THE NASTY BITS.
Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Sc.r.a.ps, and Bones.
ANTHONY BOURDAIN.
To Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee.
PREFACE.
i went seal hunting yesterday. At eight a.m., swaddled in caribou, I climbed into a canoe and headed out onto the freezing waters of the Hudson Bay with my Inuit guides and a camera crew. By three p.m., I was sitting cross-legged on a plastic-covered kitchen floor listening to Charlie, my host, his family, and a few tribal elders giggling with joy as they sliced and tore into a seal carca.s.s, the raw meat, blubber, and brains of our just-killed catch. Grandma squealed with delight as Charlie cracked open the seal"s skull, revealing its brainsa"quickly digging into the goo with her fingers. Junior sliced dutifully at a kidney. Mom generously slit open one of the eyeb.a.l.l.s (the best part) and showed me how to suck out the interior as if working on an oversize Concord grape. From all sides, happy family members were busily dissecting the seal from different angles, each pausing intermittently to gobble a particularly tasty morsel. Soon, everyone"s faces and hands were smeared with blood. The room was filled with smiles and good cheer in spite of the Night of the Living Dead overtones and the blood (lots of it) running across the plastic. A Bonanza rerun played silently on the TV set in the normal-looking family room adjacent as Mom cut off a piece of snout and whisker, instructing me to hold it by the thick, strawlike follicles and then suck and gnaw on the tiny kernel of pink buried in the leatherlike flesh. After a thorough sampling of raw seal brain, liver, kidney, rib section, and blubber, an elder crawled across the floor and retrieved a platter of frozen blackberries. She generously rolled a fistful of them around in the wet interior of the carca.s.s, glazing them with blood and fat, before offering them to me. They were delicious.
Words fail me. Again and again. Or maybe it"s me that fails the English language. My depiction of the day"s rather extraordinary events is workmanlike enough, I guess . . . but, typically, I fall short. How to describe the feeling of closeness and intimacy in that otherwise ordinary-looking kitchen? The way the fifteen-year-old daughter and her eighty-five-year-old grandmother faced each other, nearly nose to nose, and began "throat singing," first warming up with simultaneous grunts and rapid breathing patterns, then singing, the tones and words coming from somewhere independent of their mouths, from somewhere . . . else? The sheer, unselfconscious glee (and pride) with which they tore apart that seala"how do I make that beautiful? The sight of Charlie, blood spread all across his face, dripping off his chin . . . Grandma, her legs splayed, rocking a crescent-shaped chopper across blubber, peeling off strips of black seal meat. . . How do I make them as sympathetic, as beautiful, in words as they were in reality?
"Without the seal, we would not be here," said Charlie. "We would not be alive." A true enough statement, but not an explanation. You"d have to have felt the cold up there, have seen it, hundreds and hundreds of miles without a single tree. You"d have to have gone out with Charlie, as I had, out onto that freezing bay, a body of water nearly the size of an ocean, watched him walk across a thin, tilting layer of ice to drag the seal back to the canoe. Heard, as we did, the resigned calls from other hunters over Charlie"s radio, stuck out in a blizzard for the night, realizing they would have no shelter and no fire. You"d have to have been in that room. A photograph wouldn"t do it. I know. I take them in my travels, look at them latera"and they"re inevitably, woefully flat, a poor subst.i.tute for the smell of a place, the feeling of being there. Videotape? It"s another language altogether. You"ve turned what was experienced in Greek into Latin, edited places and people into something else, and however beautiful or dramatic or funny, it"s also . . . different. Maybe only music has the power to bring a place or a person back, so close to you that you can smell them in the air. And I can"t play guitar.
Fragments. Pieces of the strange ride, the larger, dysfunctional but wondrous thing my life has become. It"s been like this for the last five years. Always in motion, nine, then ten, then eleven months out of the twelve. Maybe three or four nights a month spent in my own beda"the rest in planes, cars, trains, dogsleds, sailboats, helicopters, hotels, longhouses, tents, lodges, jungle floors. I"ve become some kind of traveling salesman or paid wanderer, both blessed and doomed to travel this world until I can"t anymore. Funny what happens when your dreams come true.
My pal A. A. Gill once suggested that the older he gets, and the more he travels, the less he knows. And I know what he means now. Seeing the planet as I"m seeing it, you are constantly reminded of what you don"t knowa"how much more there is to see and learn, how d.a.m.n big and mysterious this world is. It"s both frustrating and addicting, which only makes it harder when you visit, say, China for the first time, and realize how much more of it there isa"and how little time you have to see it. It"s added a frantic quality to my already absurd life, and an element of both desperation and resignation.
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, lifea"and travela"leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marksa"on your body or on your hearta"are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt. When I look back on the last five years since I wrote the obnoxious, over-testosteroned memoir that transported me out of the kitchen and into a never-ending tunnel of pressurized cabins and airport lounges, it"s a rush of fragments, all jostling for attention. Some good, some bad, some pleasurablea"and some excruciating to remember. Much, I suspect, like the pieces in this collection.
I"ve done a lot of writing for magazines and newspapers in the last few years, and it"s the better morsels (I hope) from that work that follow. A lot of it is hopelessly dated, or obviously written for a British or Australian publication, and I"ve added some accompanying notes at the end by way of explanation (or apology). I"ve been writing this stuff for much the same reasons behind my frenetic traveling: Because I can. Because there"s so little time. Because there"s been so much to see and remember. Because I always think for sure the next book or the next show will tank, and I better make some f.u.c.king money while I can.
It"s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to a.s.semble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you"ve been and what"s happened. In the end, you"re just happy you were therea"with your eyes opena" and lived to see it.
SYSTEM D.
Debrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A debrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se debrouillera"get it done somehow.
a"George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London.
He was a master of the short cut, the easy way out, the System D. D. stands for de as in debrouiller or demerdera"to extricate . . . and to a hair (he) knew how to stay out of trouble. He was a very skillful cook, and a very bad one.
a"Nicolas Freeling, The Kitchen.
i stumbled across my first reference to the mysterious and sinister-sounding System D in Nicolas Freeling"s wonderful memoir of his years as a Grand Hotel cook in France. I knew the word debrouillard already, having enjoyed reading about the concept of se debrouiller or se demerder in Orwell"s earlier account of his dishwashing/prep-cooking at the pseudonymous Hotel "X" in Paris. But what sent chills down my spine and sent me racing back to my weathered copies of both books was a casual remark by my French sous-chef as he watched a busboy repairing a piece of kitchen equipment with a teaspoon.
"Ahh . . . Le System D!" he said with a smirk, and a warm expression of recognition. For a moment, I thought I"d stumbled across a secret societya"a coven of warlocks, a subculture within our subculture of chefs and cooks and restaurant lifers. I was annoyed that what I had thought to be an ancient term from kitchens past, a little bit of culinary arcanum, was in fact still in use, and I felt suddenly threateneda"as if my kitchen, my crew, my team of talented throat slitters, fire starters, mercenaries, and hooligans was secretly a hotbed of Trilateralists, Illuminati, Snake Handlers, or Satan Worshippers. I felt left out. I asked, "Did you say "System D"? What is "System D"?"
"Tu connais . . . you know MacGyver?" replied my sous-chef thoughtfully.
I nodded, flashing onto the idiotic detective series of years back where the hero would regularly bust out of maximum-security prisons and perform emergency neurosurgery using nothing more than a paper clip and a gum wrapper.
"MacGyver!" p.r.o.nounced my sous-chef, "CA . . . ca c"est System D."
Whether familiar with the term or not, I have always a.s.signed great value to debrouillards, and at various times in my career, particularly when I was a line cook, I have taken great pride in being one. The ability to think fast, to adapt, to improvise when in danger of falling "in the weeds" or dans la merde, even if a little corner-cutting is required, has been a point of pride with me for years. My previous sous-chef, Steven, a very talented cook with a criminal mind, was a Grandmaster Debrouillard, a Sergeant Bilko-like character who, in addition to being a superb saucier, was fully versed in the manly arts of scrounging, refrigeration repair, surrept.i.tious entry, intelligence collection, subornation, and the effortless acquisition of objects which did not rightly belong to him. He was a very useful person to have around. If I ran out of calves" liver or sh.e.l.l steaks in the middle of a busy Sat.u.r.day night, Steven could be counted on to slip out the kitchen door and return a few moments later with whatever I needed. Where he got the stuff I never knew. I only knew not to ask. System D, to work right, requires a certain level of plausible deniability.
I am always pleased to find historical precedent for my darker urges. And in the restaurant business, where one"s moods tend to swing from near euphoria to crushing misery and back again at least ten times a night, it"s always useful to remember that my crew and I are part of a vast and well-doc.u.mented continuum going back centuries. Why did this particular reference hold such magic for me, though? I had to think about that. Why this perverse pride in finding that my lowest, sleaziest moments of mid-rush hackwork were firmly rooted in tradition, going back to the French masters?
It all comes down to the old dichotomy, the razor"s edge of volume versus quality. G.o.d knows, all chefs want to make perfect food. We"d like to make sixty-five to seventy-five absolutely flawless meals per night, every plate a reflection of our best efforts, all our training and experience, only the finest, most expensive, most seasonal ingredients availablea" and we"d like to make a lot of money for our masters while we do it. But this is the real world. Most restaurants can"t charge a hundred fifty bucks a customer for food alone. Sixty-five meals a night (at least in my place) means we"ll all be out of worka" and fast. Two hundred fifty to three hundred meals a night is more like it when you"re talking about a successful New York City restaurant and job security for your posse of well-paid culinarians in the same breath. When I was the executive chef, a few years ago, of a stadium-size nightclub/supper club near Times Square, it often meant six and seven hundred meals a nighta"a logistical challenge that called for skills closer to those of an air-traffic controller or a military ordnance officer than to those of a cla.s.sically trained chef. When you"re cranking out that kind of volume, especially during the pretheater rush, when everybody in the room expects to wolf down three courses and dessert and still be out the door in time to make curtain for Cats, you"d better be fast. They want that food. They want it hot, cooked the way they asked, and they want it soon. It may feel wonderfully fulfilling, putting one"s best foot forward, sweating and fiddling and wiping and sculpting impeccable little spires of a-la-minute food for an adoring dining public, but there is another kind of satisfaction: the grim pride of the journeyman professional, the cook who"s got moves, who can kick a.s.s on the line, who can do serious numbers, and "get through."
"How many"d we do?" is the question frequently asked at the end of the shift, when the cooks collapse onto flour sacks and milk crates and piles of dirty linen, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their shift c.o.c.ktails, and contemplating what kind of felonious activity they will soon take part in during their after-work leisure hours. If the number is high (say three hundred fifty dinners), and there have been few returns or customer complaints, if only happy diners waddled satiated out the crowded doorway to the restaurant, squeezing painfully past the incoming moba"well, that"s a statistic we can all appreciate and understand. Drinks and congratulations are in order. We made it through! We didn"t fall into the weeds! We ran out of nothing! What could be better? We not only served a monstrous number of meals without a glitch, but we served them on time and in good order. We avoided disaster. We brought honor and riches to our clan.
And if it was a particularly brutal night, if the specter of meltdown loomed near, if we just narrowly avoided the kind of horror that occurs when the kitchen "loses it," if we managed to just squeak through without taking major casualtiesa"then all the better. Picture the worst-case scenario: The saucier is getting hit all night long. Everything ordered is coming off his station instead of being spread around between broiler, middle, and appetizer stations. The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d is being pounded, constantly in danger of falling behind, running out of mise en place, losing his mind. Nothing is worse in a situation like this than that terrible moment when a line cook looks up at the board, scans the long line of fluttering dinner orders, and sees only incomprehensible cuneiform, Sanskrit-like chicken scratches that to his shriveled, dehydrated, poached, and abused brain mean nothing at all. He"s "lost it" . . . he"s dans la merde now . . . and because kitchen work requires a great deal of coordination and teamwork, he could take the whole line down with him.
But if you"re lucky enough to have a well-oiled machine working for youa"a bunch of hardcore, a.s.s-kicking, name-taking debrouillards on the payrolla"the chances of catastrophe are slim in the extreme. Old-school cholos, a.s.sasinos, vato locos, veterans of many kitchens like my cooks, they know what to do when there"s no s.p.a.ce left on the stove for another saute pan. They know how to b.u.mp closed a broiler or shut a refrigerator door when their hands are full. They know when to step into another cook"s stationa"and, more importantly, how to do ita" without that station becoming a rugby match of crushed toes and sharp elbows. They know how to sling dirty pots twenty-five feet across the kitchen so that they drop neatly into the pot sink without disfiguring the dishwasher.
It"s when the orders are pouring in and the supplies are running low and the tempers are growing thin that one sees System D practiced at its highest level. Hot water heater explodes? No sweat. Just push the rillettes over and start boiling water, carnale. Run out of those nice square dinner plates for the lobster spring rolls? No problem. Dummy up a new presentation and serve on the round plates. We know what to do. Meat grinder broken? It"s steak tartare cut by hand, papi. Few things are more beautiful to me than a bunch of thuggish, heavily-tattooed line cooks moving around each other like ballerinas on a busy Sat.u.r.day night. Seeing two guys who"d just as soon cut each other"s throats in their off hours moving in unison with grace and ease can be as uplifting as any chemical stimulant or organized religion.
At times like these, under fire, in battlefield conditions, the kitchen reverts to what it has always been since Escoffier"s time: a brigade, a paramilitary unit, in which everyone knows what they have to do, and how to do it. Officers make fast and necessarily irrevocable decisions, and d.a.m.n the torpedoes if it isn"t the best decision. There"s no time to dither, to waffle, to ponder, to empathize when there"s incoming fire threatening to bring the whole kitchen and dining room crashing down. Move forward! Take that hill! Forced out of expediency to lose that cute herbal garnish on the Saddle of Lamb en Crepinette? It"s a shamea"but we"ll cry about it later, at the after-action reporting, when we"re all comfortably sucking down late-night sushi together and drinking iced sake or vodka shots at some chef-friendly joint. Right now it"s System D time, bro"a"and there"s no time for that bouquet of herbs. There"s the fish to contend with, and one of the runners just fell down the stairs and broke his ankle, and they need forks on table number seven, and that twelve-top arrived late and is eating up half the dining room while they linger over cognacs, and the customers waiting by the bar and shivering in the street are starting to get that angry, haunted look you see in lynch mobs and Liberian militia who"ve spent too much time in the jungle. Running out of arugula? Subst.i.tute mache for Chrissakes! Fluff it out with spinach, watercress . . . anything green!
At times like these, even one heroic pract.i.tioner of System D can save the day, step in and turn the tide. One guy can make the difference between another successful Sat.u.r.day night and total chaos. We can go home laughing about all we endured, feeling good about ourselves, talking about the bus that didn"t hit us instead of slinking out the door quietly, mulling over la puta vida, muttering half-formed recriminations.
Now, I"ve heard and seen some very fine chefs sneer at The System. "I would never do that," they say, when told of some culinary outrage performed in another kitchen. "Never!" they insist, with all the a.s.surance of an officer on the prewar Maginot Line. But when the Hun starts pouring over the wall, and there"s no fire support, and the rear guard is in full retreata"these same chefs are often the first guys to commit food crimes that even the most pragmatic pract.i.tioner of System D would never (okay, almost never) do.
Fast well-done steak? I"ve watched French grads of three-star kitchens squeeze the blood out of filet mignons with their full body weight, turning a medium to well in seconds. I"ve watched in horror as chefs have hurled beautiful chateaubriands into the deep-fat fryer, microwaved veal chops, thinned sauce with the brackish greasy water in the steam table. And when it gets busy? Everything that falls on the floor, amazingly, falls "right on the napkin." Let me tell youa"that"s one mighty big napkin.
System D, arguably, reached its heyday in the Victorian-era railway hotels, where the menus were huge and it was not unusual for an extra two hundred guests to show up wanting, say, the Frica.s.see of Lobster Thermidora"for which only fifty portions were ever available. Suddenly, Thermidor for fifty was transformed into Thermidor for two hundred. Don"t ask how. You don"t want to know. It is possible that the system began with the ever-changing requirements of volume cookery, only to be perpetuated by subsequent generations as the golden age of mammoth hotels began to wane and the enormous dining halls and banquet facilities of days past were faced with the necessity of serving grande luxe-style meals and bloated menus with ever-shrinking staffs and more stringent economizing. I suspect that some of the cla.s.sic dishes of that era reflect System D philosophy, particularly the efforts to get more bang from limited ingredients. Potage Mongole, for instance, allowed a chef to take a little pea soup and a little tomato soup, combine them, and come up with a third menu selection. New York"s fabled Delmonico"s offered, at one time, a staggering array of soups, numbering over a hundred. One can only a.s.sume that not all of those were made individually and from scratch every day. Parsimonious and forward-thinking Frenchmena"already inclined to make the most of humble (read cheap) ingredients, utilized every sc.r.a.p of stock meat, hoof, snout, tongue, organs, creating dishes that are now popular stand-alone and frequently expensive favorites, ordered on their own merits, rather than served as cleverly disguised by-products.
The traditional bistros that grew up around Les Halles, Paris"s central marketplace, were fertile ground for hotel-trained cooks and chefs to take System D to even more extreme lengths. They had limited s.p.a.ce to work with, most had limited capital, and the marketsa"whence came their clientelea"generated huge amounts of what might have been considered unpalatable foodstuffs. If you"re stocking your larder from a place proudly named The Tripe Pavillion, you tend to develop a cuisine heavy on boudins, tete de pore, confit of ears, stomach lining, shanks, pates, and galantines. Don"t take my word for it. Read Orwell, or Freeling, or Zola"s masterful Belly of Paris; nothing I"ve said here or will ever say approaches the terrifying accounts of mishandled food, criminally misrepresented menu items, marginal sanitation practices, and dubious sources of supply in these cla.s.sic accounts. Orwell describes working ankle deep in garbage and outgoing dinners in one such establishmenta"and this was by no means a slophouse. Even today, French veterans of bistro cooking are masters of System D, inured as they are to working in tiny kitchens with dollhouse-size ranges, producing ten or twelve menu items despite access to only minimal storage, refrigeration, and work area, with a plongeur b.u.mping them from behind. Work with some of these folks, even in the relatively roomy kitchens of Manhattan, and you"re likely to see a number of practices they definitely do not teach at culinary school.
Of course, expediency is one thing. Laziness is another. I hate, for instance, to see a cook "sear, slice, and flash," where instead of searing, say, a gigot, then finishing to proper doneness in the oven, he"ll sear the outside of the mat, slice it nearly raw, then color the slices under the salamander. I"ve seen jammed-up cooks searing lamb, beef, and duck simultaneouslya"all in the same pan. I hate that too. And instead of reducing and mounting sauces to order, in a clean pot each time, some cooks keep a veritable petri dish of reducing sauce festering on a back burner, adding unreduced sauce as needed until the pot is a crusty, horrible abomination of oversalted, scorched, and bitter swill. Not for me, thanksa"and not in my kitchen. The microwave was a blessing to full-time System D experts. I"ve seen veterans of three-star kitchens throw absolutely raw, unseared cote de boeuf for two into a microwave oven, presumably to "warm it up" to cut cooking time!
One can be a proud pract.i.tioner of The System without resorting to food murder. With a fine set of moves, a strong, TO.
adaptable mind, and a certain threshold, a level beyond which one will not under any circ.u.mstances go, one can break all the rules and still make good food. One"s customers will get what they wanted, when they wanted it. And no one will be the wiser.
If Vatel, the famous French chef of years past who allegedly killed himself when informed that his fish delivery would be delayed, had been fluent in System D, he might have lived a longer, happier, and more prosperous life. We remember him, after all, only for his pa.s.sing.
Maybe we don"t remember the name of whatever early pioneer of System D first gazed upon a snail in a moment of need and thought to himself, "Gee . . . maybe if I cram enough garlic b.u.t.ter in there, I can serve that!" But we"re still eating escargots de Bourgogne, aren"t we?
THE EVILDOERS.
i"m on the subway after a long, hard day in the kitchen, my feet swelling up like twin Hindenburgs; my back killing me; fourteen hours of hot, sweaty, uncomfortable toil and two hundred eighty dinners under my belt; and I want to sit down. There are three seats in front of me in the crowded subway car. Unfortunately, one miserable, fat b.a.s.t.a.r.d is taking up all three of them. As he sits glumly but defiantly in a center seat, his gigantic b.u.t.t cheeks and thighs spill out of the molded plastic bucket onto the seats on both sides, and his beady eyes dare me to try and squeeze my bony a.s.s into one of the narrow s.p.a.ces next to him.
Dream sequence: I"m on a packed commuter flight and we"re going down for a forced landing in a Midwestern cornfield. Engine one is on fire, the cabin fills up with smoke, panicky pa.s.sengers overturn their meal trays as they rush the emergency exits. The pilot manages to plow the plane belly-down onto soft earth, but when the planea"in flames nowa"comes to a full stop and the emergency doors pop free, the three-hundred-pound ectomorph in the window seat becomes lodged firmly and inexorably in the small doorway. At the head of the aisle, another giant f.u.c.k collapses wheezing onto the floor, blocking egress. As my hair catches fire, the last thing I see is jiggly, crenulated back fat.
Whose fault is it? Who made my fellow Americans obesea"if not morbidly obese? How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin? In whose evil snail tracks across the globe can we watch thighs expand, bellies pooch out over groins, so that fewer and fewer every year of the flower of our youth can even see their own genitals without benefit of a mirror? Who is making each new generation from once normally proportioned countries swell up like grain-fed steer?
We know the answer. America"s most dangerous export was never nuclear weapons or Jerry Lewisa"or even Baywatch reruns. It was, is, and probably always will be our fast-food outlets.
The Evildoers of the major chains live nowhere near their businesses. Like crack dealers, they know what they sell is not good for you, that it makes neighborhoods uglier, contributes nothing but a stifling sameness to society. Recently, with Eric Schlosser, the author of the brilliant and terrifying Fast Food Nation, I debated two representatives of the fast-food industry at a "multi-unit foodservice operators"" convention in Texas. Our position, unsurprisingly, was that everybody in the room basically sucked. The opposition countered with tortured recitation of numbers and statistics, mostly to do with what a valuable service their industry provided, employinga"for a few months at a timea"hundreds of thousands of people who (they implied) might otherwise be sticking up liquor stores, setting fires, and sodomizing pets. They neatly deflected Schlosser"s own accurate and sobering numbers, mostly to do with workplace injuries in the meat-cutting industry, average length of employment, bankrupt "nutritional" value, the quantifiable path of balooning thighs following in their businesses" wake across the globe, and so on. But when I asked these folks, one by one, if they would live anywhere near their own overlit, maniacally cheery looking restaurants, I got, more often than not, a stunned look and a "f.u.c.k, no!" When I mischievously suggested (opportunistically taking advantage of the current fervor of flag waving) that their chosen enterprise was basically unpatriotic; that they were deliberately targeting children with their advertising, then knowingly raising them to be no-necked arterially clogged diabetics who"d "never in a million years make it through basic training. G.o.d help us if we ever have to hit Omaha Beach again, those doughy overfed punks"ll drown like rats!"a"they looked, actually . . . guilty. They know, you see. You think they eat their own gruel anywhere near as frequently as the average rube? I don"t.
But is fast food inherently evil? Is the convenient nature of the beast bad, in and of itself? Decidedly no. Fast fooda"which traditionally solves very real problems of working families, families with kids, business people on the go, the casually hungrya"can be good food. If you walk down a street in Saigon, or visit an open-air market in Mexico, you"ll see that a quick, easy meal, often enjoyed standing up, does not have to be part of the hideous, generic sprawl of soul-destroying sameness that stretches from strip malls in San Diego, across the U.S.A., through Europe and Asia and around again, looking the same, tasting the same: paper-wrapped morsels of gray "beef" patties with all-purpose sauce. The unbelievably high-caloric horrors of beef-flavor-sprayed chicken nuggets, of "milkshakes" that contain no milk and have never been shaken, of "barbecue" that has never seen a grill, "cheese" with no cheese, and theme monstrosities for whom food is only a lure to buy a T-shirt, is not the way it has to be.
There is delicious, even nutritious, fast food to be had in the worlda"often faster and cheaper than the clown and the colonel and the king and their ilk produce. In j.a.pan (and increasingly in the West), there are quick affordable sushi joints. In Tokyo, you can purchase yakitori, small skewers of grilled poultry and meat, from yakitori vendors cl.u.s.tered around business districts to serve executives looking for an easy after-work snack. In Spain, tapas (or pinchos) are served standing up; you grab something good at one tapas joint, then move over to another, a moveable series of snacks, inevitably deliciousa"and again, usually good for you.
In Vietnam, fast food is everywhere, right out in the street: freshly made, brightly colored sandwiches on homemade French bread; steaming bowls of pho, noodles served from a portable kitchen carried on a yoke on the proprietor"s back; grilled shrimp kebabs skewered on sugarcane; tiny bundles of rice and pork wrapped in banana leaves; spicy calamari; crispy little birds; hunks of jackfruit; caramelized bananas and mangoa"all of it made and served by individuals, lone entrepreneurs for whom pride is not a catchphrase or a slogan but an operating principle. In Mexico, one is likely to find happy swarms of people slurping posole, a sort of soupy stew, or menudo, a similarly delicious concoction, around primitive carts right out in the street, electric power provided by a chugging gas generator. A few pesos and a few seconds and you"re eating better than at any place run by evil clowns or steroid-overdosed action-movie front men. Turn right and there"s an old woman making absolutely fresh quesadillas of zucchini flowers and farmer cheese, turn left and a mom and pop are slicing up a tender head of pork and rolling it into soft tacos with salsa fresca so fresh and wonderful you"ll think you"ve died and gone to heaven. Total time elapsed from time ordered to actual chewing? About twelve seconds.
Even in Russia they"ve got blintzes and piroshkis, served on fire-engine-red plastic traysa"in the worst American traditiona" but again, made by a human, fresh, on site, from real, recognizable ingredients, not shipped in frozen, preportioned vacu-seal bags from some meat-extruding facility near a far-away turnpike. And that cherished idea of the Russian as stocky, Krushchev-like babushkas is way wrong, friends. Most of the Russians I saw recently? The guys all looked like Dolph Lund-gren and the women were tall, slim, and hard-looking enough to handle themselves in a street fight.
In Cambodia, a desperately poor cyclo driver, munching on a crispy little bird at a market, engaged me in conversation. "Is it true," he asked, "that all Americans eat only hamburgers and KFC?" He looked truly sorry for me.
I wouldn"t really care what they put in those burgersa"if they tasted good. And though I do care that the rivers of Arkansas are clogging up with chicken s.h.i.t to satisfy the world"s relentless craving for crispy fried chicken fingers, I don"t believe that we should legislate these c.o.c.ksuckers out of business. My position is kind of the Nancy Reagan position on drugs: "Just Say No." Next time you find yourself standing slack-jawed and hungry in front of a fast-food countera"and a clown is anywhere nearbya" just turn on your heels and head for the lone-wolf, independent operator down the street: a pie shop, a chippie, a kebab joint, or, in New York, a "dirty-water hot dog," anywhere that the proprietor has a name. Even that beloved British inst.i.tution, the chippie, is preferable to the clown"s fare; at least you are encouraging individual, local business, an entrepreneur who can react to neighborhood needs and wants, rather than a dictatorial system in which some focus group in an industrial park in Iowa decides for you what you will or should want. Deep-fried cod or plaice with vinegar, haggis with curry sauce; these may not be the apex of healthy eating, but at least they"re indigenous to somewherea"and, washed down with enough beer or Irn-Bru, they"re quite tasty. The kebab shop makes food that is at least fresh, and a beef shawarma does not require the addition of beef flavor to make it taste like food.
Whenever possible, try to eat food that comes from somewhere, from somebody. And stop eating so f.u.c.king much. A little portion control would go a long way in slimming down our herds of heavyweights in their tent-like T-shirts, Gap easy-fit pants, and baggy shorts. (Apparently taking body-sculpting cues from some of our more humungous rappers, these guys ignore the fact that many of their heroes probably have to wash themselves with a sponge at the end of a stick.) You may as well stop snacking on c.r.a.p while you"re at it. You don"t need that bag of chips between meals, do you? You"re probably not even enjoying it. Save your appet.i.te for something good! Take a little more time! All that rage and frustration, that hollow feeling so many of us feela"for so many good reasonsa" can be filled up with something better than a soggy disk of ground-up a.s.sholes and elbows. Eat for nourishment, yes, but eat for pleasure. Stop settling for less. That way, if we ever do have to get in there and "smoke evildoers out of their holes," at the very least, we"ll be able to squeeze in after them.
A COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS n.o.bODY ASKED FOR.
if you can catch a chef in a quiet, reflective moment over a drink, and ask what the worst aspects of the job are, you will probably get the following answer: "The heat, the pressure, the fast pace, the isolation from normal society, the long hours, the pain, the relentless, never-ending demands of the profession."
If you wait awhile, maybe two more drinks, and ask againa" this time inquiring about the best parts of being a chefa"more often than not, the chef will pause, take another sip of beer, smile . . . and give you exactly the same answer.
This is something you might keep in mind at the very beginning of your cooking career, chained to a sink in a crowded sub-cellar, doing nothing more glamorous, hour after hour after hour, than sc.r.a.ping vegetables or washing sh.e.l.lfish: It doesn"t really get any better. In fact, I know a number of accomplished chefs and sauciers who suffer from what we call "dishwasher syndrome," meaning that at every available moment between delicately spooning foamy sauces over pan-seared scallops and foie gras, or bullying waiters, they sneak over to the dish station and spend a few happy, carefree moments washing dishes. This is not as bizarre as one might think. Many of us yearn for those relatively carefree days when it was a simple matter of putting dirty plates into one end of a machine and then watching them emerge clean and perfect from the other side. Similarly, I have seen owners of multiunit restaurant empires blissfully sweeping ACOMMENCEMENT ADDRESS n.o.bODY ASKED FOR.
the kitchen floor, temporarily enjoying a Zen-like state of calm, of focused, quantifiable toil far from the mult.i.tasking and responsibility of management h.e.l.l.
Cooking is, and always has been, a cult of pain. Those of us who"ve spent any time in the business actually like it that way. Unless we"ve gone Kurtz-like over the edge into madness, and started believing, for instance, that we are no longer cooks but spokespersons for supermarket chains, or forces of nature responsible for elevating the eating habits of a nation, then we know who we are: the same people we have always been. We are the backstairs help. We are in the service industry, meaning that when rich people come into our restaurants we cook for them. When our customers play, we work. When our customers sleep, we play. We know (or should know) that we are not like our customers, never will be like our customers, and don"t want to be, even if we put down a nice score now and again. The people in our dining rooms are different from us. We are the other thinga"and we like it like that. We may be glorified servants, catering to the whims of those usually wealthier than us (I mean, who among us could afford to eat in our own restaurants regularly?), but we are tougher, meaner, stronger, more reliable, and well aware of the fact that we can do something with our hands, our senses, the acc.u.mulated wisdom of thousands of meals served, that they can"t. When you"re tired after a hard day in the kitchen, and some manicured stockbroker is taking up too much room on the subway, you have no problem telling the stupid p.r.i.c.k to shove over. You deserve it! He doesn"t.
Does this sound macho? It isn"t. Men, women, anyone who works in a professional kitchen should feel the same way. They work harder, under more difficult conditions, in an often fly-by-night industry with uncertain futures, catering to a fickle and capricious clientele in an environment in which you can do everything right and still fail. This environment tends to breed a clannishness, a tribal subculture, a tunnel-vision view of the world where "there"s usa"and there"s those like us" and screw everybody else. We have to cook as best we can for them, but that doesn"t mean we have to be them.
So all those hours sc.r.a.ping carrots, scrubbing oysters, pulling the bones out of pig trotters, tourneeing turnips, in the end, pay off. In addition to becoming expert, presumably, at those valuable tasks, you are a.s.serting your reliability, your toughness, and your worth as someone whom an overworked chef de partie or sous-chef or chef might want to take under their wing, invest a little time and attention actually teaching, helping you to climb out of the cellar and up to the next level. You are also coming to an understandinga"a real understandinga"of what the h.e.l.l it is that we really do in this business, meaning, we transform the raw, the ugly, the tough, and the unlovely into the cooked, the beautiful, the tender, and the tasty. Any cretin can grill a steak after a few tries. It takes a cook to transform a humble pig"s foot into something people clamor for. This is the real story of haute cuisine, of course: generations of hungry, servile, and increasingly capable French and Italian and Chinese and others, transforming what was readily at hand, or leftover from their cruel masters, into something people actually wanted to eat. And as the story of all great cooking is often the story of poverty, hardship, servitude, and cruelty, so is our history. Like the shank of beef that over time becomes a falling-off-the-bone thing of wonder when slowly braised in red wine and seasonings, so too is the prep cook transformeda"into a craftsman, an artisan, a professional, responsible to himself, his chef, his owners, his coworkers, his customers.
A stressed, badly rested, overworked three-star chef is not going to take time out of his or her very busy day training some young commis to clarify stock properly if there"s any doubt whether that commis will still be around, still focused, and still motivated in three months. The very real need for dreary, repet.i.tive functions like squid cleaning serves a secondary purpose in weeding out the goofb.a.l.l.s, the people who thought they wanted to be in The Lifea"but don"t really understand or want that level of commitment. If some of these budding culinarians feel that they are not, for instance, comfortable with being a commencement address n.o.body asked for spoken to harshly, or dismissed with an expletive in a moment of extremis, then they usually lack the basic character traits needed for a long, successful run in this greatest of all businesses.
Much is made of the emotional volatility, even the apparent cruelty, of some of our better-known culinary warriors. And to the casual observer, the torrent of profanity likely to come the way of an inadequately prepared poissonier can seem terrifying and offensive. And there is a line not to be crossed. Bullying for its own sake, for the sheer pleasure of exerting power over other, weaker cooks or employees, is shameful. If I verbally disembowel a waiter during a busy shift for some transgression, real or imagined, I sincerely hope and expect that at the shift"s end, we will be friendly and laughing about it at the bar. If a cook goes home feeling like an idiot for trusting me, working hard for me, and investing time and toil in pleasing me, then I have failed in my job. Good kitchens, however hard the work, and good chefs, should breed intense loyalty, camaraderie, and relationships that last lifetimes.
Most reasonably coordinated people with hearts, souls, and any kind of emotional connection to food can be taught to cook, at some level or another. It takes a special breed to love the business. When you pursue excellence for yourselfa"not for dreams of TV stardom or endors.e.m.e.nt deals, not for the customer, not for your chef, but for yourselfa"then you are well on your way to becoming the kind of lifetime adrenaline junkie professional culinarian recognizable in any country or culture.
I can"t tell you how many times I"ve talked about this with chefs and cooks around the world. Whether it"s Singapore, Sydney, Saint Louis, Paris, Barcelona, or Duluth, you are not alone. When you finally arrive, when you take your place behind a professional range, start slinging serious food, know what the h.e.l.l you"re doing, you are joining an international subculture in "this thing of ours." You will recognize and be recognized by others of your kind. You will be proud and happy to be part of something old and honorable and difficult to do. You will be different, a thing aparta"and you will cherish your apartness.
FOOD AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS.
"MAYBE YOU SHOULD DRIVE," I Said.
I yanked the blood-red Cadillac Eldorado onto the shoulder and stomped on the brakes. Ruhlman, sunning himself in the pa.s.senger seat, was thrown forward, mashing his folding sun-reflector into the dash and spilling beer all over his lap.
"You filthy pig, Bourdain," he screeched, "that was the last beer!"
Ruhlman is a big man, six-foot-four like me, but wider, with big corn-fed Midwestern shouldersa"and when he gets those thick forearms and meat-hook paws around your neck, it"s already too late.
I had good reason to be afraid. He was in an ugly mood. I"d dragged him away from his wife and children, from the relative calm and civility of his beloved Cleveland, all the way across the country to this G.o.dforsaken desert, to Las Vegas no lessa"the Ugly Shorts Heart of Darknessa"to a.s.sist me in the production of a television show (and the writing of this article) on the burgeoning celebrity chef scene. As coauthor of the Bouchon and French Laundry cookbooks, and as a respected writer on the subject of chefs, he was uniquely placed to help me. He"d been to Vegas before. He knew the histories of the personalities and operations I was interested ina"and his reputation and deceptively innocent aw-shucks manner and preppy good looks might, I hoped, make me (a vicious interloper if ever there was one) more welcome in town. My plan had been to get him liquored up, then piggyback on the research he"d spent many months if not years a.s.sembling. If nothing else, I knew he could get me a good table at Bouchon.
But he"d turned on me. And not without reason.
In the past few days, in the interests of television entertainment, I"d induced him to wear the same loud, electric-blue Hawaiian shirt every day. I"d repeatedly shot (and badly bruised) him during a ferocious game of indoor paintball; fed him beer and liquor from sunup to late night; then, when he was vulnerable, remorselessly interrogated him about Vegas culinary history. I"d watched him lose terrible sums at blackjacka"all this while being regularly force-fed gargantuan, two-time-a-day tasting menus as the cameras rolled and I jotted down his every comment.
Now, we"d been driving back and forth for hours in the scorching desert suna"so the television crew could get that perfect Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas "homage" shota"and it wasn"t going well.
He had to drive. I was in much worse shape than he, my head pounding from the previous night"s mile-high frozen margaritas, my heart racing with terror in my chest. What had I been thinking? Six days to research, cover, write, rewrite, edit, and deliver an article for a respectable major publicationa"while simultaneously making an hour-long episode of a show that would (and did) require every variety of b.e.s.t.i.a.l, excessive behavior. Even now, there was a Sammy Davis Jr. impersonator waiting for me in the Neon Boneyard, an accordion convention to attend, and more fooda"always more food, more meals to eata"before I was due, on the last day, to jump out of an airplane at two miles over the desert with the Flying Elvi skydiving team.
"Pull yourself together, Ruhlman," I howled over the blaring radio. "Pouring beer on yourself is good. Helps avoid sunstroke. And having an open receptacle in the car is, I"m pretty sure, illegala"even in this state. Now snap out of it. And drive us to Bouchon!"
Las Vegas: a bright, hopeful land of opportunity for chefsa"or the elephant graveyard for cynical cooks-turned-restaurateur/ entrepeneurs? A well-deserved final score for celebrity chefs, after a lifetime of toil; a last cash-out before knees fail entirely and brains cooka"or just a soulless extension of The Brand? Was it possible to serve truly good food; maintain one"s standards, one"s integrity; do good works in Vegas"s mammoth, air-conditioned Xanadus, this neon-lit theme park, these Terrordomes of twenty-four-hour beeping, bleeping, and jangling slots? Were these names of recognizable and respected chefs, these distant outposts of empire, simply far-flung knockoffs, expensive reproductions of what were once the soulful, heartfelt expressions of their strengths and dreamsa"now only farmed out cookie-cutter versions? Or were they just as good as their flagships, the same, only subsidized by the shattered hopes and dreams of the hapless souls two floors down, feeding their disability checks in increments into the endless banks of blinking, uncaring machines?
These were the serious moral issues I was grappling with as Ruhlman crushed his size-thirteen foot onto the gas pedal and powered the eight-cylinder red beast off gravel and onto asphalt, toward Thomas Keller"s Bouchon, the place I hoped would provide an answer.
A few days earlier, we"d visited some usual suspects. Inevitable, really, that we"d hit Bobby Flay"s Mesa Grill first. I figured that a purer example of branding could scarcely be found. I was looking for an easy hatchet job. A clear case of reptilian regeneration, a restaurant group expanding unthinkingly, like a chameleon grows back a lost tail. The story arc appeared cla.s.sic: New York chef becomes fantastically well known on the Food Network, widens operation, opens in Vegas. It"s easy, so easy, to dismiss Flay"s whole Vegas enterprise with a New York sneer. It certainly does no serious restaurant much help in the gravitas department to locate in the Mega-Coliseum of Uber-Kitsch, Caesars Palace, among the Italianate statuary, the staff in togas, the gurgling fountains and Celine Dion gift shop. Flay"s mug looks down on diners and punters alike from a giant JumboTron over the slotsa"in a continuous loop of clips from his television shows. The restaurant itself looks, from the exterior, like an over-designed coffee shop; only a layer of slightly tinted gla.s.s separates the light, modern, vaguely Southwestern dining room from the killing floor.
As we took our seats in the dining room, Ruhlman pointed out an old woman in a wheelchair being pulled reluctantly away from a slot machine on the other side of the gla.s.s.
"That"s not putting me in the mood."
Over an open kitchen, a satellite-size rotisserie twirled chickens in slow rotation.
"First night they opened, that thing was roaring red at like . . . nine hundred degrees," said Ruhlman. "Would have looked cool if it was red. Or if you could see flames now. But the thing was so hot it would have cooked the customers if they"d kept it cranked. They had to turn it way down, or they would have had customers bursting into flames, running across the casino floor with their hair on fire."
"That wouldn"t be good for business," I said.
"You think that would stop these people from gambling?"
Perhaps sensing the general mood of skepticism at our table, a wary-looking flack from the casino"s food and beverage department quicklya"and sensiblya"plied us with novelty margaritas.
"Just let the kitchen cook for us," suggested Ruhlman. "Do what you"re good at. Nothing that"s not on the menu."
Our very competent server began to lay on the food, making frequent mention of the Maximum Leader.
"Bobby Flay"s Spicy Tuna Tartare" tasted like everybody else"s tuna tartare these days, which is to say, perfectly respectable, in a south-of-the-border kinda way. A "Smoked Chicken and Black Bean Quesadilla" was a gussied-up smoked chicken and black bean quesadilla. Our margaritas were replenished. Our server presented "Bobby Flay"s Tiger Shrimp and Roasted Garlic Corn Tamale" as if repeating the name would add something to the experiencea"and, in fact, it was the best of the offerings: pretty, in its artfully opened pocket of corn husk, and flavorful. A very well-conceived dish which, unlike the quesadilla, compared well to the more rustic Mexican versions. "This is as good as any tamale on earth," I offered. "This is great. You could go looking for the perfect tamale in any mercado in Mexico and not find one as good as this. Unimprovable."
"The kitchen does a good job," said Ruhlman, begrudgingly. "Just don"t look out the window."
A "Northeast Lobster Out of the Sh.e.l.l with Red Chile Coconut Sauce" masked a perfectly cooked lobster with a fairly insipid and cloyingly sweet sauce, and the Brussels sprouts (which I liked) made absolutely no sense in its proximity. "Sixteen Spice Rotisserie Chicken" was, again, perfectly cooked, but it would have been fine with about eight spices. "Coffee Spice Rubbed Rotisserie Filet Mignon" was also flawlessly cooked, though decorated with the same squeeze-bottled orange sauce as the chicken. The kitchen crew did everything right, cooked everything perfectly, with dead-on technique, but I found myself carping about the conceptual disconnect: "The same d.a.m.n squeeze bottle stuff. All these years latera""
"The kitchen is doing a really good job," interrupted Ruhlman correctly (if uncharacteristically).
"Why put your personal "imprint" on this stuff? It"s gilding the lily," I griped, wondering why a nice piece of lovingly cooked filet mignon would be in any way improved by a rubdown with coffee.
"They don"t come here for a steak, Bourdain," muttered Ruhlman. "They come here for Bobby"s steak. Taste the magic, man. You"re not buying a meal. You"re buying a personality."