No Reservations

Continuing with our theme of chefs. One of the show I like watching is Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. Bourdain gained popularity from his New York Times bestselling book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

Bourdain is a smoker, drinker, and an opinionated jerk. Turns out 'chef culture' is really quite mean and psychotic-chefs are apparently very strange and full of idiosyncrasies. Just my kind of people! I like odd, bizarre characters, who may defy logic but are manically interesting.

The book is remarkable for its insistence in deglamorizing the professional culinary industry. The commercial kitchen is described as an intense, unpleasant and sometimes hazardous place of work staffed by what he describes as "misfits". Bourdain is absolutely insistent that this is no place for hobbyists. Anyone entering this industry will run away screaming, he insists, if they lack almost masochistic (perhaps irrational) dedication to cooking.

In Kitchen Confidential he writes:

"We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in [refrigerator] at every opportunity to 'conceptualize.' Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Pot, quaaludes, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, Seconal, Tuinal, speed, codeine and, increasingly, heroin, which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get."

Nice!