The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

by Anthony Bourdain

It's easy, so easy, to dismiss Flay's whole Vegas enterprise with a New York sneer. It certainly does no serious restaurant much help in the gravitas department to locate in the Mega-Coliseum of Uber-Kitsch, Caesars Palace, among the Italianate statuary, the staff in togas, the gurgling fountains and Celine Dion gift shop. Flay's mug looks down on diners and punters alike from a giant JumboTron over the slots—in a continuous loop of clips from his television shows.

Why shouldn't the masses have access to fine food? he argued. Why shouldn't they be invited to the same table we—New Yorkers and San Franciscans and world travelers—see as almost a birthright? Isn't that a great chef's ultimate responsibility, to change things for the better? To seduce, coerce, and induce people to eat better, try new things, experience joy, even enlightenment?

And then there's sushi, and the sushi bar. To say that chefs have always been well disposed toward sushi and sashimi would be an understatement. No single development in Western gastronomy has changed our lives as drastically or as well as that first moment when Americans and English-speaking restaurantgoers decided they could let go of their instinctive wariness of raw fish—that sashimi and sushi were cool and desirable and worth paying for. From a marketing standpoint, the spread of sushi lifted all boats for all chefs. Now that there was always a Japanese chef willing to pay twice the going rate for quality seafood, standards shot through the roof. And more importantly, the choices of ingredients we could reliably expect to sell our customers expanded. Customers willing to eat eel, sea urchin, belly tuna, and monkfish liver meant that French and Italian and American chefs could now offer the neglected, nearly forgotten traditional items once almost impossible to sneak onto our menus; we were now free to serve the oily, bony, squiggly, and delicious delights like octopus, mackerel, rouget, and fresh sardines that we had always loved—and that had always been essential parts of our various "mother" cuisines. Just as importantly, chefs liked to eat sushi. It was a flavor spectrum markedly different from what we were elbow deep in all our working days. Freshness and quality were immediately apparent—just look in the display—and gratifyingly devoid of disguise or extravagant ...

Rule Three: When you find a crummy bar clogged with locals who seem to be enjoying themselves, go in, sit down, and start drinking. Be sure to buy a few rounds for your fellow drinkers. At the appropriate moment, inquire of the best places to eat, emphasizing your criteria to go where no tourists have gone before. "Where do you eat?" is a good starting point. If you hear the same name twice, take note.

Sometimes, if you want the very best, you really do have to be the sort of person who can shrug off five hundred bucks for your dinner. Sometimes, a very high price tag does indeed translate directly into quality. Masa Takayama's tiny, thirteen-seat sushi bar-restaurant on the fourth floor of the unimpressive-looking shopping arcade at New York City's new Time Warner building is perhaps the best example of this principle.

Writing incessantly about food is like writing porn. How many adjectives can there be before you repeat yourself? How many times can you write variations on the tale of the lonely housewife, temporarily short of funds, and the horny but hunky delivery boy who's not averse to negotiating for that pizza? How many times can you describe a fucking salad without using the word "crisp"? So it's always a pleasure when I'm given the opportunity to write about something that doesn't involve food or chefs. I do have other interests. Crime is one of them.