Sudha Devi Nayak
Anthony Bourdain, chef extraordinaire, plunged the culinary world as well as those who enjoy the hedonistic pleasures of gourmet food into grief with his suicide. To understand the enormous life of Bourdain, the multi personality of chef, author, TV host, celebrity, the high priest of gastronomic culture, one needs to read his ‘Kitchen Confidential’, which takes one through the dark recesses of the restaurant business.
We walk through the various kitchens dotting the United States, Europe and beyond, learning that the neatly dressed, visually appealing dishes that reach the dining table contain dark stories. “We learn that good food, good eating is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It is about sodium loaded pork fat, stinking triple cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals.”
The book started off as an article in the ‘New Yorker’, “Don’t eat before reading this” where he rips the lid over the restaurant business off for the trusting diner to see, and that evolved into the blockbuster memoir that captures our imagination.
To Bourdain, food was a calling, a vocation, the most unselfish way of giving pleasure to others. Even while looking with an unsparing eye at everything that takes place in a kitchen he loves the food he handles, the people he keeps company with and presents us with a novel which is a journey through the highways as well as the bylanes of the food experience.
Professional cooks belong to a tribe of stoics who can face up to humiliation, fatigue, urgency and threat of illness and they work under chefs who require blind, near fanatical loyalty and consistency of execution under conditions however difficult
A former heroin addict with a bad boy reputation, he started off as dish washer and inched his way to becoming a chef and decides to tell all. Told without frills, brutally honest, stating things as they are, fast-paced, with colourful profanities, the book emerges as a classic of haute cuisine. Invigorating and vibrant, Bourdain’s prose, in its loud, irreverential style, with his handwritten footnotes and afterthoughts, stops at nothing.
Professional cooks belong to a tribe of stoics who can face up to humiliation, fatigue, urgency and threat of illness and they work under chefs who require blind, near fanatical loyalty and consistency of execution under conditions however difficult.
Chefs are also mentors when Bourdain says: “You have got to be Mum and Dad, drill sergeant, detective, psychiatrist and priest to a crew of opportunistic, mercenary hooligans whom you must protect from the nefarious and often foolish strategies of owners.”
The life of a line cook is tough, with few holidays, no weekends or evenings off, often with all aspirations and dreams thwarted, living in the vicious atmosphere of the kitchen with its ribaldry and no-holds-barred conversation. At the start of a career, “you have no rights, you are not entitled to an opinion or a personality and can fully expect to be treated as cattle — only less useful”.
But for those who survive the grill for the love of the profession, for the sheer love of the food they deal with, life does open up and top chefs of today are sheer athletes bouncing from kitchen to kitchen. Bourdain serves us the good, the bad and the ugly with an even hand, dispassionately; but through it all shines the epiphanic moment, the moment of truth that food lovingly created with ones soul is sacred — one of those tangible pleasures of life where everything is so elusive.
By the time the book ends, Bourdain realises that his writing does not do justice to what he has devoted his life, it seems treason of sorts and the events are somehow diminished in the telling. ‘Kitchen Confidential’ is a recipe for a great read for all those who treat food with reverence.