Food Fight!

There is a real knock down, drag out, heavy wieght fight brewing in the food world, Anthony Boudain vs. the food intellegensia.

First some background; for the past decade, Tony Bourdain has been the bad boy of the food world. He has smashed some icons, bowed down to others and has wrecked havoc through the gastronmic world with wit and charm. He started with what is now a considered a culinary classic "Kitchen Confidential." In his own words, Bourdain wrote that book for those who work in kitchens and never expected it to become the bestseller that it did.

He now hosts the highly successful, and very entertaining, TV show No Reservations where he travels the world in search of culinary edification. Sometimes he finds it, and sometimes not. His show from war ravaged Beruit during th 2006 world is about the most unusal culinary TV show that you will ever watch. Also his show where he worked the line with Eric Ripert at Les Halles was the only time I have ever seen the energy and fear that fuels the cooking lines at restaurants in a way that civilians can appreciate what it is all about.

I, and all of my colleagues, read Kitchen Confidential cover to cover with footnotes at least once. It was one of the only books that illustrated exactly what life is like in the kitchen. It was funny, profane and all of it absultely true and unvarnished. In fact, several of the chefs that I worked with in New York were among the skewered. Three of his points rang very true with me, first those anything ordered well done gets absolutely the worst cuts of meat. Boy that hit home as we did exactly that in every kitchen I worked in. The second point was that you should never order fish on Sundays as the last fish delivery was on Friday morning. It used to drive my owners crazy when we ran out of fish at the end of Saturday nights, until they looked at waste and food cost.

The last point is the most telling and relevant to the food fight brewing over his latest comments, he basically said that there were two types of kitchens, the churn and burn kitchens and the high art kitchens. I have worked in both. I learned more in the high end kitchens, but had much more fun in the churn and burn ones where we turned 500 covers (customers) per night.

And that brings us to Bourdain's lastet tome "Medium Raw." It is a very readable, very profane and very enjoyable book, but it can't escape the conflict of Tony the rebel vs. Tony now one of the culinary guys. In Kitchen Confidential, he was a rebel, skewering the Haute Cuisine world and all of it pretensions. He had some very choice words for Alain Ducasse and many others. He told us how it was to work the line, to turn out hundreds of dishes each night and how to run a kitchen.

In this book he starts up with a confession. He admits that none of his friends would ever hire him as a cook to work in any of their kitchens. What he does not say, but most culinarians know, is that these new friends were not his friends from his KC time, these are his new friends, friends of Tony the Culinary celebrity. And that conflict comes out in both guises throughout his book. His chapter on Alice Waters had to be written. He savages her elitism, and elitism that drips off everything she does. His comments on what Alice Waters says that Middle Amercia should eat during the winter are almost worth the price of this book alone.

However, when he speaks about some of the other so called celebrity chefs, Paula Dean, Rachel Ray et all, he is just as savage, and he should not be. After telling us how lucky he was, a recovered addict who was a journeyman cook/shef that lucked out into a successful new life, he really has a lot of gaul to put these other cooks down.

And that conflict arises time and time again. He writes about how fine dining needs to be redone, then goes to great lengths about how sad the closing of El Buili in Spain will be. How David Chang is rewriting culinary rules, and how he can't cook.

Adding fuel to the fire is an interview that Bourdain recently sat down for in TV Guide. While he did not say anything new, he attracted missles from Frank Bruni, the food critic at the NY Times. I don't know if Mr. Bruni read the book, but he proceedes to call Bourdain an elitist who has no conception about how the masses eat.

I guess Mr. Bruni did not read Broudain's chapters on how his travels around the world, experiencing scarcity among the many places he visited, made him more cognizant of how blessed we as a country are. Who is going to man the small farms growing local produce. It is an interesting conflict.

And Tony comes down on the sides of an elistist as well. He himself will not feed his kid anything but organic foods. Of course, that's his choice and he admits being a world traveling food personality pays very well.

Interesting stuff making Medium Raw a very interesting read for anyone who is interested in the current culinary world.