06-12-2018, 06:03 AM
A New York Times article might offer some hints on Anthony Bourdain:
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The world of the chef and high-end eater has its glamour and mystique, but the business is far seedier than you might wish to recognize. The less that you know, the more you will like the reality. The truth is that the high-profile chefs are not nice people, most people in the business are the line cooks and dishwashers who do the grunt work under horrid conditions for low pay and with no recognition, and that there are inside secrets that owners and 'celebrity' chefs prefer that customers not know. Dining out? Any repast involving an animal recently alive involved cruelty, death, and decay. Bourdain was more journalist than chef, and journalists often know the dirty little secrets of business, politics, law, and sports that the general public would prefer to be blind to.
... and as I best remember, Vietnam. As one who typically must resort to the ersatz experience of cooking something prepared for heating in a microwave oven, I could never quite relate to the experience of haute cuisine.
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The world of the chef and high-end eater has its glamour and mystique, but the business is far seedier than you might wish to recognize. The less that you know, the more you will like the reality. The truth is that the high-profile chefs are not nice people, most people in the business are the line cooks and dishwashers who do the grunt work under horrid conditions for low pay and with no recognition, and that there are inside secrets that owners and 'celebrity' chefs prefer that customers not know. Dining out? Any repast involving an animal recently alive involved cruelty, death, and decay. Bourdain was more journalist than chef, and journalists often know the dirty little secrets of business, politics, law, and sports that the general public would prefer to be blind to.
Quote:Anthony Bourdain entered the literary stage with an inside tip, delivered in the gruff whisper of a racetrack tout: Don’t order fish on Mondays.
It was the part that everybody remembered from his first published work, a long essay about the unglamorous and sometimes unsavory work of cooks and dishwashers that ran in The New Yorker in 1999 and that made it almost impossible for waiters to sell seafood between Sunday and Tuesday for at least a decade.
A close reader of Orwell, he modeled that first essay and the book that grew out of it, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” on Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London.” While other restaurant writers had helped build the cult of the creative, artistic chef, Mr. Bourdain made folk heroes out of the dishwasher and the line cook — a job description previously known only to restaurant employees. He described their lives and their day-to-day work in concrete, indelible detail.
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When kitchens were being wrapped in a shimmering gauze of glamour, Mr. Bourdain got busy unwrapping them, revealing the injuries and addictions, low wages and high tempers that took a toll on workers.
Among other things, he was one of the first writers to tell the dining public that many high-profile New York restaurants would cease to function without the work and talents of Mexican employees. It was almost a casual aside, yet it suddenly opened new subjects to the purview of food writing: immigration policy, labor conditions, racism.
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And once he left kitchens behind for a career in travel television, he didn’t lead his camera crews on a tour of the world’s most luxurious resorts. He went to Detroit and the Bronx, Libya and Beirut.
... and as I best remember, Vietnam. As one who typically must resort to the ersatz experience of cooking something prepared for heating in a microwave oven, I could never quite relate to the experience of haute cuisine.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.