Kavi Reads

When you hear about a book sale, where hardcover books are being sold for $2 each and paperbacks for $1 each, you can’t not rush there. During the summer of my third year in college, I was starting to get a taste of reading books and an event like this was perfect to go out and find something interesting to read. It was here when I first saw the book Kitchen Confidential and it was here when I first heard of Anthony Bourdain. At this point, I had been cooking for about a year and had been watching Gordon Ramsay’s shows for even longer. I was instantly attracted to a book that claimed to talk about the wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade. And it still remains my favourite book yet. I never saw his TV shows, or read any of his other books. But with just that one book that he wrote 18 years ago, I felt a connection with him. Which is why hearing about the author’s death was that much more shocking. Unsure of how to deal with it, I found it easiest to turn to his work. Medium Raw happened to be the only book by him that was available at the library and I got it later that day.

Medium Raw is Bourdain’s follow-up to Kitchen Confidential, ten years after it was published. Here, Bourdain addresses his rise to stardom beyond just a cook and becoming a television personality. Medium Raw does not follow one, unified storyline. Instead, Bourdain has put forward a collection of various short stories in one book. The general theme is Bourdain’s speciality: food and the people who cook it.

While the delivery method is different than that in Kitchen Confidential, where the novel followed a general timeline of his life as a chef, the writing style of the author is still the same. Medium Raw comes with Bourdain’s amazing story-telling ability, honest, off the cuff and borderline inappropriate opinions, and an eloquence in his prose that is unique to him. Each chapter is its own little episode that talks about Bourdain’s tales of his culinary adventures. While he tends to hold nothing back when criticising another chef, Anthony Bourdain is nothing but a romantic when it comes to food. When he starts describing a meal, get ready for your mouth watering and your stomach begging for food. Unless you just ate two meals back-to-back, you will get hungry again.

We get a sample of Bourdain’s famous meal-descriptions right at the beginning before the first chapter even starts. Bourdain describes what almost feels like a meeting of a secret society or an underground mafia gang, where a group of chefs were summoned to a late-night meeting in a New York restaurant to eat a never-in-a-lifetime meal for most humans. An Ortolan. The bird’s illegal to eat in most places due to a declining population. In just five pages, Bourdain showed why he is famous and his food-writings legendary. Other highlights from the book include watching a man called Justo fillet and prepare 700 lbs of fish for Le Bernardin, a seafood restaurant in New York and the delights of eating Pho (a Vietnamese beef noodle soup) in Saigon, Vietnam. Both times, he pours his heart out into the chapters making the reader feel like they were there with him. Things get a big heated once he starts talking vegetarians and cheap hamburgers that are often treated with ammonia. And things get personal when he writes about his own life and about being a father.

In the chapter titled “Heroes and Villains,” he lists the chefs and food writers that he admires, respects and hates. As he often does, he does not restrain himself when praising or when insulting. One of the victims of Bourdain’s harsh criticisms was writer and chef, Alice Waters where he questions her voting record, cooking credentials, and essentially her whole image, his biggest problem with Waters being how she promotes her locally sourced, organic food agenda without actually providing a solution for people who can’t afford it. But this was nothing compared to his attack on GQ’s restaurant reviewer, Alan Richman. Richman wrote a disparaging review of the Bourdain-associated restaurant Les Halles as a slight to Bourdain (even though Bourdain hadn’t worked at the place in years) and further blamed the New Orleans residents for Katrina, and an entire chapter of the book titled “Alan Richman Is a Douchebag” is dedicated to him. In the same chapter, Bourdain proves he can take it as well as he can dish it out, he turns his verbal knife skills on himself. “A loud, egotistical, one-note asshole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long.” Maybe that was true, but he always lived up to his reputation. One only has to watch an episode of Parts Unknown or No Reservations for that.