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

by Anthony Bourdain

I believe Fergus has even been honored by the Queen—for his service to the Crown—which is also crazy, if you think about it, for a one-time architect who dropped out and started cooking bistro grub, soon after to specialize in the kind of country-ass stuff his grandmother used to cook.

But he is a hero. That he’s my hero is well documented. Since my first meal at St. John, when I flopped onto my knees in the kitchen, babbling something spectacularly idiotic but heartfelt, like “You RAWK!!!” (Fergus wasn’t even there that evening),

And the motherfucker can write. Oh, can he write.

As a writer, as a force for good, as a guy who upped the ante for anyone daring to write about food or simply looking for food to eat, he’s a hero.

That kind of talk will eventually make you unpopular. It’s very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

Regina Schrambling is both hero and villain. My favorite villain, actually. The former New York Times and LA Times food writer and blogger is easily the Angriest Person Writing About Food. Her weekly blog entries at gastropoda.com are a deeply felt, episodic unburdening, a venting of all her bitterness, rage, contempt, and disappointment with a world that never seems to live up to her expectations. She hates nearly everything—and everybody—and when she doesn’t, she hates herself for allowing such a thing to happen. She never lets an old injury, a long-ago slight, go. She proofreads her former employer, the New York Times, with an eye for detail—every typo, any evidence of further diminution of quality—and when she can latch on to something (as, let’s face it, she always can), she unleashes a withering torrent of ridicule and contempt.

emetic,

I were to walk into one of Mario Batali’s places, for instance, and see something unspeakable going on in the kitchen—animal sacrifice or satanic rituals, or something unhygienic or deeply disturbing, I’d never write about it.

As a writer, he has all God’s gifts: experience, knowledge of subject matter, a vocabulary—and the ability to put words together in entertaining and incisive fashion.

It implies someone slightly more odious than a twit, older and more substantial than a shithead, yet without the gravitas required to be called an asshole. So, maybe I got it wrong.

It says something about a person when you put chicken Caesar on the menu. You’ve crossed a line and you know it. It’s the chef version of sucking Ron Jeremy’s cock. If you do it late in your career, any notions of future stardom are usually pretty much out the window.

“I couldn’t get into auto mechanics,” he said later, at the bar across the street, a pint of beer in his hand, watching the dust motes float over the beer taps in the late-afternoon light. He fell into a vocational cooking class instead.

Perhaps now is the time to picture him, an imposingly tall, wide, barrel-chested guy, silver hoop earrings in both ears, multiple rings, the goatee, the tats.

He washed dishes, scrubbed pots, peeled potatoes, and did general scut work there for a year and a half before decamping for greener fields and more elevated social status at T.G.I. Friday’s in Tarrytown. “I started getting laid at Friday’s,” he said, by way of explanation.

sybaritic

The soufflé is fraught with peril.

In retrospect, he says now, Top Chef “looks a lot easier sittin’ on the couch with a joint in your mouth.”

As happens sometime on the show, someone who failed utterly was saved solely by the fact that someone else sucked worse.

“Look,” he says, “I love cooking food. I’m not pressing any culinary envelopes. I know that. There’s a few sick fuckers like us who were actually meant to do this.”

farting and belching like a medieval friar.

“Rage or fear … It oscillates. Rage I need to motivate me to try things that I can’t ordinarily do—as I’m a lazy man. Fear—to keep pushing harder so we don’t lose what we’ve accomplished.”

It was postmodern and contained my least favorite ingredient these days: irony.

Deep-fried shortribs (I ask you: Who the fuck wouldn’t love that?)

It is my theory that the fact that Chang attended Jesuit High School and then Trinity College, majoring in religion, is of vital significance to the emerging science of Changology.

“I’ve seen it,” Meehan says. “It’s there. But he doesn’t pursue it. His happiness is not a priority in his life. It’s an incidental benefit, but he’s not dead to it. Maybe, if someday he realizes that happiness can help him achieve his goals, he’ll give a shit about it.”

“I like fish,” says Justo without a trace of irony. “I eat a lot of fish.”

physiognomy

“I don’t want to get blood on the fish. I don’t play around. I work fast because I work relaxed. I got nothing else on my mind.”

His siblings tend to come to him for advice on important matters. His father, he says, taught him the lesson that one should “never let your family be afraid while you’re alive.”

Frightened people become angry people—as history teaches us again and again.

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.

And, naturally, I was angry with myself most of all (people like us always are, aren’t we? It’s a Lifetime movie almost anyone can star in)—for being forty-four years old and still one phone call, one paycheck away from eviction. For fucking up, pissing away, sabotaging my life in every possible way.

I don’t dislike Guy Fieri, I realized, after many viewings of his cooking shows, much soul-searching at my personal ashram, and many doses of prescription hypnotics.

tell people otherwise. It is, of course, ludicrous for me to be insulted on behalf of strangers who would probably find my outrage completely misplaced, embarrassing, and probably even deranged.

putative

It was a “transitional” phase in my career, meaning I was transitioning from heroin to crack,