Word: bourdainian
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...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...
...Melting-Pot Kitchen Some of the stuff in Cooking Dirty beggars belief - like the time Sheehan accidentally stuck an 8-in. (20 cm) chef's knife right through his hand, pulled it out and went back to chopping - but so far there has been relatively little actual post-Bourdainian fiction. Possibly the first novel of consequence is Monica Ali's In the Kitchen, set in a hotel restaurant in London. The restaurant's executive chef, Gabriel, has clawed his way up effortfully from the working classes, but having done so, he is now, at 42, having a midlife crisis...
...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, history, gender...
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