Word: bourdain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hudson and north of the Harlem didn't know, or care, what was going on in the culinary avant-garde. They were still stuck eating at Lum's. Now, thanks to all the things the ancient regime most loathes - the Food Network, Top Chef, Eater and other blogs, Tony Bourdain, Momofuku mania, Rachael Ray, celebrity-chef restaurants - America has become as turned on by food as any Ford-era gourmand. But they lack the one thing that the old guard has in spades: perspective...
...invisible then. Now we recognize it right away: this is Anthony Bourdain's world. Bourdain is no Julia Child or Hervé This - he's not a culinary innovator - but in 2000 he changed forever the way we think about food with the publication of Kitchen Confidential, his scabrous, astoundingly funny, weirdly touching tell-all about his career in New York City restaurant kitchens. It's not just that he told us not to order fish on a Monday (because it's probably been around since last Thursday) and that the bread on our table probably got recycled from...
...literature of the post-Bourdainian era is vast and unfortunately mostly forgettable (with a few notable exceptions, like Bill Buford's Heat). But to those who crave them, even bad chef memoirs have a certain mesmerizing quality. Take John DeLucie's The Hunger. Unlike Bourdain, DeLucie is not a particularly gifted writer. Also unlike Bourdain, he is annoyingly successful as a chef: he runs Manhattan's sceney Waverly Inn. All the stuff about models hitting on him makes him substantially less relatable...
...search of pure high-octane kitchen action, though, In the Kitchen is unfortunately a bit of a drag. Although they resemble each other in their manic masculinity, Ali's kitchen turns out to be the inverse of Bourdain's, and it demonstrates exactly what made Kitchen Confidential so appealing. The Bourdainian kitchen is not a muddle. It is in fact the last redoubt of clarity in a muddled world. Hot and filthy it may be, but it's the place where all the stuff that bedevils the modern human's attempts to pull together a stable, clear identity - race, class...
...hitter Jonathan Franzen handles New York. Some are less so--imagine the editors' relief when they remembered that Jhumpa Lahiri hails from tiny Rhode Island (which, as she points out, is not an island!). There's something about their home state that puts writers in confessional moods. Picture Anthony Bourdain lighting M-80s ("It's a quarter stick a dynamite!!") as a j.d. in Jersey or a teenage Joshua Ferris cruising the canals of Florida with Jimmy Buffett (at the time he didn't know who Buffett was). For better or worse, their states helped make these writers who they...