Why Anthony Bourdain’s Voice Matters
Reading Anthony Bourdain’s description of eating an oyster was, for me, a life-altering literary moment. That sounds ridiculously grand for a mollusk, but there it is.
“What is an oyster if not the perfect food? It requires no preparation or cooking. Cooking would be an affront. It provides its own sauce. It's a living thing until seconds before disappearing down your throat, so you know – or should know – that it's fresh. It appears on your plate as God created it: raw, unadorned... It is food at its most primeval and glorious, untouched by time or man.”
Well, damn.
I had read food writing before Bourdain—the delicate, succulent, exquisitely balanced variety, full of tasting notes and reverent descriptions of sauces. Bourdain gives us God, raw flesh, the sea, and a living creature sliding down your throat. He doesn't prettify the oyster. He makes it more beautiful by stripping away everything between us and the thing itself. This was my kind of food writer.
Described as the “Hemingway of gastronomy,” Bourdain’s prose was raw, conversational, and direct. He loved strong verbs, concrete nouns, and the short declarative sentence. But he had more mischief than Hemingway. More swagger. He could build a long, exuberant passage full of observation and profanity, then end it with a sentence as clean and sharp as a chef's knife.
He also understood structure. Kitchen Confidential works not simply because Bourdain had great stories, but because he knew how to tell them: confession, anecdote, revelation, philosophy, punch line. He knew when to race and when to linger. His writing could be vulgar without being dumb, intellectual without being precious, sentimental without getting syrupy. You could practically hear the cigarette lighter click between paragraphs.
I'd worked in restaurants, so Kitchen Confidential hit me differently. I knew that the lovely performance taking place in the dining room bears little resemblance to the hot, profane ecosystem behind the swinging door. Restaurants have their own language, hierarchy, alliances, rituals, and code. Respect is currency. You earn it by showing up, knowing your job, keeping your head when everything goes to hell, and not leaving somebody else to clean up your mess.
Bourdain gave dignity to that competence. The dishwasher matters. The prep cook matters. The line cook who can execute the same dish perfectly two hundred times matters. He made me appreciate the invisible labor behind a restaurant meal in a way I never had before.
And I had the good fortune to experience Bourdain's cooking myself. When he was chef at Les Halles, he made me that most classic of French bistro meals: steak frites. Nothing deconstructed, foamed, reinvented, or stacked into a little architectural wonder. Steak. Fries. Simple food that depends entirely on doing things well. In retrospect, steak frites seems wonderfully Bourdain.
His writing operated on much the same principle. Don't fuss with the thing until you've killed it. Know your craft. Execute. And for God's sake, don't confuse decoration with substance. That philosophy shaped his worldview about food, too. Bourdain could appreciate a magnificent restaurant, but he never mistook expense for importance. He could be transported by noodles eaten on a plastic stool or something made by a woman who had been cooking the same dish for forty years. He understood that mastery doesn't require credentials and great food doesn't need permission from a critic.
Eventually food became his way into something much larger. Sit down and eat what people eat and sooner or later you arrive at family, class, religion, immigration, war, memory, and home. A recipe can survive a revolution. A smell can cross an ocean. A bowl of soup can contain an astonishing amount of history.
And beneath all that famous cynicism was a raging romantic. Bourdain wanted to be the world-weary bastard at the bar who had seen everything, but put an extraordinary bowl of noodles in front of him and the pose disappeared. Wonder won.
Maybe that's why I keep returning to the oyster. Strip away the garnish, performance, and pretension. There it is: cold, wet, alive, tasting of the sea. Bourdain understood both the pleasure of eating it and the pleasure of finding exactly the right words to describe it.
He made me look differently at restaurants, respect the people behind the plate more deeply, and think more expansively about what food can tell us about the world.
And yes, Anthony Bourdain once made me steak frites.
I'm so damn glad he did. RIP, Chef.