Anthony Bourdain Reader Review – Undiscovered Gems from the Charismatic Chef Turned Writer | Food and drink books

TThink Anthony Bourdain and a whole rush of TV memories come back. Here he is – in shows like Parts Unknown and No Reservations – prowling the backstreet corners and slum hideaways of parts of the world where celebrity chefs are too afraid to wander. In Beirut and Congo; tasting calamari and checking out graffiti in Tripoli; Gorging on rice noodles and cold bottles of beer with Barack Obama in Hanoi, Vietnam. One cycle follows another, and the evenings pass past midnight, still chewing the fat with the locals, thirsty for stories – of drugs, dissent, and appalling local politics.

But Bourdain, who committed suicide in 2018 at the age of 61, always saw himself as a writer. His mother was an editor at The New York Times, and most of his fans in his youth were outlaws, such as Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lester Bangs, and Hunter S. Thompson. (Orwell too – especially his account of the life of a dishwasher in Down and Out in Paris and London.) After dropping out of college, he later took a writing workshop with the famous editor Gordon Lish. His first bylines appeared in downtown art publications. Two crime novels (Bone in the Throat and Bamboo Gold) received good reviews but sold poorly.

Things turned around after the publication in 2000 of his best-selling memoir, Kitchen Confidential. It depicted New York restaurants as sweatshops, military trenches, and last-chance saloons for a whole host of social misfits. For Bourdain they were a refuge. He was a teenager who loved Abbie Hoffman and Eldridge Cleaver, later became a heroin addict, a Ramones and Voidoids fan, and a dive bar resident. Week after week, the city turned Bloomberg, mom-and-pop shops giving way to salad bars and frozen yogurt parlors: with its swaggering, screw-faced evocation of a rawer, less pasteurized New York, his book was as much a book of mourning as it was one of celebration.

By 2011, HarperCollins had given Bourdain its own publishing imprint. By 2016, The New Yorker was describing it as “not actually a star… but a nebula.” Now his agent Kimberly Witherspoon has put together “Anthony Bourdain Reader,” inspired not only by his most famous books, but also handwritten short stories, chapters from unfinished novels, what he calls “yet another pointless journalistic charade,” and ghost-themed cartoons depicting Japanese spirits with a penchant for devouring balls of meat found inside human anuses. There’s even a travel diary entry from 1973: “My stomach and intestines hurt. I have contributed more filth and vomit to Florence’s sewage system than I did at home in a year.”

This straightforward editorial approach will not be to everyone’s taste. Bourdain’s fictional writing lacks the urgent, cheerful flavor of his journalistic letters. “Good food, good eating, is about blood and organs and cruelty and decadence,” he once wrote, and some of his memorable clips include tapping a braised bat (“imagine a braised inner tube, filled with engine coolant”), sampling a still-beating cobra’s heart (“like chewing a dog’s rubber toy”), and watching farmhands stick a knife in Pig’s chest (“The scream pierced the pig’s chest”). Fillings in my teeth, echoing down the valley.”) Is this the “food and travel porn” he fears at some point he will be guilty of producing?

At its worst, Bourdain’s carnivore and his statements against vegans, PETA supporters or anyone campaigning against toxic chemicals feel like a libertarian gimmick, manna in Top Gear clips. He complains that people can no longer smoke in bars, and grumbles: “It’s only a matter of time before some well-meaning health Nazis barge into your bedroom and snatch that post-coital cigarette right out of your hand.” And again, Christopher Hitchens might pay tribute to his anti-Kissinger diatribe: “While Henry continues to eat nori rolls and remake them at elite parties, Cambodia, the neutral country he bombed, invaded, secretly and illegally undermined, then threw to the dogs, is still trying to get up on its only remaining leg.”

Some of the most beautiful passages come when Bourdain writes tenderly and meticulously about his family: a trip with his brother to La Teste du Buch in France, where they vacationed among its sand dunes as young men; The immense pleasure he has with his five-year-old daughter nibbling on pecorino and anchovies. I suspect that in the coming years Bourdain will be read more as a writer about food than as a writer about working in food. Everywhere he lands—whether in small, struggling restaurants, or in downtown nightclubs—he approaches the subaltern class of underpaid toilers who chop, sizzle, and sweat.

One of them, a century ago, was Irish-born Mary Mallon, who was later demonized as Typhoid Mary. In his passionate defense of her, he talks about what it’s like to grow old as a chef. Back pain, knees. And maybe the heart. “Where you used to turn your head to cough, you don’t turn anymore. Wash your hands after going to the bathroom? Maybe… Unwashed hands, the ashes of a stray cigarette, a roasted chicken dropped on a dirty kitchen floor and retrieved on a bounce… We’ve been there, you, me and Mary.”