Posted on: Wednesday, January 2, 2002
Taste
Former addict on a culinary crusade
By Deirdre Donahue
USA Today
"I was a rotten kid with a big vocabulary," says Anthony Bourdain. A heroin addict for five years with an additional half-decade on methadone, Bourdain, 45, knows he's lucky to be alive. But Bourdain isn't an ex-junkie gratefully taking it one day at a time. He's a wildly praised best-selling writer whose memoir, "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly," sold more than 700,000 copies worldwide. Translated into 15 languages, the film rights have been optioned to the people who produced "Fight Club."
The working title: "Seared."
Look for no recipes. Bourdain's 2000 memoir about life as a professional chef tells the story of a difficult character finding his way in the world through food, pleasure, work and the most creative, lurid profanity found anywhere outside a multinational convention of pirates.
Bourdain's new book, "A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal "(Bloomsbury, $25.95), has just hit stores: On Jan. 8, the Food Network starts broadcasting 22 half-hour shows that follow Bourdain as he eats and drinks his way through nine months of looking for memorable meals, everywhere from people's houses to swank restaurants to holes in the wall.
Don't expect the mundane: A still-pumping cobra heart is one delicacy consumed in Vietnam.
Julia Child he's not, although Bourdain is executive chef at Manhattan's Brasserie Les Halles. But Smith grad Child and Bourdain both spring from the American upper middle class. The product of East Coast private schools, he attended Vassar College and summered as a child in his father's native France. It was there that he ate his first oyster at 9.
"I'd learned something. Viscerally, instinctively, spiritually — even in some, small, precursive way, sexually — and there was no turning back. ... My life as a cook, and as a chef, had begun. Food had power. It could inspire, astonish, shock, excite, delight and impress. It had the power to please me ... and others."
In "A Cook's Tour," Bourdain returned to France with his younger brother, a successful currency analyst who lives in Westchester, N.Y., to recapture that life-changing time in France. "It was a dud," says Bourdain, reached by phone in New York. The weather was cold, the hotel horrible: "Picture Norman Bates operating a romantic getaway." Bourdain now cooks better fish soup than the stuff he recalled so fondly.
But the return trip made him think of his father, a record-company executive. He admits that he wishes his father, who died in the late 1980s, were alive to witness that his difficult son somehow turned out far more than OK. "He would have been so thrilled. That's a central regret in my life, without a doubt. ... He was not judgmental," Bourdain says.
(At one particularly dark point in Bourdain's life, he didn't remove the dead, brown Christmas tree from his apartment until August. "It had to do with sloth, paralysis.")
His mother enjoys his success but does wish he would tone down the profanity in his books.
"She's pleased but shocked. I ignored her best-intentioned advice. She's kind of stunned. You can do everything wrong and pull it out in the end."
Although touching heroin "is an unthinkable option," Bourdain says, he has not embraced the traditional abstinence lifestyle.
He drinks alcohol and smokes. He believes strongly that "the less hygienic the surroundings, the better the food." He absolutely despises vegans and people who choose to "enjoy a healthy but pleasure-free life. ... Your body is not a temple." If he is ever hit by an ice cream truck, his regrets won't be about missing out on life's pleasures, but rather disappointing people.
He does know what he would eat for his last meal on earth: roast bone marrow with sea salt at Fergus Henderson's St. John restaurant in the Smithfield area of London.
