, didn’t help the situation. Waking up and going to sleep with this basic fact— and the way I then handled that resentment—was contaminating everything. I just couldn’t get past it. I didn’t get past it. And I made things worse—far worse—in all the drearily predictable ways. Underscore that sentence.

this all rings uncomfortably true

No. I instinctively liked and respected anyone who cooked or served food in a restaurant and took any kind of satisfaction in the job. Still feel that way. It is the finest and noblest of toil, performed by only the very best of people. Okay. I am genuinely angry—still—at vegetarians. That’s not shtick. Not angry at them personally, mind you—but in principle. A shocking number of vegetarians and even vegans have come to my readings, surprised me with an occasional sense of humor, refrained from hurling animal blood at me—even befriended me. I have even knowingly had sex with one, truth be told. But what I’ve seen of the world in the past nine years has, if anything, made me angrier at anyone not a Hindu who insists on turning their nose up at a friendly offer of meat. I don’t care what you do in your home, but the idea of a vegetarian traveler in comfortable shoes waving away the hospitality—the distillation of a lifetime of training and experience—of, say, a Vietnamese pho vendor (or Italian mother-in-law, for that matter) fills me with spluttering indignation. No principle is, to my mind, worth that; no Western concept of “is it a pet or is it meat” excuses that kind of rudeness. I often talk about the “Grandma rule” for travelers. You may not like Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked

and dry—and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblet you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it’s Grandma’s turkey. And you are in Grandma’s house. So shut the fuck up and eat it. And afterward, say, “Thank you, Grandma, why, yes, yes of course I’d love seconds.”

I would have preferred that Steve Irwin, “Crocodile Hunter”—regardless of his saintly conservationist prattle—had ended up as “Crocodile Chow.” That would have been some rough but entirely appropriate justice. In my opinion, the loud, irritating little fuck was in the business of disturbing, poking, tormenting, and generally annoying animals, who would have surely been far happier had they never met him. And if Bindi Irwin lived in my neighborhood, by the way, I would have called Child Protective Services on her parents years ago.

The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it.