The black leather jacket and earring are gone. On the cover of Anthony Bourdain's "Medium Raw," he is dressed in dark suit and tie, the tie a little loose around the neck, as if he is not quite at ease in it. Seated at a beaten-up wooden table strewn with carving implements, the former chef is testing the sharpness of a kitchen knife against his middle finger. Who, you wonder, will he stick the knife in this time?
The leather jacket and earring have been replaced by placed products; he flashes a Chase Platinum, no, Saphire, card. Everyone grows up eventually, I suppose. Bourdain has become trite.
"Medium Raw" mixes personal memoir with travelogues and ruminations on such matters as the degradation of the American hamburger, the dumbing down of the Food Network, the tedium of multicourse tasting menus and the rise of food gurus such as David Chang ("the most important chef in America today"), whose 12-seat restaurant Momofuku Ko on New York's Lower East Side requires you to log onto its website at precisely the right moment six days in advance to book a place.
Nothing is that important.
The author is still a bit of a kid himself, or at least a brat, like the one who shoots off his mouth in class, daring to say out loud what others may secretly have been thinking. He hates vegetarians, raw-food enthusiasts and celebrity chefs' product endorsements.
Is that a form of self-loathing? Or does he consider his own endorsement subtle enough to be refined and excused? Plu-eez.
The news last year about a deadly strain of E.coli in hamburgers sends Mr. Bourdain, an unabashed carnivore, into a paroxysm. The meat was sold by the food giant Cargill, "the largest private company in America. A hundred and sixteen billion dollars in revenue a year," he rails, yet the company tried to "save a few cents on their low-end burgers" by using meat scraps that had been treated with ammonia to kill bacteria. The words "meat" and "treated with ammonia," he says, should never appear in the same sentence "unless you're talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.
A very valid and accurate point. Vintage Bourdain. As is this:
Mr. Bourdain is a vivid, bawdy and often foul-mouthed writer. He thrills in the attack, but he is also an enthusiast who writes well about things he holds dear. His detailed reporting on the backroom lives of restaurant employees is terrific. One of the most moving parts of the book is a chapter on a Dominican, Justo Thomas, who has spent the past six years in a tiny room below the kitchen of Le Bernardin in New York, cleaning 700 pounds of fish a day and cutting it into perfectly uniform portions. Breaking rules of the trade, Mr. Bourdain takes him to lunch in the dining room, where Mr. Thomas for the first time gets to taste the fish he has prepared.
No one else does that.
"At the end of the day, would a good and useful criterion for evaluating a meal be 'Was it fun?' "
The end of the day? Ach, rescue me from clichés!
As a chef, Mr. Bourdain has never been on a par with his heroes, and he readily admits to possessing only "middling" kitchen skills. But he loves to cook and feels strongly that everyone should learn at least the basics. "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 a proper omelet in the morning."
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