Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain (2010)

TL;DR: A memoir of a time in Anthony Bourdain's life well into the fame and prominence, and a look on a point in time when celebrity chefs roamed the land, including critiques when food is disrespected.


This started out dark, very dark. Knowing what happens to Anthony Bourdain, and him describing nights holed out in the Caribbean, I got an eerie sense of AB's tendencies. That what he'd written down as being unsuccessfully suicidal for nights on end, a chill ran down my spine.


Celebrity chefs and selling out are some of the things he talks about; oddly enough, including getting too much love from family, eating habits of the rich, feeling and being alone. He also writes about the realities of being a chef, and that cooking should be learned as a mandatory skill, the effect of the recession on the food business, the "food porn" industry, burger as it should be, having/raising a daughter and teaching her to stray away from fast food, and an exaltation or crucifixion of the top chefs at the time.


I wonder what the reaction was at the time of this book's release. Kitchen Confidential came out ten years earlier; what AB writes as his lucky break. This may have stirred the pot after it was released, considering how he gets angry when "food" is not respected.



This ended much lighter than how it started, with AB writing about Les Halles, and being grateful of people he's encountered and written about. He still got pretty riled up about certain things, like vegetarians.



A self critique

"I am, at this point in my life, the very picture of the jade, over-privileged "foodie" (in the very worse sense of that word) that I used to despise. The kind who's eaten way more that his share of Michelin-starred meals all over the world and is (annoyingly) all too happy to tell you about them."
Like Qui-Gon Jinn: "Feel, Don't think" (about/when eating)
"If cooking professionally is about control, eating successfully should be about submission, about easily and without thinking giving yourself over to whatever dream they'd like you to share. In the best-case scenario, you shouldn't be intellectualizing what you're eating while you're eating it. You shouldn't be noticing things at all. You should be pleasingly oblivious to the movements of the servers in the dining area and bus station, only dimly aware of the passage of time. Taking pictures of your food as it arrives-or, worse, jotting down brief descriptions for your blog entry later-is missing the point entirely. You shouldn't be forced to think at all. Only feel"
After a day's service
"What I do miss, I tell them, and will always miss, is that first pull on a cold beer after work. That is irreplaceable. Nothing approaches that. That's the kind of satisfaction no bestseller can ever beat-no television show, no crowd, no nothing. That single moment after a long and very busy night, sitting down at the bar with your colleagues, wiping the sweat off your neck, taking a deep breath, with unspoken congratulations all around-and then that first sip of cold, cold beer. It tastes like victory"

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