Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

A few weeks ago, I knew Anthony Bourdain mostly as the bad-boy TV foodie who eviscerated Top Chef contestants, and the guy responsible for the awesome mac and cheese at Les Halles. Now I know him as an entertaining writer and official cute boy magnet. To wit, a conversation I had on the subway while reading Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly:

Cute guy: I see you're reading Bourdain. And marking the pages. [He gestures to my heavily post-it-flagged copy of the book] Are you thinking of becoming a chef?
Me: Nope, I just like to keep track of what I'm reading.
CG: Too bad. Bourdain was part of what inspired me to become a chef...

Then we had a lovely conversation about how the book was advanced for its time (2000) by having very foodie themes before the trend really hit. Two minutes later, I got off at my usual morning stop. But yay for surprising book conversations--and attractive guys on the R train (trust me, it's rare).

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, the book.

Kitchen Confidential isn't the best organized memoir you'll find, or the most dramatic. What it does have is an honest love for the hustle and burn of the restaurant kitchen, and a "fuck it all" openness. Bourdain doesn't take himself too seriously (or at least he didn't eight years ago), and is very willing to talk about his humiliations as a young line cook, his unheroic recovery from heroin addiction, and the various reasons why you should never order fish on a Monday.

It's also a strange, roundabout tour of restaurant culture in New York City. Bourdain worked in just about every kind of restaurant with just about every kind of kitchen person--a UN of sous chefs, petty criminals (who just happen to be transcendent bakers), nutcases, brilliant chefs, and union shills. You've gotta hand it to a book that makes you feel so repelled by the kitchens of even high-end restaurants, but simultaneously makes you crave good cuisine no matter who's doing what with unrefrigerated seafood.

Side note: The book also spawned a short-lived sitcom with the same name and theme, but with a much more, y'know, sitcom-y vibe. Also highly recommended, but for different reasons. Anyway, I suggest checking it out on Hulu if you're so inclined.

Some tidbits from the top chef himself:

"I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands--using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second)."

"My naked contempt for vegetarians, sauce-on-siders, the 'lactose intolerant' and the cooking of Ewok-like Emeril Lagasse is not going to get me my own show on the Food Network."
[Respectful editorial note: apparently the naked contempt DID get him a show on Food Network, but I digress.]

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

If you're a memoirist and you're not eighty years old, chances are at some point that you're gonna run out of humorous life anecdotes. You've mined your childhood and your family. You've exposed the quirks of your friends. You've framed every traumatic event for comedic value. So what do you do then?

If you're David Sedaris, you keep plugging along anyway. His latest book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is light on Sedaris family doings. It relies instead on the kind of stories you turn to when you've known someone forever, and don't need to discuss the big stuff anymore. He talks about his partner, his job, and daily struggles to quit smoking and interact with normal people. At this point, he seems to be going on trips (there are two airplane stories) and learning new languages just to be able to write about it. Some of the essays have distinctly enhanced qualities, but at this point I don't care if stuff is fudged. I just want him to churn out his patented funny-poignant essay collections every few years.

Some of the pieces are familiar. My favorite, "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle," was in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. But somehow even the recycled essays feel fresher, brighter than in the magazine. It may be the fresh, bright paper. Or the fact that I'm predisposed to love anything I've seen in the New Yorker. Either way, definitely worth the $15 on Amazon. (Even David Sedaris can't get me to pay full cover price.)

Favored parts:

"And there's an elderly Frenchwoman, the one I didn't give my seat to on the bus. In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no facelift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings. I think it's a perfectly valid rule, but it wouldn't have killed me to take her crutches into consideration."

"In the grocery section of a Seibu department store, I saw a whole chicken priced at the equivalent of forty-four dollars. This seemed excessive until I went to another department store and saw fourteen strawberries for forty-two dollars. Forty-two dollars--you could almost buy a chicken for that."

"It's pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I'll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I'll wave it in someone's face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I'm smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don't have a life."

The Updike of holiday weekends

A few months ago, The Sportswriter protagonist Frank Bascombe kinda pissed me off, with his poor decisions and his even poorer relationships. This morning, I found his creator to be considerably more charming. Richard Ford was a featured segment on CBS Sunday Morning (the drowsy, pleasant alternative to the Chris Matthews-style browbeating on Sunday mornings).

And it's hard not to like a guy who waxes rhapsodic about real estate: "The language of real estate is all about the language of people's hopes for where they live, how much they feel their house is worth and therefore, how much they feel themselves to be worth."

Also, I'd like to point out that Ford and his wife argue over the word "azure." Good to know that petty squabbles over word choice still happen after the honeymoon is over.