Best served raw

Medium Raw is a fine sampling from chef Anthony Bourdain for whom the title “Rebel with a Cause” is richly deserved.

Anthony Bourdain is an incredible chef, a fine writer and an entertaining host of his TV show “No Reservations”. But he hates vegetarians; he spews venom against them. Here is one sampling from his earlier book, Kitchen Confidential, which exposed the underbelly of the New York restaurant: “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. [V]egetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumour of a cold.”

As a vegetarian who sometimes flirts with fish because there’s only so much pasta and tomato sauce one can eat at Karachi restaurants, I should be appalled by Bourdain’s hostility but he’s such a damn fine writer that I find myself not minding.

Medium Raw is another fine sampling from a chef for whom the title “Rebel with a Cause” is richly deserved. He’s grown up — naturally, Kitchen Confidential was printed a decade ago — he’s wiser, less of a wise-crack, though bless, the sense of humour is alive and kicking, even when hitting vegetarians, Rachel Ray and his biggest enemy, himself.

We find Bourdain at the height of his power in Medium Raw, complete with suit and tie, discussing his show with TV execs; we find him indulging in the self-deprecating introspection that one has come to expect of him, be it talking about failed relationships or successful addictions. It is his vulnerability that comes through strongest. Imagine this superstar chef and writer admitting to being ready to give Oprah Winfrey a bikini wax if it meant getting her endorsement for his first book. Medium Raw sometimes reads as Bourdain’s apologia opus to selling out. But it’s not at all self-pity of the self-help variety, thankfully. He sees himself as a: “a loud, egotistical, one-note [obscenity] who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long and who should just shut the [obscenity] up.”   Bourdain is now in his 50s, remarried with a daughter whose birth was a major turning point in his life, especially when thinking about her diet which explains his crusade against fast food giants. However, this does not mean his writing is dulled. If anything, Bourdain gets away with saying a lot more than he did earlier because he is in a position of power. Whether he’s sticking it to the TV execs, the food network, McDonalds (perhaps his best essay, certainly one of the funniest, where he explains to his daughter that McDonalds has cooties so as to deter her from demanding it) or telling us about his favourite cuisine from around the world, or profiling culinary legends in the US (and tearing apart one critic), he does so with panache.

And for the foodies out there hoping to learn from this culinary sage, despair not, for Bourdain provides a list of basic cooking skills that everyone should know.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 12^th, 2010.