It’s been a decade since the publication of “Kitchen Confidential,” the Anthony Bourdain book that blew the lid off the roiling contents of the restaurant world to the endless fascination of diners, cooks and aspiring chefs. In the intervening years, Bourdain left the kitchen, contemplated suicide, wrote several more books, hosted a couple TV shows, stopped wearing his earring, moved to the Upper East Side, divorced, remarried and fathered a baby girl — though not necessarily in that order.
Oh, yes, and he’s continued to mouth off about the restaurant industry, much to the chagrin of those caught in the crosshairs of his new memoir, out Tuesday, “Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook.”
“It was cathartic to write,” says Bourdain, 53, of the book’s “Heroes and Villains” chapter, which calls out various industry notables, as he sips a Harpoon Leviathan beer at the zinc bar of Café d’Alsace, a neighborhood bistro on the Upper East Side. “I’m a person who’s passionate in both my dislikes and my likes.”
Among his victims this go-’round: food critics (notably John Mariani of Esquire and Alan Richman of GQ), celebrity chefs (Wolfgang Puck, Alain Ducasse, etc.) and, once more, Food Network personalities like Guy Fieri (though he’s softened on the subject of Emeril Lagasse).
While Rachael Ray famously endeared herself to Bourdain by sending him a fruit basket (“I’m a cheap date in that regard,” he says), review copies of “Medium Raw” had barely started making the rounds before Mariani and Richman began firing back.
“He is a living, breathing low blow. That’s all he does. He lives it, exults in it, profits from it,” fumed Richman to the blog Fork in the Road. Bourdain honored him with a full chapter, entitled “Alan Richman Is a Douchebag.”
Bourdain has been taunting Richman with this infantile invective for quite some time now, supposedly for kicking the New Orleans restaurant scene in the shins post-Katrina and for taking celeb chefs to task for not sweating behind the stoves. In retaliation, Richman penned a scathing review of Les Halles, the bistro Bourdain is still loosely affiliated with. (Like so many worthy enemies, the pair would appear to have much in common to the casual observer, in this case a knack for brash, sometimes brutal criticism.)
Bourdain, for his part, remains unrepentant: “I’ve been getting a lot of high-fives lately from people who still have reputations and businesses to protect. I don’t, so I have the luxury of being obnoxious.”
And then there is “Semi-Homemade” queen Sandra Lee, who Bourdain once described as the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.” In “Medium Raw,” he recalls encountering Lee and her gubernatorial-hopeful boyfriend Andrew Cuomo at a party — her “icy, predatory claws working their way up my spine and around my hips — like some terrifying alien mandibles.”
What will he do if she becomes the first lady of New York and they start serving “Kwanzaa Cake” sprinkled with corn nuts at Albany functions?
“It’s worrying, let me tell you,” he laughs. “Plus, I’ll probably vote for the bastard! In fact, I inevitably will.”
Of course it’s not all slings and arrows. Bourdain champions those he believes in, notably David Chang, who he describes in the book as “the most important chef in America today” (though he notes Chang is “not a great chef — as he’d be the first to admit”).
And he says he’s proudest of the chapter that tells the tale of Justo Thomas, the hard-working, highly skilled Dominican fish butcher at Le Bernardin. Bourdain takes Thomas to lunch — at his own restaurant — for the first time. “Very few cooks ever get to eat at their own restaurant,” he says, adding, “That felt good.”
Though his critics contend that he’s devolved into a caricature of himself, “Medium Raw” can be more thoughtful than the lobs being hurled across the blogosphere let on. While the already infamous “Heroes & Villains” chapter has all the high-mindedness of a junior-high slam book, his conflicted musings can be insightful if not exactly subtle.
In discussing the designer burger trend, he writes, “When and if the good guys win, will we — after terrifying consumers about our food supply, fetishizing expensive ingredients, exploiting the hopes, aspirations and insecurities of the middle class — have simply made it more expensive to eat the same old crap?”
Like any good cartoon, there is moral ambiguity to this vengeful tale. In Bourdain’s verbal battle between good and evil, the angel and the devil are incessantly whispering in each ear.
Still, he understands that a certain degree of venom is expected of him. “Who would want to see the Stones if they didn’t play ‘Jumping Jack Flash’?” he muses. “It would be disrespectful of the audience for them not to. ‘I’m sorry, we’re only going to play from our new album.’ ”
Despite or perhaps because of his detractors, the cult of Bourdain is still strong. He books about 40 speaking engagements a year, and during our hour-long chat no fewer than three 20-something fans approach him for a photo. (“You’re my inspiration,” gushes a young man from Indonesia.)
It’s not hard to see why: “Kitchen Confidential” helped launch the gonzo chef phenomenon (cooks as sex symbols, “I eat crazy s – – t” one-upmanship) and a whole genre of bad-boy chef memoirs, and presaged the rise of behind-the-scenes, industry-driven restaurant blogs such as Eater.
“When I wrote ‘Kitchen Confidential’ I was still standing in the kitchen at Les Halles next to the fry station,” he recalls. “A lot has happened to me in the last 10 years and a lot has happened to the restaurant business.”
For Bourdain that includes a more sophisticated dining public and, in turn, more hopeful kitchens: “I think the business still attracts a lot of marginal personalities, but at the same time it’s attracting a lot of smart kids with other options. That’s a real change.”
He says that the hijinks he experienced working in restaurants in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s and wrote about in “Kitchen Confidential” are far from the reality of today: “It’s much more professional. Snorting coke during the service period or even after work would be frowned on in most kitchens I’m aware of.”
The public is now hip to the shenanigans. “The chefs know that [the diners] know now.”
And he no longer warns against feasting on questionably fresh seafood, now urging readers to “eat the f – – king fish on Monday already.” (“Yeah, it’s been 10 years, for god’s sake,” he says. Apparently the state of the walk-in has improved.)
So, is there anything not to love about the current state of NYC dining, no dark secrets lurking behind the swinging doors?
“I don’t see any trends out there that aren’t good or interesting. These are good times,” he responds diplomatically.
Even cupcake trucks, which he denounced at a talk last year with David Chang?
“I can live with cupcakes. I buy cupcakes. My daughter loves cupcakes. It’s not the cupcakes I have a problem with — it’s cupcake mania. It’s only a f – – king cupcake. And I have a secret guilty pleasure: red velvet cupcakes. I do like those. Red velvet anything. If there was a red velvet mini-cupcake truck outside my house I’d be sneaking there with a bag over my head,” he laughs.
“Nothing’s more delicious than hypocrisy.”
In the end, the devil always gets his due.
carla.spartos@nypost.com
Choice cuts
An amuse bouche from Bourdain’s “Medium Raw”
On asia de cuba owner Jeffrey Chodorow
Sneering at Chodorow is like making a mean crack about film director Brett Ratner if you’re a budding film critic. It immediately asserts one’s bona fide as a serious observer. (See his latest bizarro pastiche, a jumbo-size attempt to straddle the Asian fusion, sushi and izakaya markets. The jokes write themselves.)
On chicken caesar salads
It says something about a person when you put chicken Caesar on the menu. You’ve crossed a line and you know it. It’s the chef version of [selling out]. If you do it late in your career, any notions of future stardom are usually pretty much out the window.
On the Cipriani empire
The Ciprianis, along with a few other imitators, made, a long while back, a remarkable discovery: that rich international f – – ktards like to hang out with each other and eat marginally decent Italian food — and are willing to pay outrageous amounts of money for the privilege. Better yet, people who want to look like they, too, are rich inter-national f – – ktards will want to get in on the action as well.
On a meal at Per Se
Could what you just had be described, by any stretch of the imagination, as ‘romantic?’ Look across the seat at the woman with you. Do you really think she’s breathlessly anticipating getting back to your apartment? Or do you think it far more likely that (like you) she’s counting the seconds till she can discreetly let loose with a backlog of painfully suppressed farts?
On Alain Ducasse
When he rolled into New York with his bad attitude, ungracious proclamations of how exclusive [Alain Ducasse New York] would be, how unwelcome New Yorkers might be — if they were not already acquainted with Himself via Monaco or Paris — he did nothing so much as drop a gigantic [turd] into a small pond.