Making the Chef

Anthony Bourdain

As you read this blog, you'll constantly see me referring to Tony Bourdain. So who is this guy?



It's simple. He's the cook's cook.

His first book that I read was called Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Part autobiography, part expose, he wrote the definitive modern culinary memoir. From his first taste of an oyster to his advice on what to order in a restaurant - never order fish on a Monday (to which I'll add never order a fish based soup or chowder) - he wrote with the brash swagger of the modern cook that hooked me from the moment I read it.

He has other books. Some non-fiction: A Cook's Tour (a non-fiction cuilnary travel memoir) and Typhoid Mary (a history of the said lady who was, of course, a cook) and some fiction: Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo, and The Bobby Gold Stories. But in the end it all comes back to Kitchen Confidential.

A reviewer once called him a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen. Very appropriate

I think about Bourdain and I find myself laughing because some of the topics he talks about in his books are topics that I want to blog about. Not a word for word transcription, but I've found myself walking down the same paths, noticing the same things, and find myself thinking the exact same things. The fact that I want to be a cook, not a chef. That I'm developing the hands of a cook. That there are things that you just don't want to know about that go on in a kitchen. I'm in good company.

I once met him at his restaurant, Les Halles, in NYC. I was in town for a business trip and I was sitting at the bar, reading a book that he had reviewed for the New York Times. He was sitting at a table near the bar, waiting for some friends to come in for dinner, and, getting bored of waiting, he came up to the bar to have a smoke. We had a short conversation and he commented on the fact that I was reading a book he had reviewed (only about half as dorky as it would have been to have been reading one of his own books). All I really remember is that I was about halfway from being a total idiot with him. After all, I had recently finished Kitchen Confidential and I was developing my plan to go to culinary school. I was a bit starstruck.

More bluntly, I was about as idiotic as a teenage groupie.

Tony, if you ever happen to read this and remember meeting a young, tongue-tied guy who was reading The Making of a Chef and eating the charcutierie appetizer, please, laugh at my expense.

posted by LindyChef @ 9:59 PM