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

by Anthony Bourdain

On the whole I have received better treatment in life than the average man and more loving kindness than I perhaps deserved. —FRANK HARRIS

The fact that people—strangers—seemed to love them, Emeril’s studio audience, for instance, clapping and hooting with every mention of gah-lic, only made me more hostile.

I despised their very likability, as it was a denial of the quality I’d always seen as our best and most distinguishing: our otherness.

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 have to admit, I grew to like this life—roaming the globe in search of nothing more than food and kicks.

I was also drunk on a new and exciting power to manipulate images and sound in order to tell stories, to make audiences feel about places I’d been the way I wanted them to feel.

I stopped working as a chef—a job whose daily routines had always been the only thing that stood between me and chaos.

Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket. So I stopped saying mean things about her. It’s that easy with me now. Really.

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.

Nice, huh? May as well have put a crack pipe in my hand right then. Why wait? Maybe this was why I never worked at the French Laundry.

Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything’s going okay… Then they shoot your fucking dog. So, maybe that’s why until I got my first dishwashing job, I had no respect for myself and no respect for anybody else. I should probably sue.

In this way, my life could easily have ended with a badly timed playing of Loggins and Messina.

impingent

And what of the seafood options? You are on your fucking own there, boyo.

The owner’s got ten or twelve of these bars and they all look the same and they all have names like Paddy McGee’s or Seamus O’Doul’s or Molly whatever—none of whom exist or ever existed. But I am happy here just the same.

The list of things I never learned to do well is still shocking, in retrospect.

There’s a gulf the size of an ocean between adequate and finesse. There is, as well, a big difference between good work habits (which I have) and the kind of discipline required of a cook at Robuchon.

These inevitably end up in the garbage—or handed over to a media escort. The white powders because I’m a recovered fucking addict—and the weed ‘cause all I need is one joint, angel dust-laced by some psycho, to put me on TMZ, running buck-naked down some Milwaukee street with a helmet made from the stretched skin of a butchered terrier pulled down over my ears.

Crunchberries and a Simpsons rerun. On the other hand, if you’re stuck heating up breakfast burritos at Chili’s—or dunking deep-fried macaroni at TGI McFuckwad’s? Maybe you need that joint.

Treating despair with drugs and alcohol is a time-honored tradition—I’d just advise you to assess honestly if it’s really as bad and as intractable a situation as you think. Not to belabor the point, but if you look around you at the people you work with, many of them are—or will eventually be—alcoholics and drug abusers. All I’m saying is you might ask yourself now and again if there’s anything else you wanted to do in your life.

They should know how to chop an onion. Basic knife skills should be a must.

Everyone should be able to make an omelet.

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.

Everyone should be able to roast a chicken. And they should be able to do it well.

Given the current woeful state of backyard grilling, a priority should be assigned to instructing people on the correct way to grill and rest a steak.

Cooking vegetables to a desired doneness is easy enough and reasonable to expect of any citizen of voting age. A standard vinaigrette is something anyone can and should be able to do.

The ability to shop for fresh produce and have at least some sense of what’s in season, to tell whether or not something is ripe or rotten might be acquired at the same time as one’s driving license.

How to recognize a fish that’s fresh and how to clean and filet it would seem a no-brainer as a basic survival skill...

Steaming a lobster or a crab—or a pot of mussels or clams—is something a fairly bright chimp could do without difficulty, so there’s no reason we all can’t. Every citizen should know how to throw a piece of meat in the oven with the expectation that they might roast it to somewhere in the neighborhood of desired doneness—and without a thermometer. One should be able to roas...

The fundamentals of braising would serve all who learn them well—as simply learning how to make a beef bourguignon opens the d...

What to do with bones (namely, make stock) and how to make a few soups—as a means of making efficient use of leftovers—is a lesson in frugality many will very possibly have to learn at some point in their live...

Everyone should be encouraged at every turn to develop their own modest yet unique repertoire—to find a few dishes they love and practice at preparin...

People will continue to pay for quality. They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit.

It ain’t a counterculture, however, unless you’re “against” something. And the first thing to go, I hope, will be bullshit.

I often feel this way when alone in Southeast Asian hotel bars—an enhanced sense of bathos, an ironic dry-smile sorrow, a sharpened sense of distance and loss.

weltschmerz-loaded

Nobody among them remembers the war. They weren’t even alive for it. Much like our post-World War II baby boom, they must have gone straight home from the battlefield and done an awful lot of fuckin’ around here. Everyone—everyone, it seems—is young and either on the way to eat, returning from eating, or eating at this very minute, absolutely choking the sidewalks on low plastic stools, filling the open-to-the-street shop houses, slurping noodles or nibbling on delicious-looking bits, drinking bia hoi, the fresh beer of Hanoi, with varying degrees of joy and seriousness of intent.

Tiny electric-red slices of chili peppers, crunchy sprouts, Thai basil, roughly yanked cilantro, mint, green banana slices, wedges of lime everywhere. Everywhere.

If you’re in a car, you’re fucked for any of this. Most neighborhoods have no room for your spaceship to touch down.

Some things never get old. Some things are just … classic. You never lose appreciation for them. Your enthusiasm may wax and wane ever so slightly, but you always come back. Whether it’s the Rolling Stones’ “Let It Bleed” or doing it doggie-style, good is simply … good. There may be other things in life, but you can pretty much spend eternity considering the matter of the former—or latter—and you’d be hard-pressed to improve on either of them.

Sitting here, choosing words, letter by letter, on the keyboard with the explicit intention of telling you about something I did or something I ate and making you as hungry and miserable as I can—surely that’s wrong. But fuck it. Who doesn’t like a good wank now and then?

This is indeed one king-hell, motherfucker of a burger—one that would be seriously difficult to top in a blind taste-off of “experts.”

If anything, all that relative sobriety pointed up a basic emptiness and dissatisfaction in my life, a hole I’d managed to fill with various chemicals for the better part of twenty-five years.

Whatever else, she’s never going to look for validation from some predatory asshole. She can—and surely will—hang out with tons of assholes. Dads, I’m assured, can never hope to control that. All I can hope for is that she hangs out with assholes for her own reasons—that she is genuinely amused by assholes rather than needing them to make her feel better about herself.

Introduced by a shockingly lazy and credulous Leslie Stahl as the “Mother of Slow Food” (a provably false assertion that thirty seconds of Googling would have put to rest), St. Alice of Berkeley was depicted floating ethereally above the fray as she grazed through an expensive greenmarket, pontificating dreamily about the joys of local produce and sustainable, socially conscientious eating.

And if she’s not a chef … well then, who is she? And why is she allowed to annoy me? Why do I listen to her? Why do I care?

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!

Who cares if she knows the Heimlich maneuver? Did Gandhi know the Heimlich maneuver? Does Bono?