Another Down (What Has Gotten Into Me?)

During my recent computer woes, I took to reading to pass the quiet time ordinarily sucked up by my computer. This time it was Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw. El had brought the paperback to me when she first came to Ukraine last October. I had been reading the Geography Of Bliss that was discussed in a previous blog, but since then hadn't felt the urge to start another. Searching for something to do, I picked up the book. Of the handful of books I have ever read in my life, three of them were Anthony Bourdain books. I really enjoy his observational humor and his writing is a pretty easy read- making it easy for me to keep up. Of the books I had read, I remember liking Kitchen Confidential a lot. The stories about his life in kitchens and the anecdotes about working in such places. I liked it. The thing is that Bourdain wrote that book several years ago and has become quite the celebrity in the interim. This newest book was a more current recounting of people and things going on in his life today with some current retellings of events from his past. Without realizing it, I found myself saying, "really? I guess I just don't care how you feel about that subject (or those people)". A lot.
At one point his criticism hit close to home for me when he chastized people who take pictures of food in a restaurant and (worse, he says) take notes while they dine. Ironically, he then spends an entire chapter descibing a meal he ate at The French Laundry. It is really great and wonderful that he can write about having his meal comped at Le Bernardin or Per Se, but then making fun of people that do the same thing he does- write about their meal, seemed to speak directly to me. Of course, we do it for different reasons, he to get paid for a book, me so I never forget what exactly I dropped a boatload of money on. I know not everyone (or most people even) are interested in what I ate in some restaurant. I write this stuff for myself, and anyone who doesn't care can feel free to skip ahead in the story. I recently had a conversation about a photograph of our group eating at an outdoor restaurant. There were five of us sitting in a beautiful location, with a full table of food. I remarked that I have three kinds of friends: those who look at the photo and say, "that's beautiful, where was that taken?", those that say "who are all of those people in the photo?", and those that say "a Tatar restaurant, what's that on your plate?" From time to time, I run across an old journal of mine and I might say to El, remember when we ate at that noodle house in Beijing, or that ceviche place in Lima, or when we had that poutine in Quebec City? Those moments are precisely the reason I wrote the journals in the first place. And I am not embarrassed to take a photo (or notes for that matter) in a restaurant.
In a particularly moving chapter of the book, Bourdain describes the daily routine of the fish cutter at Le Bernardin Restaurant in NYC. He goes into painstaking detail to illustrate how the guy responsible for fileting and portioning out every day's fresh catch at arguably the best seafood restaurant in world, does his job. At the end of the chapter he also points out the cruel irony that almost any of the kitchen staff in the highest end restaurants cannot afford to eat in the places they work in. Then, Bourdain invites the fish guy to eat with him at Le Bernardin. It is a really sweet picture of a guy experiencing how the other half eats- enjoying for the first time the finished product of what he prepares. Well, I'd like to think of myself as another guy who shouldn't be able to eat in some of these haute cuisine restaurants that I enjoy so much. And if I lived my life differently, and spent my money on different things, I probably couldn't. But, this is what I like to do. We all have our priorities and I have zero regrets spending more than a weeks salary on a single lunch (on more than one occasion). This is what we, who do not get our meals comped need to save our money for. So that I can eat at Guy Savoy, or The French Laundry, or at Per Se. A funny anecdote: a few years back a friend of a friend was planning a trip to Prague. Our mutual friend emailed me to see if I had any suggestions for the city. I forwarded a link the site with my travel journals and the woman emailed me to thank me for the link, but admitted to reading my journal about El and my meal at Per Se before even glancing at the Prague journal. I had to laugh. We've all heard it said that some bands put out better music when they were on drugs...because once they emerge clean and sober with the new record, no one can understand why they think this is their best work to date- when clearly it isn't. Bourdain has had a bit of a rough past and recounted much of it in Kitchen Confidential. According to his own words, he was in a bad place for much of the time up to and including the writing of Kitchen Confidential. Now, he has cleaned himself up and writes about these problems in the past tense. Of course I don't want to see anyone sink back into a life of drugs and criminal behavior, but reading his current recollections of those times, seems a bit lame. I don't want to say he glorifies his drug use, or needs to apologize for it, but I guess it sounds like those days provided better stories than the ones he is coming up these days. During Kitchen Confidential he was living on hard times and now he describes those times like others might describe a movie. Seriously, it's like he is running out of stuff to write about. Frankly, I'd rather read more about the fish cutter at Le Bernardin, than any more stories of drunken stupors- that seem to be recalled with amazing clarity, I might add.
So, Mr. Bourdain, if your next book could be more like the stuff you wrote during your drug years, than this newer, less interesting book, that would be super. I liked you better the old way. Although I will continue to watch your television programs, I'll consider this tome to be the moment you "jumped the shark".