Edible Complex

When Anthony Bourdain tells you never to eat mussels in a restaurant, take his word for it. This is not a man who shies away from rough food. He likes it to be dangerous--better yet disgusting--in a nerve-tingling way. He’s the guy who’ll eat the eyeball in the grilled fish head and describe the gelatinous texture of the orb. He’ll eat the cheese that could make the dead man whose feet it stinks of stand up and walk. He’s the sort who considers vegetarians and other food zealots laughably misguided in their mission to protect human flesh from the degradations it’s heir to. He aims to be the Muhammad Ali of feasters, the last one left standing, if staggering and stupefied, after consuming the most tantalizing and terrifying of foods. And still he won’t eat mussels in a restaurant. The reason: They’re never properly picked over or washed; they cook fast, and chefs don’t want to add any extra preparation time if they don’t have to. Bourdain advises against seafood frittata at Saturday brunch, too, because it’s bound to be a hash of stuff left unsold since Monday’s fish delivery.

Bourdain has been a professional chef, mainly in New York and presently at Les Halles, for the past 27 years, and he serves these cautionary nuggets in the tremendously appealing, joyously penned “Kitchen Confidential,” an elegant meld of insider reporting on the food business and personal memoir. Resentment and rage, Bourdain’s cherished motivators, fuel many of his life Laurie Stone is the author, most recently, of “Close to the Bone” and “Laughing in the Dark.” choices but not this narrative. The book is a love letter to what has nourished him (including resentment and rage), with chapters progressing chronologically and including sidebar instructions to amateur cooks (buy Japanese Global knives) and prospective food workers (“[N]ever call in sick except in cases of dismemberment [or] arterial bleeding”). The tale begins with a primal scene: During a family trip to France at age 8, Bourdain is left in the car while his parents, exhausted by his complaining, down a four-star meal. On that petri dish of exclusion grows a vow to surpass them in matters culinary, and a few weeks later he’s slurping raw oysters by the dozens, slathering baguettes with Normandy butter he at first thought unpleasantly cheesy and getting an afternoon buzz on watered red wine.

Ten years later proto-chef Bourdain is an older version of this vindictive food snob with an attraction to altered states. He readily strips down to his foulest and most wolfish impulses because he enjoys showing them off and because he’s parlayed them into a career--though at times they’ve gotten the better of him. Assuming that years of Oprah have schooled us in the origins of self-loathing, he doesn’t convene a support group to inventory his addictions, rather he matter-of-factly refers to years doing drugs (including heroin), smoking three packs a day (he still does) and screwing any woman who moved in any space available (sometimes on 50-pound flour sacks). Though drugs are out of his life for nearly sabotaging his career, he doesn’t repent his past behavior. He knows that the curiosity and aggression that might have made him a suicide or a killer are the same that turned him into a cook. He needs to be contained (pretty much every minute of the day and night), and he’s found his ideal holding cell in the restaurant kitchen, where he’s free to be a barking, swaggering, finger-sniffing, keen-eyed beast.

He allows that every kitchen is not the Provincetown, Mass. “pirate galley” by which he was first imprinted in the early ‘70s and that has remained his ideal: It was a seafood joint so blushed with machismo a grill man earned an extra testicle by grabbing a glowing sizzle platter off the fire with his bare hand. In a paean to Scott Bryan, chef of Indigo, Luma and Veritas, Bourdain marvels at the serenity of those kitchens, where nary an oven door is slammed or an escaped parsley flake sullies a workstation. Recalling a stint cooking at Le Madri, Pino Luongo’s reliquary of Tuscan home cooking, he marvels at a commitment to authenticity so consuming that meat is cut by a butcher for each order and sauce simmered daily from seeded, peeled tomatoes. Loving excellence and the lengths required to achieve it, Bourdain leaks no spite at the food greats of his time; Eric Ripert, Gray Kunz and David Bouley are among those praised. But his most passionate and extended arias are sung to the Latino line cooks and trusted sous-chefs in his lockup, the butch “lifers” (a description applying equally to the occasional woman in this sphere) who share his “deliberately dumb little corner of Hell’s locker-room.”

Recalling the “Euro-geezers” who taught classes at the Culinary Institute of America, early labors at the Rainbow Room and a plethora of subsequent jobs with restaurateurs ranging from drill-sergeant despots to dentists seeking waitron nookie and a speedy way to drain their savings, Bourdain finds something to relish in every episode. From Bigfoot, a legendary West Village restaurant owner, he learns the basics that will become his foundation: Expect even your chef to fix a broken toilet; demand punctuality; speak to food purveyors as if their failure to deliver the best products at the cheapest prices will result in a mob hit; learn everything about your staff, lest they plot insurrection. In a later brilliantly written chapter chronicling a day in Bourdain’s life, we see these principles in action, as he rises at 5:55 a.m. and spends the next 20 hours hauling animal carcasses, dreaming up specials, supervising staff, ordering food, even jogging to the Union Square green market to snare delicacies he’ll then incorporate into dishes. In the wee hours, he ends up in a midtown bar with a jukebox that plays punk classics.

“Kitchen Confidential” is an ode to appetite and the author’s fellow gluttons for experience and punishment. Appetite and pain go together for Bourdain, and he has quite an appetite for pain. There is a great deal of cheery description of mutilations--knife wounds, burns, water blisters, amputations. At one job, his friend Dimitri fashions amazingly lifelike severed fingers and penises out of sweet dough and food coloring and deposits them in aprons and walk-in fridges. Bourdain loves his weathered hands, which he views as a museum, each scar and deformity inscribing a story of risk and survival. He loves the infinite colors, textures and smells of food, sees the world divided up between eaters and what’s edible, categories whose boundaries aren’t always firm, most pointedly when he describes his own body: “I’m a bony, whippet-thin, gristly, tendony strip of humanity.” It’s as if he’s describing a cut of meat that would make for tough kebabs.

Bourdain never tires of the wonder he can conjure with a superb plate of food, the mind-altering moment of presentation when beauty and anticipation interrupt the diner’s awareness of time. He generates a similar awe with his command of language, though for him the page isn’t a field for transcendence but for the visceral, sordid, imperfect flavors of life. With an eye as ravenous as his stomach, he records all, from the pristine seafood arrayed in a Tokyo market to kitchen slang (“jiz” refers to any reduced liquid and “marijuana” to chopped parsley), to the spectacle of the Rainbow Room’s changing space: “All the cooks’ necks and wrists were pink and inflamed with awful heat rashes; the end-of-shift clothing change in the room’s fetid, septic locker-rooms was a gruesome panorama of dermatological curiosities. One saw boils, pimples, ingrown hair, rashes, buboes, lesions and skin rot of a severity and variety you’d expect to see in some jungle backwater. And the smell of 30 not very fastidious cooks--their sodden work boots and sneakers, armpits, cologne, fungal feet, rotten breath--and the ambient odor of moldering three-day-old uniforms, long-forgotten pilfered food stashes hidden in lockers to which the combination was unknown, all combined to form a noxious, penetrating cloud that followed you home, and made you smell as if you’d been rolling around in sheep guts.”

For a guy who’s spent most of his life using the Zen repetitions of cooking to blunt the anxieties of consciousness, Bourdain has truly earned his author bones with this book, though his single comment about writing is a disparagement: “[D]escription cheapens the thing described.” Maybe writing isn’t ballsy enough, or the hungers of his mind are less compelling than those of his flesh. Pay no attention to this remark. If he wrote the way he cooks, his sentences wiped clean of accidental droplets, they wouldn’t be nearly as mysterious and intense.