A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

by Anthony Bourdain

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

Portugal was the beginning, where I began to notice the things that were missing from the average American dining experience. The large groups of people who ate together. The family element. The seemingly casual cruelty that comes with living close to your food.

(oysters should not, by the way – contrary to conventional wisdom in the States – be buried in ice for hours and served chilled to frigid temperatures; it may make opening them easier for the shucker, but it diminishes the flavor).

But you can never be ten years old again – or even truly feel like ten years old. Not for an hour, not for a minute. This trip, so far, had been bittersweet at best.

I hadn’t, I realized, returned to France, to this beach, my old town, for the oysters. It wasn’t the fish soup, or the saucisson, or the pain raisin. It wasn’t to see a house in which strangers now lived, or to climb a dune, or to find a perfect meal. I’d come to find my father. And he wasn’t there.

Step one, demonstrated Zamir, is the toast. To others present, to your parents, to your country – anything will do. Hold a full shot of vodka in one hand and food – bread is easiest – in the other hand. Exhale. Inhale slowly. Knock back your entire shot in one gulp, immediately inverting your glass over the table to allow the microscopic last drop to fall out, proving you’re not a wuss or a reactionary revanchist Trotskyite provocateur. Then take a bite of food. If you don’t have any food, a long, lingering sniff of your wrist or cuff will do. (I know it sounds strange, but trust me.) Repeat the procedure up to three times every twenty minutes throughout the drinking period. This is about as fast as your system can absorb all that alcohol. If you follow this regimen carefully, you can and will retain a state of verticality throughout the entire meal and into the postmeal drinking.

There are no southpaws in Islam. You don’t use your left at the table. You never extend it in greeting. You don’t reach with it. You never, ever use it to grab food off the family-style platters of food. You don’t eat with it. I was really worried about this. It’s enough, one would think, learning to eat hot, often liquidy food with one’s fingers – but only one hand?

To waste even bread is a sin. A dropped piece of bread found on the street is often retrieved by a devout Muslim and left by the entryway to a mosque, as to leave food lying about like trash would be an offense to God.

‘And the night shall be filled with music,/And the cares, that infest the day,/Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs/And as silently steal away.’

There, one can spend a few days in quiet reflection, soaking in onsen (hot springs), enjoying the healthy benefits of a massage, perhaps taking in a little musical entertainment, and dining on kaiseki, the most refined, sophisticated style of eating in Japan.

An outgrowth of the tea ceremony, kaiseki is the national version of haute cuisine, an experience designed to appeal to all the senses, and one’s spirit, in equal proportion, as well as one’s sense of history and location – a complete yin/yang workup.

Don’t point your chopsticks at anyone else. Do not allow the soles of your feet to be exposed to anyone else. Do not step on the wooden dividers between mats. Never leave your chopsticks sticking straight up out of your food.

When drinking soup or tea, it’s one hand under, palm up, the other cradling around from the side. If it’s a soup with chunks, hold your chopsticks thus, and lift the bowl to your lips to sip from it. Do not drown your sushi in soy sauce; to leave granules of rice floating in your dipping sauce is the height of bad taste and brutishness. When your geisha pours you sake (hot sake with cold food; cold sake with hot), wash your cup after drinking and pour her some into the same receptacle. That was not a finger bowl. Wash for dinner. Really wash. Dress appropriately.

small metal waste container with a hinged lid and padlock stood next to the cutting board. The chef removed a key from a chain and gravely unlocked it. The toxic parts – every toxic part – of the fugu, he explained, must, by law, be disposed of like medical waste, segregated and secure at all times. He trimmed away any remaining skin, a few parts around the gills, some tiny, innocuous-looking dark spots on the flesh, then soaked the clean white meat repeatedly in cold water. The liver, I have to say, was lovely: creamy café au lait-colored, engorged-looking, with a foie-gras consistency. It looked appetizing, like monkfish liver.

What is love? Love is eating twenty-four ounces of raw fish at four o’clock in the morning.

These are the end products of the Masterminds of Safety and Ethics, bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn’t really oil, overcooked gray disks of what might once upon a time have been meat, a steady diet of Ho-Hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless light beer. A docile, uncomprehending herd, led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.

Turkeys drown, sometimes, looking straight up into the rain, forgetting to close their mouths (kind of like Bon Jovi fans).

He’d written two other books, The Making of a Chef and The Soul of a Chef,

‘Perfect is something you never actually attain,’ he said. ‘It’s something you search for. Once you reach it, it’s not perfect. You’ve lost it. It’s gone.’