Check, please

Anthony Bourdain’s life as literary and TV chef

By Clea Simon

A Cook’s Tour:
In Search of the Perfect Meal

By Anthony Bourdain. Bloomsbury, 288 pages, $25.95.

OVERDONE: Bourdain has literary air, but personality and attitude is beginning to supplant his credible expertise.

Anthony Bourdain has gotten lost in his own sauce. The celebrity chef, author of the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, has become such a star, such a celebrated personality, that he no longer has time to cook, a development he laments in the forward to the paperback edition of Kitchen Confidential as well as in his new A Cook’s Tour. What he doesn’t say is that he also no longer seems to have time to write. Instead, in this his fifth full-length project, a tour around the world “in search of the perfect meal,” he’s doling out his own ample chutzpah — a heaping helping of attitude — and calling it a book. Or, in all fairness, a book and TV tie-in, the non-fiction equivalent of a novelization. The smartly edited Food Network series of the same name may be bright and fast (at least the two episodes available for review), but it can’t make up in color what both parts of this project lack in content.

Back before he became a talking head, Bourdain knew how to write. His first two books, the novels Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo, may not have been great art, but they were smart and well paced: thrillers with laughs as well as gore. Bone in the Throat in particular showed off his ear for dialogue, notably the New York City types I presume he grew up and worked with, as well as an enjoyable crew of stock-comic mobsters. Gone Bamboo slacked off a bit, perhaps an indication of things to come, as it left Bourdain’s home turf behind for the Caribbean. But it was still a fun read.

Then came Kitchen Confidential. An outgrowth of a New Yorker essay that warned of the dangers of eating fish on a Monday, Kitchen Confidential was as much picaresque as memoir, with the author/chef as bad boy, drugging and screwing his way through the kitchens of Provincetown and Manhattan. The material may have been drawn from life, but the point was entertainment: Bourdain repeatedly warned readers of his penchant for embellishment and then enjoyed himself, going into deliciously hideous detail about the unsavory habits of professional chefs while skimming over the more mundane bits of an almost 30-year career (including most of his schooling, the kicking of his heroin habit, and how he managed to maintain a marriage throughout all the mayhem). Structured as a series of episodes, the book was uneven, but when it hit, it was laugh-out-loud funny. The immediate follow-up, Typhoid Mary, a mix of half-digested research and personal rant, couldn’t sustain the buzz. But that was a minor stumble, easily dismissed in the Kitchen Confidential glare.

In light of that success — and the personality that powered it — the idea for A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal must have seemed valid. Take an ornery, opinionated chef out of his home kitchen (Les Halles in Manhattan) and send him around the globe on a culinary quest. As a book and a 22-part television series it promised personality, scenery, exotica in the form of rare and disgusting meals, and lots of the raw, boys’-club humor for which Chef Tony had become famous.

Only someone along the way seems to have forgotten a few major ingredients. For starters, the boisterous chef on whom the project depends is something of a literary creation. I’m sure Bourdain is at least partly the loudmouth boss he portrays in his memoir, prone to cursing out his staff in several languages. But he himself acknowledges that Kitchen Confidential was “over testosteroned,” as he put it, a creative endeavor as much as a factual account. What he depicted was a persona, an entertaining protagonist for the stories he culled from 40-odd years of life. Going on the road, having to inhabit that persona for 22 episodes and an accompanying book, is a bit different. He does describe with glee a bar in Cambodia that lets patrons buy ammunition for its various weapons along with its beer and bar girls, and he can get wonderfully nasty when describing truly awful food (for “braised bat” he suggests we “imagine braised inner tube, sauced with engine coolant”). But the device — amusing by being obnoxious — wears thin. Instead of the jokes and the coarse-funny repartee, we hear again and again that certain adventures are intended to be the fulfillment of childhood fantasies. We then also hear that these dreams of danger and adventure are either disappointing (“what I was looking for here, ultimately, was yet another moment of underinformed fantasy”) or unpleasantly frightening in real life.

At times in the book the author gives us peeks of a more fully rounded Bourdain. A Cook’s Tour opens with a homesick letter to his wife: it’s designed to tantalize with hints of adventure to come (he’s writing from Cambodia, where a pictographic sign indicates “no automatic weapons in the lobby”), but what shines through is real fatigue and loneliness. More often, when the machismo wilts, it becomes simple ill temper. In one of several book asides on how terrible it is to “sell your soul” to television, he bitches: “I’m supposed to face the camera and spit out some facile summary of twelve hundred years of blood, sweat, colonial occupation, faith, custom, and ethnology — as it relates to a chicken stew — all in a nice 120-second sound bite?”) Well, something like that might have been nice.

What made the attitude work in Kitchen Confidential was the expertise behind it. Writing about the kitchens of Provincetown and Manhattan, Bourdain was drawing on decades of experience. With a few choice anecdotes, he could paint vivid images of its habitués: the desperate restaurant owners, drug-addled kitchen staff, and bankruptcy-sensitive suppliers he knew so well. Take him on the road, and that history — that immersion in a world — is gone.

The Food Network team seemed to sense that its host was out of his element. Each episode opens with Bourdain in his home restaurant, brusquely and confidently ordering his crew around while his voiceover talks about the life in a somewhat flat delivery reminiscent of Lou Reed. Then when the episode shows this hip New Yorker totally lost, dependent on a series of guides and translators to lead him about, the contrast provides some humor. But the book lacks this constant reminder of why we’re traveling the world with this man, and we’re left with the kind of first impressions any traveler experiences.

This type of travel writing can be valid — chroniclers from Anthony Trollope to Pico Iyer have used their outsider status to introduce readers to new worlds. But when Bourdain refers to the “awe-inspiring, life-changing mother of all fish markets,” we get his personality rather than the Tokyo market. Even the food descriptions are gone. Recalling a multi-course meal, he tells us that the seaweed with herring roe “was followed by okobushi daizu hijiki — steamed rice with abelone, soy beans, and brown algae. Don’t think algae sounds good? It is.” All too frequently in this book, as Bourdain eats his way through Asia, North Africa, Europe, and the Americas, we are given no texture, no comparison, no detail. Simply “it is.” By the time he eats a cobra’s beating heart (“like a little Olympia oyster — a hyperactive one”), it’s too little, too late.

The television series helps fill in some of the details. Thanks to good camerawork, we witness fish being boned, sliced, spiced, and cooked in the kitchen of a St. Petersburg restaurant. At the table, Bourdain points out the traditional accompaniments to caviar, the chopped egg and onion he dismisses as “tchotchkes.” And in Tokyo, we get to see both the gigantic fish market and the precise presentation of sushi that he enjoys afterward. Yet the flashy MTV-style editing that makes these scenes so lively doesn’t linger on the dishes. We see Bourdain oohing and aahing. We see Bourdain drinking sake, his translator and guide giggling. We see more dishes coming out, more sake being poured. And then on to the next adventure.

In a strange bit of cross-pollination, the filming makes for some of the best bits in the book. In St. Petersburg, Bourdain writes, he and his translator got so drunk that they couldn’t walk down the road to give the camera crew the final tracking shot it wanted. “ ‘Lesh fix it later . . . In the editing room,’ I said. ‘I was learning.’ ” (No such shot appears in the series.) Neither has Bourdain totally lost his insight. In Mexico he realizes that “proximity to livestock and animal feces . . . is not necessarily an indicator of a bad meal.” (The reason, he decides, is that those living in rural conditions have to be more careful about freshness.) Also, the picaresque element that many readers will undoubtedly seek — the animal slaughters, the vomiting, the fun with automatic weapons — is abundant, if less amusing than in the context of a chef’s working life.

The book’s many flaws (along with comments about production schedules scattered throughout) suggest that there was a rush to get this project done — and that the author had little opportunity to read his manuscript through. Neither, with the conclusion dated August 2001, is it likely that A Cook’s Tour received thorough editing. Although that kind of speedy service may be necessary to feed a houseful of hungry restaurant patrons on a busy Saturday night, an audience of readers should be served more carefully. Some substance, please, with the sauce.

A Cook’s Tour premieres on the Food Network this Tuesday, January 8, at 10:30 p.m.