Knocking around odd-ball shops near Golden Gate Park I spied a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. “I’ve never read that,” I said to my kid. “I feel kinda bad about that. I love Tony’s stuff, and that’s the book that started it all.”
My betterhalf saw it too and asked me if I’d read it. Soon it was purchased, a little late Christmas gift to keep me occupied while United repeatedly ripped up our return itinerary.
It wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought it would be a stomach-churning exposé on health-reg disregard. Instead it’s mostly memoir, a look into how-and-why Bourdain came to love food, and gnawed his way up from galley-grunt to executive chef.
And it’s basically nostalgia. As Tony readily explains in the “Updated Edition” afterword, the restaurant world took a leap right around the time the book was published. Food suddenly became cool. Along with the attention came a new wave of respectability and professionalism. You might say that food got gentrified. Bourgeois-ified. Scrubbed up like Tony’s Lower East Side, made camera-ready for a Food Network brokered round of speed-dating with the expanding bellies of the middle-class. Despite his romantic attachment to the rough-and-tumble past, Tony admits that this is mostly for the best.
My odd-job sojourn in the food-and-beverage industry happened right about that same time, as expectations were switching over from sphaghetti-and-meatballs to tagliatelle-ai-funghi. Just like Tony, it started on Cape Cod, where I worked as a waiter on evenings and weekends hustling vodka-cranberrries and surf-and-turf to a mix of crusty townies and late-season tourists. I’d moved out there to sweat through my days in the lucrative career of an under-the-table landscaper, but sometimes I needed a little extra cash when my crew’s weed-a-holic boss came up a few bucks short.
Talk about an eye-opener. Setting up for lunch in the cave-like bar-and-grille one bright-sky sparkling Sunday, light shafts piercing the shutters to reveal smoke-thick air from the night before, I thought to myself, “ain’t nobody gonna be in here today.” Wrong. A crowd of regulars shuffled in well before noon, grey-skinned and red-eyed, soon stabbing at their Bloody Mary’s with limp celery spears. This church boy had a lot to learn.
Reading Kitchen Confidential, I’m realizing that I didn’t even see the half of it. As adventurous as I thought I was — gunning my well-worn Chevy first-time over NYC bridges with the Beastie Boys on repeat — my life was pennies-on-the-dollar to Tony’s time in Cape-tip P-Town, where I wandered on off-season rainy days to read Beats over pints and partake in solicitous smiles from handsome barmen.
But those years gave me some grit, made it clear that when the pressure is on that “nice” is no substitute for competence. And it taught me to fire back when need be.
“The Player’s Club.”
“I need a Caeser on-the-rails!” I shouted to the line, cockily deploying the universal kitchen patois I’d recently picked up.
“Why’s it gotta be on-the-rails?” yelled the perpetually annoyed cold-station cook.
“‘Cause I fucked up!”
The line got a good laugh out of the entire kitchen crew, and the salad was in my hands in ten seconds. I’d made the first step towards earning some respect, respect that they showered on me on my last day — dousing me in a special batch of Hobart-whipped lard, eggs, and various end-of-the-night scrapings before parading my slippery, stinky, soiled-uniform ass to the bars for round after round of on-the-house late-night shots.
No, these were not the environs in which I was raised, but I’m glad I got out and got a taste of what Tony was up to while I figured things out. Of course, there’s plenty more where that came from, but for now…let’s keep it confidential.
