
Sometimes, that lack of reverence tumbles into a curious kind of disdain and the book becomes less an education than a warning. The result is an obsession with prime ingredients without any of the tiresome reverence that too often follows on behind. From his very first meeting with 'stinky runny cheeses that smelled like a dead man's feet' or his first oyster ('this glistening, vaguely sexual-looking object, still dripping and nearly alive') both while in France with his parents aged just nine, he grasped the true sensuousness of food and eating. Mind you, the heroin addiction probably had something to do with that.īut what really makes Bourdain's writing sing is his complete understanding that food is not a subject for aesthetes. He was never one of the generals with his daytime TV slot and his name stitched carefully across the breast of his whites. Although he is now an established figure in New York, executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles, a faux French joint serving up brasserie staples, for most of his career he was just a jobbing guy with his knives and his moves and his tricks with demi-glace who tumbled from kitchen to kitchen, rubbing shoulders as often with the Mob as with the suburban dentists turned ill-fated restaurateurs, on a picaresque adventure to put Don Quixote to shame. It is that litany of failure which distinguishes this book. Most of the restaurants where Bourdain served went bust. As a finale, they would recreate the napalm blast by emptying half a pint of brandy over the range so that it would ignite, sending a sheet of flame powering through the kitchen. In one sequence, Bourdain describes how he and his sous-chefs, strung out on a rich stew of dope, amphetamines and overwork, would re-enact the opening sequences of the movie Apocalypse Now as an overture to the evening service. Hell, these boys are even armed, with serious lengths of thrice-sharpened steel. They lurk not just in the language of 'crews' or 'brigades' that he forms about him in his kitchens, but in the total approach to the life that the working chef must lead.



The military metaphors are his, not mine.
