The Nasty Bits
Anthony Bourdain and the crew for his Travel Channel series No Reservations were evacuated from Beirut on a ship bound for Cyprus two days ago. Word that the top-selling chef-author was caught up in the devastating bombing crisis in Lebanon (where he was filming an episode about the country’s culinary and cultural resurgence) spread after he was quoted on “Page 6,” the New York Post’s daily celebrity rag. The paper (all the while using irresponsible phrases like “North Vietnam,” which is not now nor ever was the name of a country) regrettably painted Bourdain as a glib party animal thrown in amongst the wreckage, but on eGullet’s forums the man himself exuded the kind of perspective and confidence that one would expect from a dedicated war correspondent. The same kind of honest, straight-forward eloquence with which Anthony Bourdain reported from Beirut runs through each of the short pieces in his latest bestseller, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones
The Nasty Bits is a collection of magazine articles (first published in the likes of Gourmet, Food Arts, and British Esquire) and informal prose pieces (originally written as emails and stream-of-consciousness rants), and the collection concludes with an original work of fiction. From New York to Melbourne to Hanoi, Bourdain maintains the no-bullshit stance of his earlier culinary exposé Kitchen Confidentiald here on Food Bound). He takes a stridently Brechtian approach to both the kitchen and the page, forever pulling down the forth wall, turning the camera around, and paring down illusions. He reminds the reader that he’s putting on an act, that his ulterior motive is to profit from his fame, that he has a publicist. In a piece originally published for Gourmet where he spends five days with his wife in a multi-million-dollar apartment aboard the ship The World, Bourdain neither hams it up as a hapless everyman nor feigns the kind of wealthy station occupied by his fellow passengers; instead, he opts for the kind of ethics that are almost nonexistent among journalists (especially those on the “luxury” beat) and discloses that he never would have been able to afford the trip if he hadn’t been sent on assignment. In a deliciously entertaining piece on Las Vegas’s emerging fine-dining scene called “Food and Loathing in Las Vegas,” he describes his gambling travel companion (The Reach of a Chefa href=”http://ruhlman.com/”>Michael Ruhlman) with incredible candor: “Only a week earlier, I’d seen a blazer-clad Ruhlman playing the Simon Cowell role on the PBS competitive cooking series, Cooking Under Fire. Now he was a shell of his former self, unshaven, eyes banging around in his skull like pachinko balls.” And with one smooth slice, he deconstructs the entire scene: “Now, we’d been driving back and forth for hours in the scorching desert sun–so the television crew could get that perfect Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ‘homage’ shot–and it wasn’t going well.”
Perhaps more than a hypermasculine hedonist, more than a trash-talking restaurant-insider (really, anyone with a few years’ experience as a line cook and a chip on his shoulder could play that role), Bourdain stands out here as a distinguished man of letters. In addition to the Hunter S. Thompson nod, he also tucks in references to Arthur Miller (”A View from the Fridge”) and Graham Greene (”The Hungry American”), and he includes an essay on his favorite kitchen literature (from George Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris to David Blum’s Flash in the Pan). Bourdain was already an accomplished author when he emerged as a celebrity chef (a term he tries to elude), and he now has five nonfiction books and three novels to his credit. When a ten-year-old waiter on a Caribbean island asks the chef what he does for a living, Bourdain ruminates for a moment: “Am I some kind of writer guy? I dunno.” Man, you are a writer–a damn good one.
