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“I’m actually not a fucking cook, I’m a writer,” Dominic Sessa says in the trailer for Tony, the new A24 movie about Anthony Bourdain. It’s 1975 and the fictionalized Bourdain of the film is on the cusp of literary greatness, before being denied a huge writing fellowship and having to abruptly change his summer plans, going off to Provincetown to bum around and fry the clam strips that would set him on the path away to culinary greatness. This award—and Tony’s contention for it—is fiction. At Vassar, Bourdain walked around campus with nunchucks and a samurai sword. He wasn’t even attending class, much less being recognized for extracurricular merit.
But Bourdain did want to become a writer. And although it’s easy to view his time in the kitchen as some semi-journalistic kick, Bourdain wasn’t just generating gonzo material: he was working a demanding job in fairly humble venues for money he needed. He did it for a long time. There were 25 years between the summer covered in Tony and Kitchen Confidential coming out. Bourdain was writing through it all and what he was expecting was not altogether different from the made-up fellowship in the film. He was counting on a literary windfall to lift him out of his life. And it did. But why did it take so long?
The answer is that the young Bourdain—the same sexy one we’ll all soon be seeing on the big screen—was terrible at writing. Bourdain’s unpublished short story, “A Strange and Twisted Adventure,” was written for an English class at Vassar in 1974—right before or right after the pivotal summer on the cape. It follows “two drug-crazed teenagers on a mission of celestial significance” and is a fairly straightforward rip-off of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Here’s a characteristic passage: “Allow me a slight tangent. Quaaludes are ugly drugs. They are also fun to take. The user bops around all night feeling no pain, friendly, happy, warm, with an inhuman urge to fuck anything that walks.” It’s hard to imagine that winning a huge writing fellowship.
He did not improve quickly. Here’s an excerpt from another story written in the mid-80s:
“Gas filled the cage. The man inside started shitting and pissing and then he puked and puked and rolled around uncontrollably in the mess, making funny noises. Then he got an erection and died.”
Bourdain was nearing 30 when he wrote that. Becoming a chef didn’t keep him from becoming a writer, it saved him from failing as one. And better still it gave him something more substantial to write about than shitting and fucking and fucking drugs.
Bourdain’s earliest available short story fragment, written for a high school English class, is about an asteroid where the gravity is such that “human intestines could not function properly.” Even then, he was gastronomically inclined. And the short stories he wrote throughout the 80s and 90s and published primarily in downtown zines like ZAT and Between C&D, are generally about life in food service. “YOU PUT NITRATES IN MY PÂTÉS!?!!” screams a chef in one short story. “Man stole my motherfuckin’ kosher salt!” screams a chef in another. It is not uncommon for those in the service industry to dream of a more glamorous career in the arts (Bourdain’s former colleague Edie Falco would go on to star in The Sopranos) but it is strange for their career in the arts to be so rooted in their day job. Imagine an actor to-be who only auditioned for parts as The Waiter. That was Bourdain.
Like many autobiographical writers—and Bourdain, even in his attempts at fiction, always seemed to settle on a main character named something like Chef—the most telling details about Bourdain are not those that he proudly reveals, like his drunkenness and drug addiction, but those he somehow neglects to mention. Charles Leerhsen in his catty unauthorized biography Down and Out in Paradise, talks at length about Bourdain’s maternal grandfather Milton Sacksman, a Ukrainian Jew living in the Bronx who—when he wasn’t in jail—apparently supported his family by stealing things like “$60,000 in textiles,” “a million cigarette stamps,” or “four hundred pairs of pants.” Bourdain, who wrote three crime novels and whose adolescent rebellion (which lasted into his early 40s) consisted primarily of being obsessed with various outlaw behaviors, rarely mentioned this connection. In an essay from the 2000s entitled simply “Crime,” he tells us that Court TV is always on in his apartment and that his favorite website is something called gangland.com. He even brags of a former mobster friend named Joe “Dogs.” Why not Milton? Maybe out of sensitivity to his mother. Perhaps because he rarely mentioned his Jewishness (“I’m the worst kind of atheist” he writes in Kitchen Confidential), generally preferring to emphasize his French heritage. Maybe even French wasn’t good enough. As he admits in KC: “I always wanted to be Italian American in some dark part of my soul.”
In 1995’s Bone in Throat, his first crime novel, crime is the least appealing aspect. Bourdain’s criminals say things like: “He’s a numb-nuts… But he earns” and “It sure beats spreading your cheeks up at Greenhaven.” If Bourdain knows little about vigs and made guys, he makes up for it with culinary insight. Much of the book figures around a dentist restaurateur who has gotten in over his head with the mob (and FBI) while trying to save his brasserie. And Bourdain, who had been in his share of failing restaurants, gives real color to the dentist’s terrible ideas to save the joint—jazz brunch, a fishtank, a nice new rotisserie (“Ladies,” the dentist assures us, “They order the chicken”). And Bone in Throat features many other Bourdain favorites: how squeeze bottles can make a mediocre plate look fancy, how industry guys tip at least 20%, how food in a steam table isn’t fresh. The book’s final set piece involves mob guys mistakenly using a chef’s knife instead of a boning knife to chop up a corpse. “They should get that knife they got on TV,” says one mobster. “The ones they sell, whaddaya call ’em—the Ginsu. Shit saws through a fuckin nail.”
In 1999, Bourdain was frustrated with the abysmal sales of his crime novels, with his steady job at the brasserie Les Halles, with the apparent death of his dream of ever being Bruce Lee, Iggy Pop, or Hunter S. Thompson. In an inspired fit of pique, he vented all that rage into a tell-all essay, exposing the worst practices of the New York restaurant scene. Bourdain’s mother, a copy editor at The New York Times, cashed a favor with New Yorker editor David Remnick’s wife and soon after “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” came out in The New Yorker. It’s a great piece. Bourdain hits on all the points he’d repeat on talk shows for the next few years—fish on Mondays (not fresh), brunch (leftovers), well-done (we save crappy cuts for it), gloves and hairnets (no one wears them), vegetarians (they’re stupid), pork (better than chicken), and butter (just the best). Before the essay could even come out, he had a big new book deal.
“My naked contempt for vegetarians, sauce-on-siders, the ‘lactose intolerant’ and the cooking of the Ewok-like Emeril Lagasse is not going to get me my own show on the Food Network,” wrote Bourdain in the book that directly led to his hiring. Kitchen Confidential is undeniable, a rightful classic. Bourdain’s reminiscences from the various miserable restaurants he worked in are lively and fun. “Zey vould feed ze girls bananas,” he recalls an ex-Wehrmacht corporal at The Rainbow Room telling him of a club for top Nazi perverts. He shakes his head at the greedy publicists that looted the failing restaurants where he always seemed to work: “I got Joey Buttafuoco to come in tonight; make sure to comp him!” Perhaps best are the reminisces on his own demented shenanigans:
“When the restaurant closed, we’d take over the bar, drinking Cristal—which we’d buy at cost—and running fat rails of coke from one end of the bar to the other, then crawling along on all fours to snort them.”
It’s a fun knowing book about a subject people didn’t quite know to be curious about. There had never been a literary, laugh-out-loud memoir from a mediocre chef. And now there was.
In one of the many sections that are funny in retrospect, Bourdain, ever humble, admits: “I don’t know, you see, how a normal person acts. I don’t know how to behave outside my kitchen. I don’t know the rules. I’m aware of them, sure, but I don’t care to observe them anymore—because I haven’t had to for so many years.” This wasn’t entirely true. Bourdain had fantastic manners. He was able, when he wanted, to get along with anyone. That’s what had taken him through the dozens of restaurants between The Dreadnought (the Provincetown clam bake where we’ll meet A24’s Tony) and Les Halles. And that’s what would take him on his next book project.
Some of Bourdain’s best ever writing is in A Cook’s Tour. He describes the smell of durian fruit: “It smelled like you’d buried somebody holding a big wheel of Stilton in his arms, then dug him up a few weeks later.” The taste of iguana: “The texture was like chewing on GI Joe—if Joe had been resting at the bottom of a long-neglected turtle tank.” Of a cold plunge in a Russian sauna: “It was a punch to the chest from God’s fist.” And following his trip to Southeast Asia he makes a remarkably astute assessment of San Francisco:
“A great number of women in San Francisco seem to be sex workers, and while perfectly OK as a lifestyle choice in my book, there are so many of them, and so disproportionately Asian, it feels more like Cambodia than any American city. As rents are so high, there’s nowhere to live—and the dotcoms ain’t hiring like they used to.
With all their kind hearts and good intentions, San Franciscans, living in postcard-pretty houses atop high hills, seem to be sending a message: It’s OK to come here. If you are prepared to lap dance for us… and then sleep on our sidewalks.”
But much of A Cook’s Tours greatness is undercut by the reality of it being filmed and made into a better TV show. When Bourdain writes “pho is fantastic—spicy, hot, complex, refined, yet unbelievably simple” it’s hard not to reach for the remote. And often there is a foreboding of the clippable cable Bourdain, like when he says of churros: “The combination of sugar, chocolate, hot dough, and grease is the perfect breakfast for a borderline alcoholic.” Here too is his most famous quote: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”
In a 1973 journal entry during a pre-Vassar European vacation, Bourdain complains: “What I had planned as a lovely time in Florence living the life of Hemingway has turned out to be living on a train living the life and observing the diet of Gandhi.” It is extremely easy to imagine that line delivered dripping with sarcasm during a minor inconvenience on No Reservations. It’s remarkable it took him almost three decades to figure out that that was what was so vital about his voice. But he got there.
It’s easy to imagine another world where Bourdain never went to Provincetown, never fried those clam strips, and never became a chef, where he flunked out of Vassar, moved to New York, and failed as a writer in a slow painful manner—the unendurable defeat of a serious and sincere young person. Bourdain’s culinary career saved him from that. It gave him a cover story and it gave him more time. But more than that it gave him a voice and real passion, that specific enthusiasm which you can’t buy, learn, or steal. At Vassar, Bourdain was only able to whip up a poor imitation of the writers and rock stars he admired, after a quarter century adjusting his recipes and perfecting his mise en place he was finally able to serve something satisfying and authentic.