BOURDAIN

BOURDAIN

The first time I met Anthony Bourdain was on a rainy night in San Francisco at A Clean Well Lighted Place for books. He was on his first ever book tour and was doing a reading from Kitchen Confidential, the chapter about how cooks talk to each other in the kitchen. A chapter which he chewed off and re-enacted with drama and gusto.
The reading area had been set with about 30 chairs in-between a couple of bookshelves. Those filled quickly and it was standing room only behind the chairs, maybe 100 people. There was a contingent of California Culinary School drones in their stiff white coats, clutching their knife bags. I had had the good sense to arrive early and was up front in the second row.

The reading was great, and we all got an up-close and personal view of the energy and passion of the author/chef before he had become "the big thing". He read with passion for his own words and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Pre and post reading he spoke in that New York city rapid fire kitchen-speak that we have all come to know.
After the reading I waited until the crowd had thinned a bit then introduced myself and told him he had written the East Coast version of my life. He laughed out loud and said, "you know, I hear that a lot. Let me see your hands." I showed him my right hand with my well-raised and seasoned knife callous and he laughed again. We talked "cook talk" for about ten minutes with people constantly breaking in. I wished him good luck on his tour and went back out into the rain.

The next time I saw him was the summer of 2015 and my girlfriend and sisters had bought me (and her) second row seats to his "Close to the Bone" speaking tour in Portland at the Arlene Schnitzer Hall which came with passes to a post talk "meet and greet" at a local restaurant.
The talk was great. He spoke for nearly two hours without stopping, pausing briefly for slugs of water. He never hesitated--there were none of the "uhs, or mmms" of an unpracticed speaker. He was good. No, he was better than good, he was brilliant. The sold out hall was the antithesis of 30 chairs at the bookstore, and his schtick was more nuanced, but he was still the same.
Post "show" we waited in line to have our posters, books, etc, signed and our pictures taken. When I got to the front, after shaking his hand, I reminded him of that reading in San Francisco over 15 years ago and he looked at me astonished and said, "You were there? I remember that," and laughed out loud. We both laughed when he said, "That was a lot different than this."

We shook hands again, and the next person stepped up.

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I was just asked a question on Quora, where I occasionally throw in my two cents worth, "What made Anthony Bourdain special to me?" From the looks of it there are a lot of Bourdain questions floating around on that site. But, being the kind of guy I am, I answered...

"Anthony Bourdain made being a professional cook acceptable. Well, not necessarily acceptable, but far less anonymous, mysterious and edgy.

When I first encountered Anthony Bourdain, via an essay in the New Yorker, I had been working in the restaurant business for over 25 years. I was committed to and also used to the notion of having a career that lived forever on the borders of what was commonly accepted as reasonable employment. As cooks/chefs we were outlaws, bad boys, ex-cons, ad finitum, but mostly people who couldn’t hold jobs in a normal employment situation.

By the time Mr. Bourdain wrote the essay that blossomed into Kitchen Confidential, the Food Network was beginning to open people’s minds as to their relationship with food, but also to introduce them to chefs as people. As you may or may not recall, most of the “personalities” on the early Food Network were restaurant chefs.

Kitchen Confidential told the story, or a version of it, of my life, but also the lives of countless other chefs/cooks who had labored in rather adverse conditions in complete obscurity for a dining public who was entirely clueless about the struggle that went on each day and night to get the food on their plates. The publicity garnered by Kitchen Confidential and subsequently Mr, Bourdain’s exposure (not to mention his charming personality) gave a face to those of us who had been laboring thusly and went a long way in helping to hold the profession of Chef in a far more acceptable light.

I am forever grateful to Anthony Bourdain for writing the East Coast version of my life in the kitchen but also for normalizing and even romanticizing to a certain degree the profession in which I continue to labor."